Stay Ahead of the Gaming
Stay Ahead of the Gaming
When performance targets exist for workgroups, there have been many reported examples of gaming to meet the targets, particularly in the public sector. Gaming means changes to the working practices of a work unit, or to the ways in which performance data are recorded, that boost apparent achievements against targets without producing a real benefit to clients.
The wide range of gaming approaches that have been reported could be regarded as testimony to human ingenuity. They include:
- Re-assigning resources to target-bearing outcomes to an extent that is bound to seriously degrade non-target-bearing outcomes
- When there is a choice as to the sort of operations that a work centre carries out, choosing operations which are inherently more output and achievement friendly rather then choosing those which will best benefit clients
- Artificially lowering the reported staff capacity of a work centre in situations where targets are proportional to staff capacity
- Reclassifying outputs into different categories to which more credit is attached
- Changing working processes in a way that produces an apparent improvement in timeliness but only by artificially making the job start time later or the finish time earlier
- Dividing jobs into smaller jobs without justification so that apparent timeliness is improved
- Including job types that benefit timeliness and/or outputs within a category when the job types concerned should be excluded
- Working to a target by deliberately slowing activity once a target has been met – the threshold effect; or continuing activity but not formally recording it until the start of the next reporting period. This has further significance when future targets are known to be ‘performance-plus’ i.e., past achievements plus a certain percentage – the ratchet effect.
Certain dynamics can give rise to the spread of gaming in an organisation as the result of a gaming law equivalent to Gresham’s Monetary Principle: bad practice drives out good. If some work groups believe others are operating in a manner that may constitute gaming, but it is not clearly unacceptable according to established rules, or is likely to be unacceptable but unlikely to be subject to scrutiny, then the practice may spread. Once seeded in this way, the spread of such practices may become more rapid. As a result, a stringent target regime may achieve improvements in the short and medium terms but lead to major dysfunction in the longer term.
One of the most high profile occurrences was at Mid Staffordshire Hospital. It was alleged that a very poor standard of care had been provided over the fifty months between January 2005 and March 2009. In 2008 the hospital had acquired foundation trust status, allowing it operational freedoms. Five official investigations were carried out, the final one being a Public Enquiry led by Robert Francis QC. It referred to the ‘appalling suffering of many patients’ and said that while targets can have value, the failure of the provider Trust Board ‘was in part the consequence of allowing a focus on reaching national access targets, achieving financial balance and seeking foundation trust status at the cost of delivering acceptable standards of care’.
Reported gaming approaches for hospitals have included the use of various means of meeting the four hour Accident and Emergency waiting time target including patients being kept in ambulances to avoid the waiting time commencing, unnecessarily referring patients to clinical decision units and discharging people too quickly.
A 2015 investigation by Merryn Hutchings, Emeritus Professor at London Metropolitan University, on the impacts of accountability measures in schools, commissioned by the National Union of Teachers, reported that the measures had narrowed the curriculum that pupils experience, disproportionately hindered disadvantaged pupils, caused some schools to be reluctant to admit pupils perceived to be likely to restrict attainment outcomes, and damaged the quality of the relationship between teachers and pupils.
Business rules can be designed to control aspects of a business’s operation but configuring them to relate to all possible aspects of gaming is likely to be difficult. It is much more effective to develop an organisational culture in which targets are used sensibly and in moderation, for workgroups to have an input to target setting, and to strive for non-blame approaches in which the true causes of alleged under performance – often multi dimensional – can be identified.
Read more in the book Targets and Terror by William Barclay. Available from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Targets-Terror-Englands-Management-Revolution/dp/1916035388