PRP: Methods EA Use to Maximising Performance

Jeff Hunt the Senior Director of Electronic Arts University and EA. He talks to Steve from Business Execution Radio, about how they maximise performance in their highly creative workforce. Below are some key points made that relate to my Dissertation question.

Jeff: "EA was in the space for a long long time where we were by far the most successful company in the market, [...] well, now it’s more a competitive marketplace, there’s been a lot of technical transition, etc, and so [...] the question really comes down to, how do we help prepare our managers to be, to produce these great results while looking at a more competitive marketplace, Wall Street’s demanding more, etc, and so EA University has really put a focus on helping managers navigate that change and that transition."

Jeff: "We’ve actually created some social networking tools inside of EA, and we have very much tried to foster people’s use of those. They’re rudimentary compared to what’s generally available on the web, like Facebook and LinkedIn and others, but they do give people an ability to create a presence inside the organization and talk about who they know and who they’re connected to, and what kind of work they do together".

Jeff: "The way we decided to measure success in that area is not by how many times we reached out to them,[...] but instead how many times they reached out to us, or how many times they took of their time,[...] and participated in events, channelled other relationships to us, came to give us information, and the way we did that, the way we inspired them to that, is to let them know that we viewed them as a community, we viewed the relationships as critical, and that we were willing to invest in that community and in those relationships independent of whether they would ever work for us or not".
Steve:"That’s a great example, it sort of summarizes, it sounds like the key to maintaining this healthy tension in relationships really comes back to making sure people have agreement on, these are our shared goals, this is what we’re trying to accomplish, that we’re having these debates back and forth, that kind of, we can come back and use, which of this is moving us towards the goal that we’ve all agreed to, but the recognition that those goals needs to be revisited constantly, you can’t just set the goal at the beginning of the year, and then assume everybody remembers what it was, because it probably evolves over time. "