Go Mobile: Aligning District Managers and Store Teams

Tatiana  Sandino

Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2014 (Revised April 2014)

Go Mobile: Aligning District Managers and Store Teams

Abstract

Indian cell phone retailer Go Mobile had implemented high-powered incentives to motivate its store employees to behave as owners and provide exceptional service. As the company scaled up, it faced multiple challenges in building a layer of district managers that were willing and were able to support the highly-incentivized store teams. On one hand, the district managers were expected to drive a profitable expansion, supporting complex day-to-day operations at the stores. On the other hand, they were expected to serve as mentors—communicating and teaching the values of the firm to their store managers, sharing best practices, and instilling a long-term perspective of the business. The case presents different mechanisms that the company could implement to motivate the district managers to effectively support the stores and foster growth.

Language: English

Format: Print

19 pages

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Citation:

Sandino, Tatiana. "Go Mobile: Aligning District Managers and Store Teams." Harvard Business School Case 114-034, February 2014. (Revised April 2014.)

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

Learning or Playing? The Effect of Gamified Training on Performance

Ryan W. Buell, Wei Cai and Tatiana Sandino

Gamified training is a novel management control system in which companies use gamification techniques to engage and motivate employees to learn. This study empirically examines the performance consequences of gamified training by conducting a field experiment in a professional services firm. We find that the main effect of adopting the gamified training platform on performance is not statistically significant at conventional levels. However, we also find that the effect is moderated by employee engagement, such that the gamified training platform improved performance in offices with high employee engagement and worsened performance in offices with low employee engagement. In offices with high levels of employee engagement—with above-median rates of employee retention and willingness to log onto the training platform—each additional minute of average platform engagement per employee led to an additional 0.28 new clients per month. In offices with below-median rates of employee retention and willingness to log onto the training platform, each additional minute of average platform engagement per employee resulted in 0.78 fewer new clients per month. Taken together, these results suggest that gamified training, which, in part, is intended to help engage and motivate employees to learn, may only yield performance benefits among those who are already highly engaged and motivated.

Keywords: gamified training; Management Control Systems; employee engagement; Employees; Learning; Training; Motivation and Incentives; Performance;

Citation:

Buell, Ryan W., Wei Cai, and Tatiana Sandino. "Learning or Playing? The Effect of Gamified Training on Performance." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-101, March 2019. View Details

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Go Mobile: Aligning District Managers and Store Teams

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Go Mobile: Aligning District Managers and Store Teams

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