Jeff Hunter - Maximizing performance of a highly creative workforce

Steve

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. This week we spoke with Jeff Hunter, who’s the Senior Director of Electronic Arts University, and Electronic Arts, if you don’t know, is a company that makes interactive games and media, what historically we call video games. As Jeff points out, it’s much much more than that now, and he talks about the challenges and opportunities of managing a workforce that, basically what they have to be is extremely creative. He says “Our employees need to come up with the next cool thing. If it’s already out there today, it’s old, we need to come up with new things constantly”, and how do you manage a workforce built around this? - he said, “Monetizing creativity”, so a really fascinating discussion of the use of relationships, and goals, and how that gets into creating a good creative tension in one of the more innovative industries in the world today, which would be this interactive entertainment industry. So let’s listen to Jeff Hunter this week on People Performance Radio.

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. Today I’m talking with Jeff Hunter, who is the Senior Director of Electronic Arts University and as any of you that certainly fall into the core demographic of, I don’t know Jeff, I think it’s males predominantly, I know you guys are really trying to get at that. Everyone’s familiar with Electronic Arts as one of the largest video games or interactive entertainment companies in the world – is that correct?

Jeff Hunter

Yes, actually Steve. Thanks for that great introduction, and yes, we’re actually the second largest publisher and developer of interactive entertainment in the world.

Steve

Wow! And interactive entertainment is the new way of saying “video game”?

Jeff Hunter

Well, we don’t like to say video games any more, because interactive entertainment is going online, it’s going casual, it’s going, you know, in 100 million different places to billions of different people, and so video games has this creative image of a young white male sitting in front of a console in a darkened room with no friends, playing a video game, and we now are trying to move to see it as an interactive community-based really global phenomena around using interactivity and fun to connect people, and teach people and do all kinds of stuff, so we’re trying to broaden the brand a little bit.

Steve

That absolutely makes sense, you know, sort of changing the space. When you’re working in a space like that, that boy, I mean, talk about industry that didn’t even exist, and now it suddenly exists and now it is changing so quickly, and have played such a major role in society – what are the talent management challenges? What is unique about this industry, from a talent management perspective?

Jeff Hunter

Well, what’s interesting about the interactive entertainment industry, and you might be able to say the entertainment industry, media industry overall, is our business really is taking human creativity and monetizing it, so what we do is get groups of people together, teams of people together, to create interactive experiences, and then people either like those experiences or don’t, and based on how much they do like them, pay for them, and so there’s a very direct line of sight between human creativity and how well we do as a company, and I think that, while that some are unique, I don’t think that it will continue to be unique, because innovation, creativity, becomes a bigger part of how an organization wins in the marketplace, the sorts of challenges we see here at Electronic Arts will become more prevalent in other industries.

Steve

That’s such a fascinating idea, of sort of monetizing creativity, and creativity is one of those classic psychological terms that everyone kind of, it’s like, I know it when I see it, but it’s probably hard to define what it is. When you’re looking at saying, our business is really about being creative, creating for the environment – how do you define creativity within Electronic Arts?

Jeff Hunter

Well, that’s a fantastic question, but the way I would define it, I’m not sure we have a global set definition that everybody points to, like on a stone tablet, but the way I would define it is a unexpectedly pleasant surprise in an interactive engagement between one of our products and the consumer, so this industry moves incredibly fast, if you take a look at where we started with a little eight bit machine and a small processor and a cartridge from Atari on top of the TV set, to taking a look now at a PS3 or an Xbox 360, or a high end PC, which is literally rendering 60 frames per second of interactive content, there’s more computing horsepower in a PS3 than there was in the average mainframe in the ‘70s. When you’re taking a look at that kind of rapid innovation, that rapid change of technology in communications infrastructure, the customer who engages with us has a rapidly evolving taste for what they’re going to like in interactive entertainment, and so we have to be able to stay ahead of that, we can’t just play to yesterday, we can’t deliver a product that they were expecting, because that at best is an average product; we have to deliver a product that is unexpectedly and pleasantly surprising them, and so the way I would define creativity is getting a bunch of people in a room to say, OK, we’ve got a clean slate, what are we going to do as a team to develop that experience for that customer? – and there’s absolutely no formula for that, it’s not following a CMU process or anything, it’s really at the very bleeding edge of trying to get individuals to think of new ways to do things.

Steve

That’s sort of interesting, you say that basically our challenge is, we have to get people to go and say, what’s the next cool thing? – and recognizing that it’s not what was cool yesterday or today, what’s the next cool thing, and the challenge, I think you said, there isn’t a process for doing that. You get into, all right, talent management is so much about having processes, you have higher-end processes, you have systematic performance management, goal management processes, and yet you’re saying, from creativity, the process can strain the creativity right out of it, yet you’ve got to have some structure – what is Electronic Arts doing to create this structure to manage your organization, but at the same time not constrain creativity? What are some of the things that you perhaps do differently from what other companies do around talent management to build that idea factory?

Jeff Hunter

Well, some of the things we do, I think, are very similar to what other companies do; I’m not sure they’re as effective when we do them as when other companies do them, performance management, I think we do performance management like a lot of companies do performance management, but our core constituency inside of here - developers, engineers, producers, artists – we’ll take a look at that, and say, well, you know, how do you individually evaluate a great product that a bunch of people worked on? So I think there’s a challenge in that you’re bright, you do need processes just so you can normalize a bunch of data, and try to feel like there’s some level of fairness there, or equity in what’s going on, but one of the things I think that we’ve learned pretty early on is that, if you want to put in process, and you want to put in certain levels of controls and standardization with regards to how you do certain things, it’s really important to apply the same kind of thinking or mindset that our developers and producers and artists have to think, apply when they’re approaching the marketplace, and that is, how can we unexpectedly and pleasantly surprise them? So for instance, when we’re deploying self-service technologies within PeopleSoft, we didn’t just go the regular PeopleSoft route, we’re trying to figure out how we can do self-service in a way that’s fun and engaging, and more “Web 2.0”, and by doing that, and taking some different looks at that, we actually got people who were much more willing to engage with those tools because they actually saw them as meeting more of their idea of how those tools should work, but the thing for us, I just want to bring this up, the thing for us is, yes, you have to look at all those processes and talent management etc, but I think of something that’s frequently missed inside of talent management is the concept of the strength of relationships, so from a business perspective, our company in a lot of ways rises or falls, based on the strength of the relationships inside and between this company and the outside, and talent management that takes that into account, that looks at sourcing, both internal paths of sourcing and external paths of sourcing, first and foremost it’s an opportunity to build relationships, and have a conversation, and understand what people’s expectations and hopes and passions are. When you start at that level of the talent management landscape, it’s a lot easier to have an interaction with a creative group than when your purpose is actually to instead maybe categorize, or to standardize or centralize, or do those kinds of things that are very typical of the talent management process, so I acknowledge that we absolutely have to have processes, we do have processes, but at the same time I think we try to take a slightly different bent on it, and say, how can we focus on the quality of the relationships, the stories and the conversations, that precede all of that process.

Steve

So it’s almost like a talent management, sort of different philosophies, and some talent management systems, the companies focus very much on having systematic processes and that’s kind of the main thing, some focus on creating really effective conversations, some focus on really identifying people’s capabilities at an individual level, sort of who are the A players and the B players and the C players, and it sounds like you say, within your creative environment, it’s really about how can we make sure we’re creating really strong relationships between different people?

Jeff Hunter

Yes, and I think there’s certain aspects of everything you’ve just said, but yes, it is about the relationships.

Steve

How has, can you give some specific examples, and maybe we can go back, that PeopleSoft for example, where you have done things differently, where you say, here’s something that we’ve done that works in Electronic Arts pretty well because we’ve got this focus on creativity and not constraining our artists, that wouldn’t necessarily work in another company, like if I was in retail, I wouldn’t necessarily want to use this process, but it works for us?

Jeff Hunter

Well, I’m pretty familiar with the whole retail space, I have great friends like Susan Burns, and have spent a lot of time there. I think there’s a group of thinkers who believe that relationships, it depends on what your perspective is, if your perspective is, as an HR or talent management function, that you’re trying to control cost and risk, and people represent both, cost and risk, then what you want to do is make sure you standardize and proceduralize, and all those kinds of things, because what you want to do is make sure that there’s a kind of predictability to the process, but when talent is everything to you, whether it’s somebody who’s on the retail floor who can influence a major buying decision, or it’s somebody who’s making a video game, or it’s somebody inside of an enterprise software company who’s thinking about the next great thing that’ll unlock their customer base, when talent really is everything to you, trying to manage for cost and risk ends up being something that’s really, well it’s antithetical to success, it takes people, it lets them know that management views them as a cog in a wheel, so that’s something that we specifically are trying to get around, so how do we do that? – well, from an external perspective with regards to taking a look at an entire talent pipeline of who is available, when and where and ready to do what kind of work, what we did, at first it started from the external perspective under the leadership of Cindy Nicola about three, three and a half years ago, taking a look at creating very active sourcing platforms for hiring, so rather than focusing on the standard, “wait for the req, get the req, fill the req”, instead focus a lot more work and effort on trying to figure out who and where were the relationships we needed, so that if the business grew and progressed, we would be able to source from those places, and we quickly realised that the standard kind of sourcing parameters that are typically put in place, number of touch points and how many times have you contacted them, really weren’t very effective measures. The way we decided to measure success in that area is not by how many times we reached out to them, not how many touch points we created, or how many emails we sent to them, or how many websites we drove them to, but instead how many times they reached out to us, or how many times they took of their time, and well time and actually came to us 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, that it was worthwhile to us and to our business to have that community and those relationships, and Cindy Nicola’s group, as the Head of Talent Acquisition here at EA, has gone even further with the social technologies, including Facebook and LinkedIn and many others, to create this incredibly interactive community for EA as an interactive entertainment company, to really broaden these relationships, and so that’s an example of outside, and now we’re starting to bring that themed perspective to inside. One of the most valuable resources a company has is the relationships its people have inside, and companies typically don’t focus on that, they don’t focus on who’s talking to who, or who knows what or who knows who, so what we’re doing now is taking that same kind of concept that we had outside and bring it inside, and start to develop detailed relationships with our employees, and with their talent, to be able to talk to them about what their hopes and aspirations are, and how we can provide them value ahead of the curve, so they want to invest in the EA community, so those, the measures are more about how effective we are in seeing the fruits of those labors result in a broader, more engaged, more interactive community.

Steve

I think the way you use, to keep these in the community, instead of having candidate pools, we’ve created almost like customer/user communities with people that we might want to view as part of our organization, and internally are you using a lot of these – there’s so much talk about social networking tools and technology now – are you actively promoting and using those things internally to try to build stronger and stronger relationships between employees in the company?

Jeff Hunter

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, and so that’s been our first rudimentary steps there, to try to create social networking tools. Where we’re going with it is, creating even more of a talent relationship management system for the internal set, so we’ve definitely, Cindy and her group have been a market leader in going out and creating talent relationship management systems for the external talent, but now taking a look at that same kind of thing and focusing it internally is something where, thinking about how you actually set up, for lack of a better term, a CRM for your employees, so that you can go in and actually know what kind of interactions people are having with each other, and what their interests are, and how mobile are they, where’s there passion? – and where do they want to go? – so thinking of them, just like you said, as a community or customer engagement pool that we can constantly ping and talk to and share information with, so that when we go to look for promotions, we go to take a look at internal mobility, we actually have the data we need to make a really good set of decisions for the business and for the employee.

Steve

It’s like, almost like an internal version of Facebook, or something like that, where you can go and see what people have posted on their walls and see how they’ve interacted with each other, and who they’re linked into – is that a good analogy for what you guys have created?

Jeff Hunter

It’s a good analogy for where we’re going, we haven’t gotten to the wall posting, we’ve done picture sharing, we’ve done some cross-communication, we have not gotten to wall posting, we haven’t gotten to some of the things that you’re more familiar with, this method of sharing between friends and in the community, but we’re definitely headed in that direction.

Steve

So one question I have is, you look at the relationships, and obviously the positive sides of the relationships, but I’m sure you must experience this too, you have a lot of very creative people who are very passionate about their ideas – what do you do when relationships start to get strained? – when people start bickering or arguing or they’re not being effective in collaborating, and there are performance issues – how do you approach those? – is that different? Again, I always think of a bit of classic, artists as being this high strung creative person, I don’t know if that’s a true stereotype or not, but how do you deal with that, trying to get people to play nice and get along when they all have such strong ideas?

Jeff Hunter

Well, artists are people who are very passionate about their work, I don’t know that anybody’s running around here cutting off their ear (that was a Van Gogh joke for those of you who aren't in the art world, but make sure you tip your waitress, I’ll be here all week. So I think, you know, there’s a real challenge for HR in this kind of world, and it is very much about change leadership and keeping teams productive and trying to figure out how to help teams work well together without making them passionless machines, because one way, inside a creative organization, there’s a certain amount of creative tension and conflict that is necessary and beneficial to the process; if you look at, all the way back to the team that created the Macintosh, there’s a lot of fighting that goes on, a lot of discord, and I think that creative people and people who are more technical but on the kind of innovative or leading edge, understand that when you’re passionate about what you’re doing, and you’re pushing passionately for a point of view, and somebody else has another point of view, there is a level of discord that’s going to come out of that, there’s a level of conflict that will naturally arise, and whereas the HR perspective in a lot of organizations may be, hold on, we don’t want to be fighting here, can’t we all just get along? – I think here it’s incumbent for HR professionals to understand that’s not always a bad thing, we want a team that is passionate and strong and going for it, but you also don’t want to cross that line between a team that’s passionate and going for it and a team that’s completely destroying each other and engaging in behaviours which ultimately aren’t beneficial to them, the product or the company. I don’t know that there’s any real formula for that, when they’re screaming at each other, it’s OK, but when they punch each other, that’s not OK, but there is an increased sensitivity inside the HR organization, the how can you help guide a creative team through those kinds of interpersonal problems, and not look at them purely as negative, but look at them within the broader context of what’s good for the team, what’s good for the individual, what’s good for the product and what’s good for the company.

Steve

Do you find, as the Head of EA University, that you’re investing a fair amount of resources in things to help people to get better at managing relationships, and keeping that effective tension? Is that something you actively are trying to support, or when you talk about your training investments and your development investments, where do you tend to focus your resources when it comes to improving the productivity of your workforce? What is it that you focus on?

Jeff Hunter

We’re making a huge investment, we’ve made a big investment last year, we’re making a huge investment in our upcoming fiscal year, the fiscal year we’re in right now, which we just started, in helping intact teams, management teams, especially in the product development and publishing sides of the business to get together and actually figure out how to work more constructively with each other, because there’s a real dynamic that’s going on inside of EA, so EA is a $4.3 billion company, that’s a big company, that’s over 9,000 creative individuals inside this place in multiple countries, continents and locations around the world, and so you want that fire, you want that passion, but at the same time Wall Street’s expecting a certain predictability of results from us, we can’t just come out and say, hey, this quarter we completely left, we didn’t ship anything, but trust us, the creatives are happy and everything’s going great, so we always have this tension between having a predictable business result and being able to delight our investors, and the tension of having this incredible productive creative team that’s delighting our customer, and when you’re going through that, what you realise is that your team can be very clear, your creative team can be very clear about the outcome they’re trying to create, and they can be very clear about how that outcome aligns to a business goal, and if they don’t have that, if they’re clear on what they’re trying to create and what they’re trying to do, and they aren’t clear about that connects its overall business objectives and strategies, that’s where you see a lot of breakdown between what the company needs, what the employee needs and what the team needs and the customer needs, so if you can bring those into alignment, we’re investing massive amounts in new programs that we’ve developed around trying to have intact teams coming together and actually work through over a period of several months in fits and starts and different pieces, come in and actually identify those tensions and those issues, and make sure the team is aligned on the overall business objective, the product objective, the publishing objective, and what each of the team members needs to feel like they’re engaged in passionate working on something they really feel good about, so training managers about how to navigate that almost ambiguous space, that space where you seem to have two competing priorities, is a big priority for us, because EA was in the space for a long long time where we were by far the most successful company in the market, and we had incredible financial results, and so you could not focus on a lot of these things, and just the fact of our great franchises and great properties, would just kind of help, the financial results would end up covering up a lot of tensions and issues that we were experiencing, well, now it’s more a competitive marketplace, there’s been a lot of technical transition, etc, and so the question really is, 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.

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.

Jeff Hunter

Exactly, yep.

Steve

Yeah, well Jeff, I’m just sensitive to your time, and I appreciate you spending some time here on People Performance Radio, I think this is fascinating and I think that in general this idea of how do you create an organization whose job is to very rapidly come up with the next cool thing, which is, talk about a well-defined yet not at all defined business strategy, it’s been really fascinating, your discussion of relationships and communities and how that relates to goals. So, any last comments or thoughts before we sign off?

Jeff Hunter

Well, first of all, it’s been a great couple of minutes Steve, so thank you very much for asking me to do this, it’s always a pleasure to talk with EA and share these perspectives. My final thought is that one of the things you learn quickly in a business like interactive entertainment is that what you don’t know is much larger than what you do know, so everybody listening to this program who wants to shoot me an email at jjhunter@ea.com, and tell me what I got wrong, or what we need to do better, I’d love to hear from you.

Steve

Thanks, hopefully you’ll get a follow up on that. So we’ve been talking to Jeff Hunter, who is the Senior Director of EA University, and thank you again Jeff for appearing on People Performance Radio.

Jeff Hunter

Thank you, Steve.

Speaker

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