Business Simulations for Personnel Administration

This sounds simple, but in practise, its more difficult that it may be assumed. To make a company profitable, a lot of people are necessary with a lot of different capabilities, where one of the major skills is often forgotten, the ability to communicate to each other. What is your profit, if you have a lot of people with excellent know-how in your company but they can not understand each other, they can not understand the way the company works or do not understand the targets.

Beside the technical know-how, the "soft skills" of the company stuff is not only discussed since today. The ability to work within a team, to communicate to and understand each other, to take over leadership and therefore to fit into the right place within the company structure is one of the keys to success for the company. Today, the public institutes of education like schools and universities have raising problems to fulfil these requirements of the companies than ever before.

The logic systems Gesellschaft für produktive Softwarelösungen mbH has developed a concept in cooperation with personnel consultants, which can supplement and enlarge the possibilities of the personnel management. We have classified this concept into the three chapters:

the Personnel Election,

the Potential Analysis,

the Personnel Development.

To employ personnel means, to take over responsibility for them. This responsibility implements the further education, the recognition of potentials and their development and last but not least to motivate and to integrate our staff into the company structure.

Personnel Election

One of the most expensive mistakes, a company can do is, to make the wrong decision electing the wrong people. Not often, the company has to pay high gratuities or a law court has to find a suitable way. That means, that one of the main targets must be to minimize the risk of wrong decisions while electing personnel, before contracts are signed. To use business simulations to supplement the election process is not really new, but the criticism of this instrument is the same than for the most assessment. You can prepare for it and therefore the results are questionable. Because of BO-Cash is a business simulation under competition, you have about 40 billions possibilities in every period, important to prepare for it and therefore the results are more reliable.

Potential Analysis

The times, in which personnel development was distributed "with the watering can" are over. It is necessary to find out the right training for the right people because of a very wide rage of offers we have. With a potential analysis, you can find out discovered potentials within the company as well as concealed problems, which then can be developed or solved. By using different instruments like role playing or management simulations, you can discover skills like the ability working within a team, leadership competence, the ability to handle and solve problems and a lot of more. By an intensive feedback you can give your staff the chance to discover and realize their own potentials or deficits and therefore the chance to find out, where to start an efficient development.  

Personnel Development

You should not let your employees "become acid", that means, they loose their motivation. As more as the people have the possibility to develop and realize themselves, as higher the motivation and as higher the performance and therefore the profit for the company. That does not mean, that the company must be responsible for their private life, that means first, that they feel to be important, to be accepted and to be respected. This works as far as the stuff has a chance to bring in their knowledge, and that means, they must have it. But the half-life period of knowledge get shorter and shorter, and that means, it becomes more and more expensive to keep the knowledge on the same level.

The second point is, that our staff becomes more and more intelligent, they want to understand the way it works, the times of the "stupid worker" as well as the times of "life-time jobs" are over. They want to understand the company and the decisions of the  management, auf course, not every detail, people are different. But they want to feel themselves as part of the company. This is one of their elementary needs, security for their life. .

Both have to be coordinated. We need efficient ways of further education on the one hand, on the other hand, we have to deploy soft skills to get the raising needs of all interests managed.

The Instrument

"BO-Cash" was developed as an instrument for the education and further education for universities and the industry. The wide rage of adjustments allows the usage for a wide rage of educational target. The main idea is the learning by experience and the usage of all senses, not only by reading.

Beside the main target to train economic knowledge and decisions, to understand the dependencies within a company and on the markets, we have made the experience, that BO-Cash can do a lot more. The way the people are acting, the way they communicate to each other or to work together discovers a lot of potentials and problems. Therefore we decided to use BO-Cash not only for educational purposes but also to use is as an analytical instrument as well. Especially the short-time usage under time pressure shows, how able people are to deal with such situations.

Think about one point, you normally never have the chance the make the same mistake twice in the real life. You never will sell a product without testing it. Why do you believe your staff is different?

The  Method

While the personnel development works normally as a seminar about 3 up to 5 days, the usage of BO-Cash for analytical or election purposes is different. Depending from the main target and the available time, BO-Cash shows only a more or less complex part of the simulation, but with some restrictions. Restrictions may be time limits or additional task beside the simulation. The participant get explained the situation and the task is, to reach the best result.

The target of the observation is not really the result, but the way, how the participant tries to reach it. BO-Cash is able to write a log which can be analysed later. While the observation by individuals is always subjective, BO-Cash offers you an additional "observer", which recognizes every single step and which is absolute objective.