I want to start by saying I wanted to expand on EliasRipleyâs idea in their thread here: Immersive Staffing
I think it would be absolutely immersive to have a higher level of Employee gameplay mechanics, especially where employees interact with their co-workers and have a certain set of skills that can be modified by their co-workers and their relationship. This is akin to Railway Empire where you would hire an Engineer or Conductor who would increase certain stats of that particular train, but if they had competing personalities, they would negatively affect their skills.
What Iâm thinking for Big Ambitions is something along the same lines. I had some ideas with what possible modifiers there could be, as well as overhauling the two traits we have currently:
Customer Service: Change and remove this traight from Insight. I think it would be better to have an individual skill that modifies how much a customer ends up paying by increasing the overall cost by percentage tiers so for 25% to 50% CS Skill they will earn -2.5% for each transaction, for 50% itâs 0% bonus for 75% itâs 2.5% and for 100% CS Skill they will increase each transactionâs amount by 5%. The reasoning is, this would give more motivation to fully train employees and have HR managers do so as well, plus it will bring a little RP into the notion that great customer service brings repeat business and poor customer service usually does not. The name should also just change to Service since this would need to affect jobs that currently arenât labled Customer Service.
Cleanliness: This should mostly stay the same as it pertains to the insight screen and how it affect business revenue, however, I think it would be interesting if the cleanliness skill would also dictate how well each area cleaned is actually cleaned up. I feel like right now itâs mostly a set it and forget it skill/job, I donât really train my cleaners that much, and every one of my stores still is at 100%. Perhaps with this traight being modified to affect their ability to actually clean, it would incentivize training them AND hiring actual cleaners as opposed to using your CS Reps in some cases.
New Modifiers -
Happiness: This should be self explanatory. I think Satisfaction should be modified by Happiness as well as a new trait Iâll explain below. Happiness, however, should be modified by fulfillment of Wants/Demands as well as whom they work with. In the real world, not everyone is happy with whom they work with and in a perfect world a manager would know this about each employee. Although this is untrue in the real world, for gameplay purposes alone, it would make sense if you knew each employees happiness with whom they work with on their shifts. It would be interseting to have personality traits where they could modify each other for instance a âStudious Workerâ could clash with a âLazy Workerâ. Perhaps that Studious trait could give a percentage speed to checkout times, and a Lazy trait could give negative percentage speed to checkout times. Those are just âspitballâ ideas on what traits could exist but the overall goal is to have workers have relationships with their co-workers and those relationships affect one another.
Work Ethic: This would be the secondary trait to modify satisfaction. What this could do is basically what I described above, have a Studious work ethic for instance, and if your employee works with others with compatible ethics then this would positively modify satisfaction. Iâm not sure personally how this would be measured though if I were to hazard a guess, I would say that it could also follow the 0-100% scale. Every scale would start at 100%, being negatively modified only if there are uncompatible traits in a co-worker, but still positively modified by compatible co-workers. So it should be along the lines of Co-worker #1 Has Studious trait, #2 has Lazy trait. Main employee is now at 66% due to having 100% Ethic Score personally, 100% from Co-worker #1, and 0% from Co-worker #2. There would be other ethics that wonât necessarily be 0% against the calculation but that is just for examples sake that I mention the preceeding.
Experience: This one should be simple but still important. I think experience should be added to help influence the pay an employee asks for. It would need to be adjusted based upon age ranges, but I think just like in the real world, a person with more experience should be able to demand higher pay vs someone with no experience at all. With more experience comes higher pay but also higher immediate reward, which saves time on training.
Training: This should no longer be just a button click alone that just modifies a service skill. Training should also have a low chance to change a persons negative work ethic trait to a positive one. Along side that, training should take a week rather than just a single day at a time. Most businesses have training for a week prior to an employee working their eventual shifts. When training is complete it can only go to a maximum of 75% when clicking the button, whereas the rest of the way HR handles through passive training.
Raises: As an employee grows in experience, they earn the chance at a raise. There should be two ways of doing this. First there should be a flat percentage rate that you can give employees (that can also be done via the mass drop down options), second there should be an individual method where you go into an employeeâs info card, and offer them a raise. There should also be a low % chance an employee demands a raise with consequences to denying that request, be it them quitting, or them staying on, but have a negative impact on their happiness for a year letâs say.
Lastly I think Satisfaction should replace Customer Service in the Insight panel, and be renamed to Employee Satisfaction. My reasoning on this is that a satisfied employee will likely work with a better attitude and thus be a better service representative for your business where the inverse would be the case if they are unsatisfied.
These are all ideas that can be done either on their own with your own Dev Teams tweaks or altogether, it really doesnât matter in that regard but it was just something that came to mind that I wanted to share. If anyone else wants to add/modify any of this please do so, I think having multiple people invested in these ideas would be awesome.
Thank you all