Monday Developer Journal #18 news - Tech Executive Tycoon

Hello everyone!

It’s time for another Monday Developer Update! Today we will talk about how management works within the game. This will be a pretty long update, so buckle in! Tech Executive Tycoon is all about leading your company into a golden age of technology. This will include managing managers. This is where it gets challenging and quite engaging. In the game there are roughly 4 levels in the employee hierarchy. Entry level employees make up the foundation, then there is the specialist who are slightly elevated above entry level carrying out specialized tasks. The next level up would be mid-level management. After that, you will have your executives which you will spend probably the most of your time interacting with and delegating to. Lastly, there is you, the wonderful CEO.

Mid-level Managers

Let’s begin with mid-level management and what they will do in the game. mid-level managers, just like in real life get directions and department goals from executives, passing it along to the entry level employees and specialists to then carry out. The manager has a very direct impact on the overall motivation and productivity of the entry level employee. In the game an employee without a manager will as a result have less guidance and therefore will not be as efficient as they can be. Without managers, executives will not be nearly as capable at achieving their goals. Managers are the backbone of your company in many ways.

Team Cohesion and Efficiency

So let’s talk about how you will use managers in the game. Let’s say your company is growing out of its infancy and now you have 10 Finance accounting clerks handling your growing budget, as well as a growing number of employees in each department. With 10 Finance personnel, you are obviously getting a lot of work done, balancing the budget accurately and paying company bills on time. However, at this point you have a bunch of equal employees on the same level trying to work together and follow a plan without any guidance. This will have an adverse effect on the efficiency and eventually cause the finance productivity to drop significantly as a result. Try running a company without management. By adding a finance manager, you gain two benefits; The first benefit is that you will start to build team cohesion within that office. Cohesion is the score that reflects how well everyone in the department works together to achieve goals. This score is actually always growing, but the speed at which it grows is significantly faster when a manager is organizing and orchestrating team productivity. Each employee has their own cohesion score which is added together with everyone in their department to average out the departments cohesion score. So you can imagine when you hire new people, they start at zero. This is when its most beneficial to have a manager in place to help that score grow. A high department cohesion score leads to great productivity and efficiency.

Executives

Executives are your direct line of controlling the different departments in your company as it grows. In the beginning of the game, your operation will be small and you will be able to micromanage without feeling overwhelmed. With a few well-placed managers, you can get by just fine. However, as your company grows (and it can become a huge conglomerate), you will see how important hiring executives can and will be. Executives will communicate directly with your management throughout the company in their departments handling the delegation and administration of your goals to the company as a whole.

To better explain this I will provide an example for executives as well. As you grow, the company will definitely branch outside of the walls of one building. You can eventually reach operating as many buildings and location as your budget will allow. If you can imagine operating 5 large offices, 5 research facilities, 10 warehouses, 4 call centers and more, you can begin to understand how difficult it can be to micromanage each one. This is where executives and managers really shine. You can only have one executive per department at a time and they can only operate from your HQ (so these are the employees you will actually see throughout the entire game). They will delegate all things to their departments based on your delegated instructions that you can give to each executive. They have their own ideas and ways of operating however. At any time, you can override this, but when hiring, you will see exactly the kind of executive you are trying to hire. So you may want to hire those individuals who believe in what you believe in and operate in ways that you feel will be successful.

Executives have “System Philosophies”, which are preferred methods of doing things and skill-sets that allow them to be effective in that way of thinking. For example, an executive can have the “immediate results” system philosophy which means they are much more likely to push their employees to perform right away without mercy or relent. This tends to squeeze every bit of productivity out of the department, but at the cost of employee happiness or longevity. Under this sort of leadership many employees will burn out, retire early or just simply quit. However, the benefit is a very productive operation over the short term.

So, executives can be delegated to do many task or you can pick and choose which they should do, or those you prefer to keep control over. Hiring practices and department budgeting are the two main things executives can control. Everything else on a macro level you the CEO will have to decide. On a micro level, they can take the reins and delegate to their managers. Their leadership style regardless what you have them do, will be reflected in the department, so know that whoever you put over a department will leave a very significant impression there.

So just because you can hire executives doesn’t mean they’ll want to work for you. As you grow the company, some executives may want to start with a mid-sized company lacking a high level of prestige. Then there are others who prefer to be at a very established and well known company. Either way, you will have to make it worth their while in order for them to lend their services. So unlike hiring other employees in the game, who are generally immediate hires as they tend to seek you or have been recruited as a potential candidate; executives tend to require an offer and they will then ponder the decision to join you for a few days. After this happens, they get back to you with a yes or a no. If they agree to the terms, they will show up at your front door awaiting their new shiny office. If not, you’ll be back on the hunt.

So that is what I have for you this week. I hope you come back next week when I start to talk about more game-play and how you will be able to do some pretty cool things in the late game.