Drive
Business guru and Al Gore speechwriter Daniel H. Pink, started his RSA talk the other week by giving things away. A ham and cheese sandwich to the man in the second row. £10 to a man whom he asks to stand up and plug his book to the webcam live streaming the event. These are both demonstrations of motivation or drive. Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money. Pink’s premise is that such 20th century carrot-and-stick incentive systems do not work for 21st century knowledge work. Infact, such incentive systems actually make knowledge workers perform worse when tasks require cognitive skills. He argues that the secret to high performance and satisfaction can be found in the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things and do better by ourselves.
Pink demonstated his theory with the following examples:
Zappos.com
Zappos.com is an online shoe and clothing shop based in Henderson, Nevada. Since its founding in 1999, Zappos has grown to become the biggest online shoe store. Zappos did “almost nothing” in sales for 1999, but grossed over $800 million in merchandise sales in 2007, and is projecting over $1 billion in 2008. The company was acquired by Amazon.com for a reported $1.2 billion.
What Pink points out as key to Zappos success is its great emphasis on company culture and its core values. The company publishes a “Culture Book” annually that is made up of contributions from employees describing what the company culture means to them. According to the company, the core value is to “deliver ‘wow’ through service.”
At the heart of this is the way they employ and train their staff. All employees hired for their corporate office, regardless of position, are required to undergo a 4-week customer loyalty training course, which includes at least 2 weeks of talking on the phone with customers in the call center at full salary. After a week of training, the new employees are offered $2,000 to leave the company immediately, no strings attached. This is done to ensure people are there for the love of the job and not the money. Over 97% turn down the buyout. The quit-now bonus began at $100. It was soon bumped to $500 then $1,000. They currently offer $2,000 to “quit now”. The company’s culture focuses on making sure every interaction with the customer results in them saying, “That was the best customer service I have ever had.”
Atlassian
Atlassian is another company hailed by Pink as a company that motivates its employees in radical and effective ways. This Australian software company tells their engineers regularly to go for 24 hours and work on anything you want as long as it’s not part of your regular job. Engineers use this time to come up with a cool patch of code, something new and then present their work to the rest of their colleagues at the end of the day. This is called a FEDEX Day because you have to deliver something overnight. These days of independence have produced an array of products and software fixes and have worked so well Atlassian started another project called 20 PERCENT TIME (done famously at Google – which has produced products like of GMAIL, ORKUT and Google News) where engineers get time to spend on anything they want.
Pink also talks about a work system called ROWE. In an office where ROWE is employed employees don’t have schedules. People show up when they want. They can be there at any time. People just need to get their work done. When, where and how is up to them. Meetings in this environment are optional. Almost across the board – productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up and turnover goes down. Pink views such systems of work as a new and better way of doing things.
Conclusion
These are all examples of a new way of working and motivating. What Pink makes clear is that people respond well to incentives in their environment. However, people sometimes take the low road. They take shortcuts and sacrifice the long term for the sake of the short term. We live in a reward-punishment drive. What Pink argues is that science shows that we all have a drive to do something because of inherent satisfaction. To neglect such a drive would mean to neglect a huge of talent each of us possess and too many businesses are failing to see such a drive, often to their detriment
Thanks to Gavin Cumine for this story.
