Sunday, September 13, 2009

Results Oriented Work Environment

Our current means of motivating employees is antiquated and inefficient, argues Dan Pink. Instead, he says, we need to focus on intrinsic motivators that generally revolve around autonomy, purpose and mastery.

As someone who works in software, which he mistakenly dismisses as one of those 'left brain activities', I couldn't agree more. We don't have very many carrots at work, but we have quite a few sticks. And we have one more thing that he doesn't mention that's far more pervasive: The implied admission that candle problems cannot be solved by incentivized behavior from management, but a different direction in how to react to that. Instead of changing the way work culture is, how we exchange ideas, and focusing on intrinsic motivators, there's a Herculean effort to find a mechanical way to turn candle problems into non-candle problems.

We have 'best practices', step-by-step instructions, 'industry standard' architectural models and a plethora of other things that a junior engineer with no right brain capacity whatsoever is supposed to be able to apply in a very mechanical way to turn all candle problems into non-candle problems. The idea here is that we can somehow learn from other problems that required creativity to turn similar problems into simple mechanics. It doesn't work at all.

I'm a major believer in the free market, but that doesn't mean I think bonuses are intrinsic to the free market, but rather competition. If some companies adopt the ROWE atmosphere and others do not, then the evidence presented in this TED Talk indicates that those who adopt ROWE will out compete those who do not. This is going to be such a gargantuan change in our labor culture as to be unrecognizable. Imagine a world in which all the jokes in Office Space no longer make any sense.

A small price to pay for more overall fulfillment, I'd claim.

As a not-so-long-ago new hire into the Corporate world, I was mystified every day by this question, "What is it, exactly, that you do here?" I still can't account for over 90% of the people I work with. I can't account for why we have 8-9 hour days that are dominated by water cooler chatter, web surfing and meetings that serve as escapes from our real jobs while still making us feel important and productive. ROWE gets rid of all that. It really is going to be a huge culture shift.

I do have one question, though, and want to know what others think about this. The candle problem showed that incentivising an employee once he's already solving the problem narrows his focus too much and renders him less capable. But what about incentives as a means to attract talent in the first place? I'm not sure the candle problem's findings apply here. In other words, once you have good talent in place, punishing them with management bureaucracy and enticing them with Chili's gift certificates doesn't work. But if you had to hire someone new, wouldn't offering the best compensation still attract the best talent pool? I'd claim it'd have to via reductio ad absurdem. If the candle problem findings are true, AND apply to attracting new talent rather than rewarding current employees, then you'd find yourself in the odd position of saying that paying nothing gets the best results.

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