TPN :: The Working Week

This week, Wayne discusses incentives and motivation with Brooks Mitchell, a Professor of Management at the University of Wyoming and President of Snowfly.com, a company that uses gaming to promote reward and recognition.

At the heart of this approach is the belief that workers will try harder and be more enthusiastic about achieving workplace goals if they can obtain instant rewards for their efforts.

As Brooks explains, this somewhat unconventional approach to reward and motivation is actually based on sound behavioural research - any human activity that is positively reinforced will be repeated.

His approach to employee motivation in the workplace involves four major themes: immediate recognition, relevant incentive rewards, accountability and the behavior-changing power of intermittent positive reinforcement. It’s also based on money, not merchandise – because money equals choice and can also be broken into small amounts.

It’s certainly a novel approach, but with a third of incentive programmes actually decreasing performance, it’s one that certainly shouldn’t be ignored

 

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On the Working Week this week, Wayne talks about employee ownership with Mary Ann Beyster, President of the Foundation for Enterprise Development, a private foundation that promotes business principles and practices that encourage free enterprise and advance science and technology innovations.

Employee ownership can be a tough proposition. But if you have really want to empower employees and push decision-making down to the grass roots, creating a decentralized, network-based company that values input from everyone, it is a model that can deliver tremendous benefits.

As Mary Ann explains, the employee involvement that characterizes companies with broad-based ownership tends to result in greater transparency and open-book management. And the knowledge that every individual can influence the direction of the company also produces a different dynamic, often with very high energy levels.

To disseminate the message about employee ownership, a new project has been launched by the Foundation for Enterprise Development, the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education and the Foundation for Enterprise Development and the Employee Ownership Foundation.

Between them, these institutions have created of a Curriculum Library on Employee Ownership which represents the largest collection of university teaching materials on employee ownership—including such areas as broad-based equity compensation and shared capitalism. The library is at
CasePlace.org.

 

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If you’ve experienced a clash of ideas or difficulties in communicating with people of a different generation in your work environment, then this week’s Working Week is required listening.

To explore the impact and role of generations in the workplace, Wayne is joined by
Graeme Codrington. With a CV that includes chartered accountancy at KPMG, IT boom entrepreneur, youth worker, consultant, professional musician, futurist, best-selling author and professional speaker, Graeme is a visiting professor at four business schools, as well as one of the founders of futurist consultancy TomorrowToday.

As Graeme explains, it’s too simplistic just to say that they key to understanding generational issues is to say that “people are different”. Instead, you need to look at the different value sets that each generation have developed - often shaped by the context and events which occurred during their childhoods.

This also explains why different generations have such different styles of communication – and find it so hard to co-exist in the same meeting, let alone the same office. When Baby Boomers prefer face-to-face meetings whilst Generation Xers prefer to text or email, it’s little wonder we have communication breakdowns!

Each new generation entering a new lifestage brings this generational valueset with them, and redefines the lifestage they’re entering. All of which has very important implications for how organisations motivate, attract and retain them as staff and business partners.

 

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In the current economic climate, financial literacy and good money management has never been more important. But one thing that we’ve all learnt over the past few months is that many so-called financial experts aren’t so expert after all.

Which is why Wayne is joined for this week’s Working Week by Jennifer Openshaw, who is CEO of the website Weseed.com, which demystifies the stock market by helping people share what they know and make smart investing decisions based on the collective wisdom of the community.

Jennifer’s mantra, as she explains to Wayne, is to “invest in what you know”, be that what you know through work or through the things you are passionate about or interested in.

And while this might seem like a strange time to be talking about investments, the fact remains that it’s in a company’s best interests to have financially literate staff. As Jennifer points out, people who have financial worries are more stressed and less productive than those who aren’t.

That’s something that UK retail giant Tesco - the largest private-sector employer in Britain - is well aware of. Just this week, it announced that it is distributing financial educational guides to all its 280,000 employees. It will also run a series of hour-long briefings in head offices and distribution centres, where hundreds of staff will be taught how to manage their money better.

 

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