Knowledge Work Incentives

Copyright Kemsley Design Ltd., 2015 1

Sandy Kemsley ● www.column2.com ● @skemsley
Changing Incentives
for Knowledge
Workers
Aligning incentives with the social
enterprise

Agenda
 Knowledge work: best when it’s social
 Social business #fail
 Intrinsic motivation
 Knowledge work incentives

How The Enterprise
Became Social
The shift in enterprise processes, attitudes and goals

Social in the Enterprise
 Enterprise social work patterns
 Social interaction to strengthen weak ties
 Goal-oriented social production
 Social feature implementations
 Standalone social platforms and networks
 Built into core business platforms for
“purposeful collaboration”

Human Work Is Changing
Routine Work
Execute transactions
Efficiency
Compliance/standardization
Process improvement
Automation
Knowledge Work
Solve problems
Collaboration
User-created processes
Assist human decisions
Collect supporting artifacts

Knowledge Work Works
Best When It’s Social
Social Feature Enterprise Benefits
Collaboration Exploit weak ties for knowledge
sharing and social feedback
= Improved decision-making
User-created
content
Use and capture tacit knowledge
= Improved processes
Transparency Provide context for work
= Improved problem-solving

What Makes Social
Business Social?
 Social graph
 User profile
 List of connections
 Network effects enrich community
 Activity feed
 Communication events between social graph
 Collaboration events on artifacts
 History of every process
Source: Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim, “Social Business By Design”

Why We Want Social
Business
9
Source: Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim, “Social Business By Design”

The Collaboration Dilemma
What is limiting the adoption of social enterprise processes?

Social Business Gone
Wrong
In spite of evidence that collaborative,
dynamic, goal-directed processes can
improve agility, profitability and
customer satisfaction, many
enterprises maintain a corporate culture
and management style that
does not incent workers
for these activities.

Social Business Adoption
Failures
 Management disables social features
 Attempt to control workers’ activities
 Results in “off the record” collaboration
 Workers ignore social features
 Insufficient training
 Insufficient incentives to collaborate

 Executives want
collaboration across
silos; management
want work done on
time
 Performance metrics
for efficiency, not
service levels
Misaligned Goals
And Metrics

The Incentives Conflict
“When an organization doles out
bonuses, raises, awards and
promotions based on individual
contributions, what’s the carrot for
social participation?”
-- Gia Lyons, Jive Software
Do the
right thing
What’s in
it for me?

Aligning Incentives with
Goals
Changing why you work in order to change how you work

Identifying Mismatch of
Rewards and Goals
 Intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations
 Recognition versus monetary rewards
 Team versus individual goals

Source:Daniel Pink, “Drive”
Rewards vs. Motivation
Extrinsic Rewards for
Algorithmic Work
 Financial
 Job security
 Working conditions
 Focus on profit
maximization
 Rewards short-term
thinking
Intrinsic Motivators
for Heuristic Work
 Enjoyment of work
 Genuine
achievement
 Personal growth
 Focus on purpose
maximization
 Rewards ethical
behaviour

Elements of Motivation
 Autonomy
 Task, time, team and technique
 Mastery
 Infinitely improvable
 Purpose
 Contribution to the greater good
Source:Daniel Pink, “Drive”

Align Incentives with
Business Objectives
 Intrinsic motivation in addition to
extrinsic rewards
 Recognition for:
 Problem-solving over efficiency
 Valuable work outside job description
 Recruiting problem solvers

Boost Teamwork
 Reward team goals as well as individual
 Strengthen weak ties with dynamic, self-
organizing teams
 Encourage joint ownership of goals,
activities to increase buy-in
 Leverage social ties/pressure to adopt
new ideas
 Teamwork is not just “doing your job”

Source: Alex Pentland, “Social Physics”
Self-Organizing Teams vs
Hierarchical Crowdsourcing
Red Balloon
Challenge
 Time-critical search
challenge
 Reward team
recruiters and
problem-solvers
 The people build the
organization, then
solve the problem
Mechanical Turk
 Pre-defined atomic
tasks assigned to
anonymous workers
 No network
interactions
 No incentive to solve
the overall problem

Source: Ted Coine and Mark Babbitt, “A World Gone Social”; Frederic Laloux, “Reinventing Organizations”
Flat Leadership For Greater
Competitiveness
 Workers are more engaged
 Set goals and make decisions
 More productive, less absenteeism
 Freedom (and will) to innovate
 Reduced “management tax”
 Less hierarchy = reduced costs
 Less bureaucracy = improved efficiency
 Zappos, W.L. Gore, Basecamp

The Metrics Of
Knowledge Work Incentives

Problem-Solving Metrics
 Customer satisfaction
 Time to achieve business goal (not
just complete task)
 Quality of decision/goal achievement
 Correlate with degree of collaboration

Enterprise Social Scoring
 Social graph connectivity/strength
 Indicator of collaboration
 Detect/boost weak ties
 Reputation-based recommendations
 Social reputation
 Indicator of contribution to community
 Incorporate peer recognition

Building In Social Incentives
 Capture social metrics on systems of
interaction
 Social graph and interactions
 Flexibility and innovation
 Quality of decision/problem resolution
 Peer assessment
 Combine with traditional metrics
 Immediate feedback with recognition
and gamification

Next-Generation Social
Analytics
 Evaluate (and reward) collaborative
behaviors that:
 Are aligned with organizational culture
 Get work done
 Assist others to achieve shared goals
 Resistant to “gaming” by workers

Summary

Summary
 Enterprise processes are inherently
social
 Misaligned goals and incentives will
reduce success of outcomes
 Organizational culture and
management style may need to shift
 Core social business technology is in
place, but metrics are still catching up

Questions
Sandy Kemsley
sandy@kemsleydesign.com
www.column2.com
@skemsley
www.slideshare.net/skemsley

Knowledge Work Incentives

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