Posted by Bill Ives

It is the holiday season where you should be putting more fun in everything. Rex Lee did a nice blog post, Maximizing Business Value from Enterprise 2.0 through Fun & Motivation.I did a FastFoward post on it but could not resist from including it here and adding some more as I think the message is essential. Rex begins with scientific premise that providing financial rewards to people for knowledge-based tasks is counter productive.

Rex offers an excellent video from Dan Pink that argues that while rewarding people for many simple work tasks from the 20th century and before might increase performance, doing it for the cognitive tasks of the 21^st century does not work. The reason is that it narrows the focus and does not promote the exploration of options that can occur with other motivations. I have also found that it undercuts the team sprit and sharing that collaborative organizations need.Our recent economic downturn also shows that it puts too much weight on individual achievement even if it is counter to the success of the whole organization.

I think this makes sense.If you try to use performance incentives to promote enterprise 2.0 adoption, you need to be very careful that it does not reward the wrong behavior.It certainly needs to be aimed at overall team success if used at all.

So what does Rex offer instead? He writes, why not fun.Here I am completely onboard. I have often been involved in knowledge management implementations where we introduced fun as part of the awareness campaign.I will work even more if it makes the work more fun, such as meeting new interesting people to collaborate with and finding out more about your colleagues. In a minor way this is why I like to work with music as I get caught up in the rhythms of the sounds and works seems more fun.

Rex closes with a great video from Volkswagen that seals the deal. It shows how if you make one channel more fun it will trump the easier, formerly more popular, one.We should add the spirit of this approach to our enterprise 2.0 implementations. It should only help. 

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 at 8:30 am and is filed under Business, Management. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

About the Author: Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog.