Business Class
At Facebook, programmers eagerly await he company’s periodic hackathons. During these all-night innovation ses- sions, staff members compete against each other to create the coolest product
or feature (Facebook Chat emerged
from one session), and even CEO Mark
Zuckerberg joins the marathon programming parties. Facebook employees
aren’t paid more for hackathons. They
enjoy working an all-night shift because
it’s essentially one big party celebrating
their geekdom.
And Facebook isn’t alone. Many of
the world’s most innovative organizations found a 9-to- 5 work schedule and a
steady paycheck weren’t enough to compete in the innovation economy: getting
employees—and consumers—excited
about a business tapped into a level of
ingenuity that a paycheck couldn’t buy.
Research from the Great Place to
Work Institute shows that innovative,
happy, charitable companies aren’t the
exception, but the new rule: Businesses
high in trust and worker satisfaction are
more profitable compared with their
less-happy counterparts (matched by
similar industry). For now, treating
Earnest Money
Employees who
happily work all
night? Customers
who market on your
behalf? Innovative
and successful
companies—like
Facebook, TOMS and
Zappos—are finding
passion leads to profit
employees well and being pro-social is
an option. But new evidence from Gen Y
shows that many young employees view
these elements as a requirement. Thus,
in the near future, businesses that focus
solely on the bottom line may be a recipe
for extinction.
BY GREGORY FERENSTEIN
Less Pay, More Work
“It’s not the money,” says Stacy Sullivan,
Google chief cultural officer. “It’s not
our bonuses and stock. The work envi-
ronment is awesome.”
Indeed, many employees often
take paycuts for the honor to work at
the Internet search giant. Why then is
Google still the most coveted place to
work in the world, according to Fortune’s
“ 100 Best Companies to Work For” list?
Daniel Pink, author of the best-selling
book Drive, explains that the long-held
belief of carrot-and-stick motivation is
misguided. People are more creative and
driven when doing things out of an inner
enthusiasm.
To test this out, a cadre of elite economists, from MIT to the Federal Reserve
Bank, proposed a simple test to pay
people increasing amounts of money
for various tasks and evaluate the dis-crepancies in performance. The results:
For mechanical tasks, larger rewards
led to increases in performance. Yet,
once the task required “rudimentary
cognitive skill,” more money decreased
performance.
