Workatainment

Mary Poppins was remarkably prophetic when she sang "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down" to her young charges. In so doing, she signalled the forecoming of a generational shift in attitudes to work.

Our rollout of Innovation Market has focussed our attention on this shift, since its growing success seems to be a result of blurring work and play.

Innovation Market is workatainment, rather than something you are forced to do to earn a living.

In our Innovation Market, you buy and sell stocks in ideas. If you get into an idea early enough, with any luck by the time it goes live, you'll have made a bit of a profit in Bank Beanz. Bank Beanz are the virtual currency we created internally, and we pay people in Beanz for participation in the market. They earn a few Beanz for handing over their ideas, but can only make decent profits by working on the ideas, or by speculating in other people's ones.

The funny thing is, this is all quite like a game. Its fun to do, and although the actual cash amounts involved aren't very high, people are very, very competitive. We have this internal leaderboard, you see, and people would much rather be wealthy in Beanz (and therefore visible to everyone else) than cash out for the real money.

Anyway, when we started showing Innovation Market internally, one of the key questions we often got was "what if my staff play with Innovation Market all day instead of working?". The thing is, you see, Innovation Market is fun. We even have people using it from home.

But the fact that its fun doesn't detract from the main point: people are using a tool to improve our business. The fun is just a bonus.

Now, as you'll know if you've been reading here for a while, I am of the view that we have a generational change coming in our workforces. Those people born after 1980 – the Gen-Y people – are just about coming into positions where they are beginning their management careers. But Gen-Yers are as different to the people coming before them as the modern city-dweller is to the caveman.

When you have Gen-Y in charge, the fundamental attitude to the way work is conducted changes.

For a start, Gen-Yers works because they choose to. They work on things because they are interested in, not because they are directed to do so. There's pretty much no regard for what management says or does. And when management does provide robust direction, they go out of their way to look as if they are complying whilst behind the scenes doing what they were going to do the first place.

The fact of the matter is that Gen-Yers have long enough to recover from any minor career mis-steps that the downside of not doing as they please is pretty insignificant.

Now, in such an environment, the hard slog up the career ladder hardly seems such a meaningful activity. Only things that are interesting get done well. Workatainment, by definition, is interesting and fun.

So we face this generational change in our workforces, and workatainment is one way of getting good outcomes from the new talent.

It follows from the argument I've just outlined that the more entertaining you make your work environment, the more likely you are to get those key people that can make a difference. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see a time coming when all the new young guns don't even care so much about the money, so long as they are having a good time.

In any event, Gen-Y hasn't had the time to learn to rely on a big income.

My point, in the end, is this. Gen-Y is going to make work fun, or choose not to work in a particular organisation. We, as the current generation of managers, have a choice: either harness this new work ethic, or see the best people slip away to more enlightened organisations. One way to do so is, as Mary Poppins rightly said, put the sugar in the medicine.

The sugar is workatainment, and Mary, were she around today, would hardly have had to use her clever magic to get the best people to work for her.

Comments

[Neil Robinson]

Oh, dangerous ground, James!

I would quickly move away from associating the excellent work you've done with innovation internally with entertainment!

According to Princeton's WordNet Lexicon, the classical definition of "entertainment" is:

"an activity that is diverting and that holds the attention"

Surely business process innovation is quite the opposite, is it not a focus on achieving better results by a more efficient means, in your case by introducing a reward culture using TSBeans (see what I did there?)

Now, just invent some fictional head of the programme and call him "Lloyd" and you'd have "Lloyd's TSBeans".

Hey, you'd pay millions for such a great marketing campaign. I'll send you my bill later...

[Joshua Davidson]

As a Gen-Y worker I have to say, for me this is very much 'on the money'. Websites like Monster have already radically changed the way we approach finding work, opening up what seems like unlimited opportunities. Now Web 2.0 tools and life streaming activities have also meant that one can easily find and follow professionals in fields that really interest us. Here is a good example: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/milo_yiannopoulos/blog/2009/02/11/out_of_a_job_here_are_ten_ways_to_maximise_your_employability_on_twitter

Perhaps a key factor in this is that we are also settling down a lot later in life (I don't have statistics on this but suspect I could Google some) and so are less likely to immediately need to support a young family. Which means money is indeed less important.

Have you considered opening up a version of this game to the public? If it is as educational and fun as you suggest it would be a great piece of social outreach.

[Dave Shea]

I have in the recent past worked with a great bunch of Gen-Yers, they started as interns and landed jobs because of the great work they did. I have to admit that our particular situation allowed for great latitude and personal contribution, even from interns. It's over now (things change) but I've seen it work and look forward to more in the future. I'm old enough to be their Dad but I liked it too, maybe more than they did since I knew it was not a "typical" situation in a very large company.

[Angelos Taplatzidis]

The reality is that we have seen high responsibility/high risk occupations supported by real-life scenario training. I am actually referring to pilots, soldiers, special-forces police officers being trained on simulators of every sort.

The recent course of global finance events have clearly established the banking sector as a potentially high responsibility/high risk one, thus “simulator” type training isn’t out of context. Regardless of what I believe though as a Gen-Yer, let us not forget investment houses and funds have used the concept of “virtual trading” extensively in the past.

Unfortunately I won’t get the chance to get my hands on the Innovation Market platform but I still believe that it could only bring positive impact.