Archive for November, 2009

Passion and employee mojo

Posted: November 23, 2009 in Positive psychology
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Warning: The following statement is rubbish. As soon as you’ve read it, please erase it from your memory :)

“Twitter and social networks cost UK businesses over £1.38 billion per year in lost productivity”. This recent quote from a survey by Morse, a UK based IT consulting company, doesn’t even deserve to be referenced, except it has now appeared in newspapers worldwide. Companies who wish to lose their employee mojo, go ahead and follow Morse’s advice. Those who want to continue to attract the Y Generation, the Digital Natives, forget you ever read that statement.

As I have already mentioned in my earlier blogs about the topic, Digital Natives, and the rest of us really, expect to be able to check our Facebooks, our online bank account statements and book our weekend trips any time we want. But hold on, we also prepare customer presentations at 11 o’clock at night. We do that if we’re passionate about our jobs.

The real world example is Google and their 20 percent time. Google offers their engineers “20-percent time” so that they’re free to work on what they’re really passionate about. Google Suggest, AdSense for Content and Orkut are among the many products of this perk.

Just consider this: How many hours of lost productivity do you think Google has each year on that account? It’s around $400,000,000. And do you think Google considers it “lost productivity”? Or is it their mojo?

Motivation – are corporations heading down the wrong alley?

Posted: November 23, 2009 in Positive psychology
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I recently watched this video with Daniel Pink. And since then I have been thinking about the real impact of what he’s saying, which is basically this: If your job involves a minimum of cognitive skills, most performance management methods, systems and approaches don’t work. There’s a mismatch between what science knows and what businesses do. Mind-buggling and it really calls for action (or corrective action as we consultants like to call it). Go ahead and watch it. Trust me – it’s worth investing a little time in.

My promise: I intend to find out to what extent this is true, to what extent corporation know about this and to what extent they intend to do something about it.

Until then… these are the 3 motivational words to remember: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.