A Kudos Culture

People want to be recognized and rewarded for their thoughts, ideas, and contributions.” Few statements will garner less argument than that. Yet, when we think about “rewarding collaboration“, people tend to gravitate only to material rewards, which most of us don’t have a whole lot of power to change. However, when participating in collaborative environments, it is especially important to remember that psychological rewards are often just as powerful and behavior-re-enforcing as a restaurant gift card or a cash bonus.

People like to feel appreciated

At the risk of noting the most obvious observation ever written, I will go out on a limb and say that people like to feel important. Thinking back to sociology/psychology class, Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs hits on the people’s desire to reach levels of satisfaction beyond material reward to self-actualization. Similarly, Frederick Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory argues that job satisfaction is most closely tied to “motivating” factors like recognition, personal growth, and challenging work (as opposed to “hygiene factors” such as salary and company policy, which contribute more to dissatisfaction, but do not give positive satisfaction).

Getting out of the realm of theory, it is my experience that recognizing people’s contributions, even peer-level recognition, is a great way to reinforce and encourage collaborative participation. Just knowing that our work is useful/interesting/helpful for our peers in many cases is enough to encourage sharing inside of organizations. In environments where it’s difficult to know if people are actually deriving value from work–i.e. most knowledge-creation jobs–positive recognition of utility and value is an important thing.

In particular, I want to call out two groups of people to get more in the habit of recognizing valuable contributions:

• Lurkers: The lurker is a much-maligned creature. Even the name rings of someone stalking from the shadows. Forget the Paredo Princple/80-20 rule for a moment: if there were no lurkers, there’d be no audience! The lurker is an under-appreciated being (I suspect most so in environments without adequate metrics: imagine if newspapers couldn’t detect the number of subscribers and instead calculated readership based on the number of letters to the editor that they received). But in order to encourage people to continue providing information/content, sometimes the lurker has to leave the shadows. Lurkers should realize that there is value in simply thanking a poster if they find information/insight that is useful, even if the lurker doesn’t think he has something substantive to contribute.


I see you lurkin'...with your lurkin' self

• Question-askers: Readers of this blog know that I am a fan of telling people what you want from them. I am a strong believer that asking the question that you want to have answered is the best way to get the answer you want (this post is so full of the obvious, it’s ridiculous). But when we get responses, many times we don’t always take 15 seconds to thank people for their participation/contributions. This is absolutely critical to continued participation, especially in a professional environment.

Reinforcing collaboration

I think that it is important for organizations, in order to build a more collaborative culture, to build a “kudos culture”. People seek recognition and appreciation from collaboration and sharing: so thank people for contributions and reciprocate! Commenting, re-tweeting, sharing links, and answering questions are all valuable behaviors that demonstrate value and utility of information.

Are people already rewarded for collaboration?

One of the most interesting and debated topics in my line of work is how to reward people for collaboration and/or participation in Web 2.0 efforts. This topic is worth books in itself (and many, many individual posts that perhaps I will write in the future…), but I want to explore whether this whole problem could be avoided. This is crazy, you say: you have to incentivize workers in order to actually get them to collaborate or use Web 2.0 technology. Or you have to write it into their performance objectives.

Or do you? My theory, I submit to you, is that this is unnecessary. Why? Because collaboration is a means, not an end.

Craziness?

You have to incentivize collaboration and participation in Web 2.0 in order to get people to play, right? NSFMF! There’s gotta be a benefit in collaboration that is self-evident to the people participating. Blogging, using a wiki, or social bookmarking may be inherently public/crowd-sourcing activities; but participation by good will is not sustainable. There has to be a return on investment. This is why collaboration by mandate often doesn’t work well, because people see it as “another duty as assigned” and more work, rather than part of their actual job.

Perhaps think of it this way: prior to Web 2.0 technologies, did you really write into your performance reviews that you drafted products in Microsoft Word or worked with your colleagues via email, instant, messaging, and face-to-face meetings? Not so much. Likewise, a communications professional shouldn’t get rewarded for blogging; he should get rewarded for communicating. An intelligence analyst shouldn’t rewarded for making wiki edits; she should get rewarded for high quality intelligence analysis. Collaboration and Web 2.0 are just two ways that help her get to a higher level analysis. Collaboration is a skill, like writing, research, and presenting: it’s to be developed and honed.

The Ends Justify the Means

Take a moment to think about why you work with others. Ideally, it’s not to check a box. It’s to search for new ideas, get sanity checks, and find different points of view on my work and thoughts (or provide such services out of reciprocity or sense of mission). I do these things because I want to produce something that’s better than I could do alone. No matter how smart I [may think I] am, I’m not smarter than my network. Let’s face it, nobody’s smarter than all of their network. Isn’t that the whole point of this Web 2.0 thing?

Collaboration is an input. It is one of many. At the end of the day, people in knowledge work are rewarded (in a perfect world) for the quality outputs. The point of this entry is not to say that collaboration shouldn’t be rewarded: it’s that collaboration is already rewarded. It’s rewarded because the final output should be that much better if you’ve collaborated with outside peers.*

*Granted, this is of course dependent on having managers who are able to account for said improvement in quality of output…