Lead the Work: Navigating a World Beyond Employment

Chapter 9The Reward: Short-Term, Individualized, and Imaginative

Leading the work means thinking differently about the rewards that you provide your workers. A world beyond traditional employment offers leaders the opportunity to actually redesign rewards to give workers more of what they want, and cost you less. At the extreme, more work is being done by attracting volunteers. Recall the example of Foldit, where volunteers used the web-based application to help solve protein-folding problems. They did it gladly, for the reputation of being the winner, and for a good cause. Your organization won't likely get all of its work done by volunteer gamers, but, with the right framework, you can better optimize your work rewards. In Chapter 4 we showed ...