Why work? | Opensource.com

Why work?

Posted 01 Feb 2011 by 

Tom Malone (Red Hat)
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Most economic theories (and many managers) assume that the best way to get what you want from workers is give them the right financial incentives.

But most real people have lots of reasons for working besides just making money. They work to have fun, to socialize with others, to challenge themselves, to find meaning in their lives, and for many other reasons. To bring out people’s best efforts in their work, we need to engage more of these non-monetary motivations.


Of course, there’s nothing new about the fact that people are often more dedicated and creative when they are doing work they enjoy or find meaningful. But in our increasingly knowledge-based and innovation-driven economy, human brains—not capital—are becoming the primary drivers of business success. And having dedicated, creative workers can often mean the difference between business success and failure.

So how can we engage people’s best efforts? How can we make work more fun?

One of the best ways to make work fun is to give people more control over what they do. In my book The Future of Work, I talked about how giving people more control—more freedom—in business is now becoming feasible in many more situations. One of the key enablers of this change is that cheap communication technologies now make it possible for many more people to have enough information to make more decisions for themselves.

For instance, eBay’s electronic infrastructure lets hundreds of thousands of people sell products to a worldwide marketplace. But these eBay sellers aren’t employees of eBay, following orders from eBay managers. Instead, the eBay sellers are essentially independent storeowners, deciding for themselves what to sell, when to sell it, how to advertise it, and how to price it.

Even though both eBay and Walmart sell huge volumes of retail products, eBay does it in a way that gives much more freedom to its sellers than Walmart sales clerks have. Is it more fun to be an eBay seller than a Walmart clerk? I suspect it often is. And I suspect that eBay sellers—on average—probably bring more energy, creativity, and dedication to their work than a typical Walmart clerk.

Another way of thinking about how to make work fun is to look at some of the most fun activities around—games—and try to use the same features that make games fun to make work more fun. Almost 30 years ago, in my Ph.D. thesis, I used this strategy to suggest how to make education more fun by incorporating features of highly motivating video games. And, surprisingly, the framework I developed then still applies—with some adaptation—to making work fun today.

The framework highlights three important features of highly motivating environments like video games: challenge, fantasy, and curiosity.

Challenging environments are those where you are always confronting challenges that are on the edge of your capabilities—not too easy and not too difficult. It may seem strange to use this example, but I just saw the movie The Hurt Locker, and one of the main characters in the movie was essentially addicted to the life-threatening challenge of disarming dangerous bombs in Iraq. Was his job fun? Most people probably wouldn’t think so, but for him the challenge made his job almost like a game, and he brought huge amounts of dedication to doing his work.

Many video games are also engaging because of the fantasies they evoke—taking on alternative personalities, killing enemies, living in imaginary worlds. One analogy of fantasy in the work world is the meaning the work has for people. For instance, many contributors to Wikipedia are attracted, in part, by the grand vision of helping to create the world’s largest encyclopedia. They find this task so engaging that they are willing to spend lots of time working on it—for free.

Some jobs—like some computer games—are also great at engaging people’s curiosity. Engineers at Google, for instance, are allowed to spend one day per week working on projects of their own choosing. By letting engineers follow their own curiosity in this way, Google not only helps keep the engineers motivated and engaged, but Google also gets the benefits of the creative new products that often come from these efforts.

Still another way of thinking about how to make work fun is to consider what motivates people, in general. Of course, philosophers and social scientists have been thinking about this question for centuries, but in a recent paper of mine, we used a very simple way of summarizing people’s motivations. People do things for the following three reasons: money, love, and glory.

To take the work out of work, we need to focus on people’s desires, not for money, but for love and glory. For instance, many of the contributors to Wikipedia really enjoy the actual writing and editing of encyclopedia articles. You might even say they love it. And many of them also enjoy the opportunities to socialize electronically with the worldwide community of other Wikipedia contributors. Do they all love each other? No, of course not, but it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that many of them love the social interactions they have with each other while working on Wikipedia.

Giving people a chance at glory—or recognition—is also often a very good way to engage them deeply in their work. Many of the contributors to the Linux open source software system, for instance, are partly motivated by the chance to be recognized by their peers for their technical achievements. As with Wikipedia, the Linux community engages people’s motivations so deeply that most contributors work as volunteers—they don’t get paid at all for their “work.”

People will do all kinds of boring, meaningless work, if you pay them enough, and they need the money badly enough. But to thrive in today’s economy, companies need much more than just the grudging compliance of their workers. They need workers who are dedicated, creative, and truly engaged by the work they are doing. And to do that, companies need to make work more like play.


Open Minded

Another aspect of the "why work" bit perhaps would be the attempt to remove the anonymity that is liable to get in. As a company/project evolves and grows outward, participants are more likely to become 'anonymous'. Putting in structures that remove this undesirable trait also works as a motivating factor and, keeps ensuring that the employee finds value in participating.

Which is what I guess you write when you take the example of the Free Software and Linux world and tie in the recognition by peers aspect.

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Open Minded

Best, Paul
i <3 theopenweb

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Question Everything

collector, the janitor, the waitress, and good students should be paid to study. People would do difficult and interesting jobs, not for the pay, but for the prestige, the challenge, etc, and there would be no motive to screw people on wall street. Being a banker would be decently paid (because it's boring work), but not extravagantly. The type of people who are greedy and value money more than being useful to society could pick up trash, clean toilets, and make a killing.

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Chris Walden
Community Member

I agree with many of the ideas in this article. The nature of work is changing and the relationships that people will choose to make with people who reward them is likely to become a lot more free-form than the traditional employee/employer relationship.

I thought the eBay versus Walmart metaphor was a little stretched. People who sell things on eBay aren't working for them. It's a service that helps individuals overcome sales barriers by making it easier for buyers to find what they need. Sellers actually pay eBay for that... something that I would hope you don't do with your employer.

It does, however, show how technology has opened up a number of potential revenue streams that were previously not possible. Now, rather than thinking about the "job" that a person wants to have, they can look at their various interests and talents and use different outlets to sell those interested parties. Our society needs to catch up to this thinking and understand the difference between self-employed and unemployed. This must include changes in insurance and banking models so that these innovators aren't left with the greatest hardships.

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Professor of MIT Sloan School of Management
