Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do.

Stories of organisations using rewards as a means of reducing absenteeism, such as the scheme implemented for the Royal Mail, are usually heralded as demonstrating the power of incentives to change behaviour.

I’ve always felt a bit uneasy about this kind of incentive, and at first I though this was because it’s not rewarding a positive behaviour. But I’ve realised that the real problem is that it rewards attendance rather than performance.

An interesting article at Business Week looks at how American electronics retailer Best Buy has implemented a Results Oriented Work Environment at its’ corporate headquarters, judging people on their performance rather than the hours they are at work.

Work place productivity is a myth, generally based around paranoid management who believe they can’t control what they can’t see. But there are so many distractions in the workplace, from web surfing, dealing with e-mail fire-storms to water-cooler summits and office chair jousting, its possible to spend a day at work without getting any work done..

With ROWE, people are not only free to work when they want, but where they want. There are no mandatory meetings and no schedules, which leaves employees to manage their jobs around their lives, not the other way around.

“The official policy for this post-face-time, location-agnostic way of working is that people are free to work wherever they want, whenever they want, as long as they get their work done”

Many organisations are also realising that freeing their staff from their desk is a great way to reduce the requirement for office space:

“Sun Microsystems Inc. calculates that it’s saved $400 million over six years in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of all employees to work anywhere they want. And this trend seems to have legs. A recent Boston Consulting Group study found that 85% of executives expect a big rise in the number of unleashed workers over the next five years.”

With ubiquitous wireless networking, cheap laptops, and mobile telephony, the idea of commuting to a central office space to spend all day on the phone or computer terminal seems more and more archaic. The role of the office will doubtless change to a more informal, fluid zone for face to face exchanges and collaborative working.

Can a ROWE model also be applied to a retail environment or shop floor, where staff do not have the same flexibility of work patterns? Yes, according to Phyllis Moen, a sociology professor at the University of Minnesota, in this article:

“It’s not about being free to come and go,” she says, “but being free to come and go based on getting the work done, so covering the show floor will necessitate coordinating with others. It’s a revolutionary idea.”

Modern performance rewards and incentives will need to adapt to the new realities of the new workplace. With the work-life balance that ROWE offers, incentives will be used to target different behaviours, and assist in helping employees acheive their self-set goals.

Today’s business is about transparency.

A clever marketing ploy by UK sandwich-and-coffee chain Pret a Manger seems to me to epitomise the new ecology of business. On their website, on their takeaway bags, and now in a book, they provide the recipes and list the ingredients needed to remake their tasty food. It says: ‘Want to reproduce our chicken wrap? Here’s how’.

The clever part, of course, is that few people ever will. They’re giving away their secrets because it’s actually good for business. It provides a great marketing opportunity for Pret a Manger to tell the story of how much care goes into the preparation of their food, and the importance of carefully selecting the right ingredients. The subtle indication is that once you really know what goes into making a particular sandwich, salad or soup, they seem much better value.

But there’s another way in which Pret’s transparency is good for business, and that is because it sets their standards. With this marketing campaign, they are nailing their colours to the mast, and declaring their values. ‘This is how we do things’, it proclaims. It is a public commitment to quality and accountability.

This serves as a motivational aid to the staff across the Pret chain, to ensure they live up to claims made by their marketing, as well as an acknowledgement of the standards they have already achieved.

Motivation and transparency are at the heart of the new business economy. Defensive, paranoid organisations, crippled by a culture of secrecy and protectionism, will find themselves left behind both by customers, and an increasingly competitive recruitment market. People won’t want to buy from defensive organisations and they won’t want to work for them.

Our business is founded on meeting the needs of today’s agile business, not yesterday’s lumbering corporations. We’re happy to share the secrets of successful motivation and give tactical insights to running successful incentives, because we know it shows our strengths.

A new version of Hasbro/ Milton Bradley’s Game of Life boardgame offers other rewards than money.

“When it launches this summer, Hasbro, Inc.’s new THE GAME OF LIFE: Twists & Turns Edition will be the first major board game in America to replace cash with a Visa-branded card as the preferred form of currency. Visa will also provide financial literacy enhancements within the game to teach children and consumers of all ages the benefits of proper money management.”

But, more fundamentally:

“The winner is no longer the person who accumulates the most money, but rather earns the most “life points”, which is a combination of wealth and life experiences.”

It seems that even Hasbro have realised that cash is a poor incentive.

Incidentally, there’s a short history of Milton Bradley and the Game of Life on the New Yorker