Encarta vs. Wikipedia - How the Outcome Defines Motivation

In the world of business, incentivizing can be a tricky balancing act. Do external or internal incentives motivate better? Do monetary or satisfaction driven incentives create more buy in? What motivates us to do our best work? Regardless of the motivating factors, employees express three key criteria to be motivated in their work:

1.) Autonomy - nobody likes to be micromanaged

2.) Mastery - we want to develop and grow a useful skill

3.) Purpose - what we are doing has to serve a greater purpose than just ourselves

If you want compliance, traditional notions of management are great. But if you want engagement from your workforce, self direction works better. Workers who feel autonomous in their job function and feel they are working towards a useful/usable skill that has a purpose greater than themselves are emphatically more engaged and, as a result, produce greater work. 

I work in a company that embodies the ROWE work style wholeheartedly. ROWE, results only work environment, means that employees are expected to perform their job function and perform it well; that's it. How they do it, where they do it, when they do it.....is of no concern. All we care about is the end result. In this environment, I am autonomous, I am mastering a skill and my work has a defined purpose.

So how does this play into the Encarta vs. Wikipedia discussion?

Well Microsoft started an online encyclopedia called Encarta in the early 1990's hoping to digitize the encyclopedia Britannica. They contracted thousands of capable developers to index, they hired capable managers to ensure delivery was on time and in budget and senior MS leadership had a vested interest in the process. Individuals were compensated fairly and understood the purpose of their work.

In 2001, Jim Wales and Larry Sanger had a different idea on how to digitize the entire encyclopedia. Jim and Larry realized that trying to build a team to perform this HUGE task was a futile effort. So why not just open things up and let people who are interested in topics freely add their information? Open source information sharing was now being made possible thanks to this thing called the internet.

Needless to say, the carefully planned and scaled operational team at Microsoft Encarta stood no chance against the entire world's population's interest levels. Jim and Larry saw that people were motivated to add their information onto topics because they had an intrinsic interest in them. The Encarta team was just performing a job they HAD to do. Wikipedia contributors are contributing because they WANT to.

Is your company poised to be an Encarta or a Wikipedia? Do people feel they are just performing a job to get paid and go home? Or do they have a vested interest in what they are doing and an intrinsic desire to perform well?

How is this type of environment being shaped? Are you ROWE oriented, or strictly adhere to hard start/stop times, structured meeting days, staggered lunch breaks....? Do you want to work where you are or are you just working there because you have to?

Be great,

Greg