HR Tech Europe 2013The Future of Work

Daniel Pink25 October 2013

What is going on?

What do we do about it?

MY PRESENTATION

What is going on?

What do we do about it?

What is going on?

From the Agriculture Age to the Conceptual Age

GTA (globalization, technology, affluence)

18th century 19th century 20th century 21st century

Agriculture Age(farmers)

Industrial Age(factory workers)

Information Age(knowledge workers)

Conceptual Age(creators and empathizers)

What do we do about it?

“As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”

D. ARIELY, U. GNEEZY, G. LOWENSTEIN, & N. MAZAR, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper No. 05-11, July 2005; NY TIMES, 20 Nov. 08

But once the task called for “even rudimentary [basic] cognitive skill,” a larger reward “led to poorer performance.”

D. ARIELY, U. GNEEZY, G. LOWENSTEIN, & N. MAZAR, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Working Paper No. 05-11, July 2005; NY TIMES, 20 Nov. 08

If-then

Great for simple and short-term.

Not so great for complex and long-term.

“Our results were quite startling.”

TERESA M. AMABILE, ET AL, “Person and Environment in Talent Development: The Case of Creativity,” (1993)

“The commissioned works were rated as significantly less creative than the noncommissioned works, yet they were not rated as different in technical quality.”

TERESA M. AMABILE, ET AL, “Person and Environment in Talent Development: The Case of Creativity,” (1993)

“Our [previous] sales salary system felt like . . . a gigantic, complex and medieval spirograph centered on an assumption that wasn’t true.”

NEIL DAVIDSON, CO-FOUNDER, RED GATE SOFTWARE

FACT:Money is a motivator.

3

MASTERY

AUTONOMY

PURPOSE

MASTERY

AUTONOMY

PURPOSE

Management

FEDEX DAYSSHIP IT DAYS

“After our CEO declared ‘mobile’ was key to our strategy, none of our business units were able to change direction on a dime, but our employees using 10 percent time created seven mobile apps before any other formally funded mobile projects even got started.”

ROY ROSIN, recently departed Vice President for Innovation, Intuit

GENIUS HOUR

Konstantin Novoselov Andre Geim

“If scaled up to the thickness of plastic refrigerator wrap, a sheet of graphene stretched over a coffee cup could support the weight of a truck bearing down on a pencil point.”

Dennis Overbye, “Physics Nobel Honors Work on Ultra-Thin Carbon,” New York Times, 5 October 2010

FRIDAY EVENING EXPERIMENTS

CARVE OUT TIME FOR NON-COMMISSIONED

WORK

TRY A FEDEX DAY (OR A GENIUS HOUR)

AUTONOMY AUDIT

How much autonomy do you have over

your tasks at work -- your main

responsibilities and what you do in a

given day?

How much autonomy do you have over your team at work -- that is, to what extent are you

able to choose the people with whom

you typically collaborate?

How much autonomy do you have over your

time at work -- for instance, when you

leave, when you arrive, and how you allocate your hours

each day?

How much autonomy do you have over your technique at work -- how you

actually perform the main responsibilities

of your job ?

www.danpink.com/audit

MASTERY

AUTONOMY

PURPOSE

“. . . making progress in meaningful work.”

Teresa M. Amabile & Steven J. Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy Engagement and Creativity at Work (2011)

FEEDBACK

MONTHLY ONE-ON-ONES

Love & Loathe

Removing Barriers

Career Long Term

Check-ins

“A good and honest conversation about how

they have done in the past 6 months.”

OFFICE HOURS

MASTERY

AUTONOMY

PURPOSE

Hand hygiene prevents you from catching diseases

Hand hygiene prevents patients

from catching diseases

Gel in, wash out

HOW | WHY

Next week, have 2 fewer conversations

about “how” and 2 more about

“why.”

Purpose &

purpose

“I felt I wasn’t making a

__________.”

“I felt I wasn’t making a

contribution.