What motivates people?
What motivates people? This seemingly simple question has long puzzled humanity. How does an organization keep its employees, partners, customers and other stakeholders moving together? Beyond the workplace, how do we motivate our friends, family, and partners? The answer remains elusive. Managing and maintaining employment engagement is one of the most difficult challenges managers face today.
Studies show massive levels of workforce disengagement worldwide, with one Gallup study indicating that 87% of employees worldwide are disengaged with their work. The impact of workplace disengagement manifests itself in other ways. Gallup surveys also indicate the primary reason workers leave their jobs is a lack of appreciation.
This widespread employee disengagement has real economic implications. Employment disengagement represents lost output for employers and missed opportunities for career development and advancement by employees.
The team at Nod aims to change this. Crypto NYC hosted Matthew Laffer, Van Nguyen, and Michael Santiago from Nod at our weekly Tuesday lunch on August 28th for an update on their ongoing effort to revolutionize the recognition market. Laffer and Nguyen are the co-founders of Nod and have been working together for over fifteen years on various projects. Laffer is a serial entrepreneur and Nod is his fourth start-up.
Most presenters at Crypto NYC start their presentation with a brief introduction of the speakers, then dive into the details of their company and product. Nguyen began his presentation with a story about his mother’s escape from South Vietnam in 1975, when the South Vietnamese government finally collapsed into communism.
The new regime began punishing all perceived enemies in South Vietnam, setting up re-education camps for anyone who had even a passing connection to the old regime, the Americans, the Catholic Church, or any other perceived class enemy. Nguyen’s mother and father were determined to escape communism. Both wound up in a re-education camp by the ocean.
After several unsuccessful attempts to make it out of the country, Nguyen’s pregnant mother, father, and brother participated in a daring mass attempt to escape via sea. Dozens of small boats were assembled on the beach, and during the middle of the night the escapees attempted to row past the breaks into open water, where a larger boat was waiting to ferry them to safety.
The ocean had two main breaks in the path towards open water. Most of the escapees made it past the first break, but the current was too strong for most to make it past the second break. Escapees boats started tipping as the escapees became too fatigued to continue paddling. Eventually the Nguyen family’s boat tipped, and Nguyen’s parents were separated from his older brother in the confusion.
Ngyuen’s parents swam to shore. The shoreline was full of panicked, exhausted escapees desperately trying to reconnect with family members who had been separated in the confused escape attempt. They frantically searched for Ngyuen’s brother. They saw a couple on the beach holding a small child, running from group to group, asking if they knew who the boy’s parents were. It was Nguyen’s brother.
Reunited, the group followed a path into the jungle, hoping to escape via land. As the group was walking down the path, they saw a pair of cigarettes glowing down the path. The escapees assumed the smokers were a pair of Vietcong guards, and dived into a ditch, hoping the guards would not notice them as they passed.
As the group waited for the guards to path, Nguyen’s mother realized the folly of their plan. While they were off the road, they were barely hidden, and the guards were sure to spot them. She made a radical decision and returned to the road, deciding she would bluff the guards. Despite the fact she was soaking wet, she put on a brave face and strolled passed the guards. The guards, almost certainly knowing she was attempting to escape, just smiled and continued to walk towards the beach.
The group continued on, eventually making it out of the country, and Nguyen’s parents continued to the United States. Nguyen was born a year after his parents settled in the United States, and Nguyen says he was “a celebration baby.”
Nguyen used this story as a vehicle for exploring the question of what motivates people. What can we learn about what motivates people in our day-to-day work from this dramatic story? In the confusion on the beach following the aborted escape attempt, what motivated the unknown couple to reunited Nguyen’s brother with his parents? What gave his mother the courage to bluff her way past the guards and save her family? Why did the guards simply smile and let the group slip past?
These questions get to the core of the questions Nod is trying to answer, albeit on a more extreme scale. Why do some employees scrape by, while others seemingly selflessly put in long hours? Why are some employees happy and motivated, while some are disengaged or apathetic? Nguyen and Laffer’s past work in HR, combined with ongoing research into the subject, suggested a somewhat counterintuitive answer. The primary motivator for individuals, regardless of their environment or circumstance, was positive recognition from their peer group.
The Nod platform was built as a tool to help facilitate this type of peer-to-peer recognition. The team hopes to fundamentally change how recognition, and ultimately reputation, is given and received. Today’s recognition process largely follows a familiar hierarchical top-down structure, where managers are responsible for recognizing and rewarding achievement. By moving to a P2P recognition structure, Nod hopes to capture many of the positive achievements individuals contribute that are currently unrewarded.
A beta version of the Nod UI is currently being tested by several companies. Nod built the initial version of the platform to be integrated with Slack. Users can give their colleagues “Nods” for all sorts of achievements, such as bringing positivity to a difficult meeting, or contributing creative ideas for problem solving, even if those ideas are not ultimately implemented. Users of Nod, and not their employers, own their data, and the Nod team believes that Nod will eventually allow for the creation of a P2P, crowdsourced resume.
Laffer pointed out that many people feel uncomfortable talking about their achievements, viewing it as a type of bragging. By encouraging P2P recognition, employees who perhaps may have been to shy to openly market themselves to their peers would be able to display the positive feedback they had received from their team without needing to volunteer the information themselves.
Many organizations and teams tend to focus on the achievement of their primary goal and disregard contributions that are not directly linked to the completion of that objective. On sales or business development teams, for example, only direct contributions to the sales quota are typically singled out for appreciation and recognition. Nod would provide a venue for many of the less obvious but still essential tasks inherent in meeting a sales quota to be recognized and appreciated by the team and management.
Nod is currently running as a centralized service while the team continues to build out their product and receive feedback. Eventually, the Nod team will connect their project to a blockchain to allow Nod users to control their data, and the recognition they ultimately show to the world and future employees. The team has not settled on which blockchain to use for their project, although they are leaning towards Ethereum. In addition to giving users the ability to control their data, by putting the Nod ecosystem on the blockchain, employers could issue Nod tokens with real monetary value to incentivize their employees to give and receive recognition using the software.
Laffer stressed the importance of employee engagement. With such a huge percentage of the workforce demotivated and disconnected from their work, and with an increasing amount of economic output dependent on the service and creative industries, increasing employee engagement could add billions of dollars of lost economic output back into the economy.
The Nod team is actively searching for feedback from both the blockchain community, as well as from employers who are looking for tools for motivating and engaging their workforce. If you are interested in learning more about the Nod project, or getting involved, feel free to reach out through their website.
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Photo by Vince Fleming on Unsplash
