• Friendship at work: A fascinating look at Zappos’ work culture. Here’s an excerpt:

“ we’ve begun tracking employee relationships. When employees log in to their computers, we ask them to look at a picture of a random employee and then ask them how well they know that person — the options include “say hi in the halls,” “hang out outside of work,” and “we’re going to be long time friends.” We’re starting to keep track of the number and strength of cross-departmental relationships — and we’re planning a class on the topic. My hope is that we can have more employees who plan to be close friends”.  Read more...

Do you offer monetary incentives to motivate staff?  Think again.

Dan Pink believes traditional reward practice like increasing pay aren’t always effective in motivating and improving staff performance. He argues that there is a huge mismatch between the science behind motivating people and what companies practice. To illustrate his point Dan quoted two riveting studies:

“In eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance” ( Federal Reserve of Boston, Paper No. 05-11)  Read more...