Sunday, July 26, 2015

The new coins of the realm


In the corporate world: How do you incentivize people to participate in meetings or come to a presentation? One of the incentives at IBM would be: “refreshments will be served.” Cookies are a great inducement.

What do you do when the cookies are already pervasive and plentiful? Food is no longer an incentivizer to “show up.”

But people still need incentives
.
I am discovering the incentive system at Google. One is the full range of Google T-shirts that you get for participating in certain events. Some people proudly wear different Google T-shirts to work every day. Another incentive is…stickers. I participated in speech data acquisition this week. (You make recordings that the research team can use to improve speech recognition accuracy.) I have done this numerous times at IBM, and in return got a free lunch voucher. I now did this at Google, and got stickers to apply to my Mac. I wondered where people here got all the sticky “bling” for their computers. Now I know…you participate in stuff, and then you adorn your computer with these badges of honor. So we all need incentives, but they need to be provided in the context of what your society “values.” (Full disclosure…I would have contributed my voice for the advancement of speech technology…with or without the giveaways, at IBM or at Google…J)


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