Incentives for sharing
Dinesh Tantri makes an interesting link between the Freakonomics' discussion of incentives and that of incentives for sharing in Moral Versus Economic Incentives For Knowledge Sharing
While incentivizing knowledge sharing and collaboration it is important to find the "golden mean" if you will. Ideally we need to build schemes that rely on peer recognition and self-satisfaction. This needs to be augmented with more tangible incentives that are neither too less or too much.
The topic of incentives comes around frequently, and it is clearly an issue. Good planning has considered this as the KM effort was created. Bad planning says, "Hey, we've built this thing and no one is coming. I know! Let's give them a Starbucks card when they contribute to the repository."
It has been clear to me that reputation (whuffie) encourages knowledge workers far more than do economic incentives. The economic incentive will get people curious and might encourage people to check something out for the first time or possibly take some direct action. (Fill out your profile to get your Starbucks card.) But it won't keep them coming back, nor will it serve to create long term value in contributing to a "knowledge base" or to a KM community.
3 Comment(s)
"Hey, we've built this thing and no one is coming. I know! Let's give them a Starbucks card when they contribute to the repository."
Tx for the morning chuckle! :-)
Unfortunately this often the case... For me, the old expression of 'buy in' still has meaning, and the overall change must be based in corporate culture. Sway the right people, and the rest will roll along.
Not that incentives are useless, but they are very easy to rely upon; and by themselves do not equate a change management strategy.
Great post, Jack ! I am not sure why the trackback that I tried to send out yesterday didn't work but I thought I would let you know that I have created a post over at my weblog hoping to try to expand further on what you and Dinesh have detailed so far. Here is the article itself.
Oh, by the way, thanks a bunch as well to Denham for sharing that study ! Have started reading through it and it is quite an interesting read for anyone who does KM work one way or another. Thus thanks for that, Denham. Appreciated.
This recent study has an 'instrument' to point you to the areas to focus on when assisting knowledge sharing:
To share or not to share, that is the question. Conditions for the willingness to share knowledge>