[atoav]

Realistically that reward is going to be:

1. more work

2. nice words and then more work

3. nice words, more work and then she is asked to do the same for another person's task who is then fired

Sorry to be cynical here, but it is very rare for managment to reward the few people that do a better than good job with more free time or less work.

[yodelshady]

I believe dingi is perfectly aware of the realistic outcomes, and is instead describing the normative ones, i.e. what you need if you want an enterprise that actually self-improves, where the best employees aren't actively looking for the door whilst concealing things from management.

It is, however, wholly a management problem to find those actually-rewarding rewards.

Crazy idea: what if employees retained IP of any spontaneous, self-directed R&D? You could then license their tech and make the role redundant, something any ruthless capitalist would consider a win. The employee can go job-hunting with a small passive income and glittering CV, which means they're much more likely to actually tell you so you can get that outsourcing win.

In reality, it seems far too many businesses have moats as a result of excellent decisions made by founders in the past, and as a result can't be outcompeted by companies that do manage talent better.

[dingi]

She doesn't have to tell anyone

[atoav]

Exactly my point. But if you are a manager, you might wanna consider if that is the incentive structure you wanna have at your organization: People who do good work get "punished" with more work, people who keep it low don't.

I certainly have left jobs because of that.

[ethbr1]

I think about incentive structures from an opportunity cost standpoint too.

Everyone has finite amounts of time they can spend on work.

Ceteris paribus, if you spend 90% of your time working and 10% politicking, at most companies you will be out promoted by someone who spends 60% of their time working and 40% politicking.

The parallel IC track that tech popularized solves this to some degree... but most non-tech companies don't have that track.

[maayank]

What mechanisms successfully address this?

[sobkas]

> She doesn't have to tell anyone

She doesn't because there is an app on her work machine that gathers all kinds of useful data on usage of such computer. Sooner or later someone will notice and there will be consequences for doing so. There are no trophies for running some unauthorized software on companies data and documents.