{"id":21,"date":"2017-06-04T01:08:00","date_gmt":"2017-06-04T01:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/34.10.140.215\/?p=21"},"modified":"2025-12-04T01:09:39","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T01:09:39","slug":"rewards-vs-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/?p=21","title":{"rendered":"Rewards vs. Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I was in college, I spent two years as editor in chief of our daily online-only newspaper, The Daily Gazette<\/a>. One of my first projects was leading a redesign of our website \u2014 and that included adding advertising; overnight, we were pulling in a thousand dollars a month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn’t really know what to do with the money (the college paid our costs), so I came up with a scheme to divvy up the money as a salary of sorts to our team. Each semester, we’d pay writers, photographers, and editors a few hundred dollars \u2014 but they had to be active participants, meeting a quota of contributions. I imagined this could lead to a golden age for quality content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, the program failed miserably. Story contributions and staff attendance dropped rapidly over the course of the semester.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next semester, we changed course. We stopped paying the team (apart from a couple, more significant, work-study scholarships) and instead used the money to buy t-shirts, send people to conferences, hire a journalism coach, and throw parties. This became a turning point for the Gazette: Our staff grew, the team wrote a lot of great stories, and we were named one of the top three college news sites in the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking back, I now realize that this challenge is a great lesson in the difference between rewards<\/strong> and culture<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I realized after that first semester is that when we started paying our staff, working for the Gazette became a job \u2014 not a passion hobby. Our staff had tons of other opportunities, and a couple hundred bucks wasn’t worth hours of their life. When we pivoted how we used the money, though, we built tight relationships within the team, we created a sense of camaraderie, and we made the Gazette a social touch point at the school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People want to get paid appropriately, of course, but as people move up Maslow’s hierarchy they want more than just a paycheck. I’m always thinking back to my time at the Gazette, and wondering how I can focus on building a culture so that work isn’t just an obligation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So what should you do? Events like OpenTable’s recent internal hackathon<\/a> are great. Share books with colleagues, so that you establish common frameworks and mental models. Print t-shirts, host board game nights, sponsor wine tastings. And don’t give undervalued rewards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was in college, I spent two years as editor in chief of our daily online-only newspaper, The Daily Gazette. One of my first projects was leading a redesign of our website \u2014 and that included adding advertising; overnight, we were pulling in a thousand dollars a month. I didn’t really know what to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-professional"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions\/22"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesskorpen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}