How it started
This project was inspired by Jurgen Appelo and his workout about this topic. You can read about this here -http://www.management30.com/workout/merit-money/
Here is a quote from that document “Paying people for work, without destroying their motivation, is one of the most difficult challenges for management. Regrettably, most compensation systems are unfair and unscientific. That’s why it would be wise to consider some lesser known alternatives that are based on real merits instead of imagined earnings.”
What we want to achieve
Goal is very simple, involve everybody into evaluating work/achievements and effort. Everybody is encouraged to share cookies with team members if they find someone’s work valuable. This is still an experiment and we constantly gather feedback to improve. Yours is also important.
How it works in our company
Name: Cookie
Value: 1 cookie = worth nothing
Main principles:
- Every participant gets equal amount of cookies each month – 1000
- Every participant must give away his cookies to others. If you didn’t give away everything during a month, cookies will disappear
- Cookies you get are transformed into earned cookies and they are accumulated each month
- You can award teams or individuals for their great work
- At a random point of time exchange rate will be suggested to convert cookies into something valuable
- You can keep cookies and wait for another round if current exchange rate is not suitable for you
Open Source
I was looking for something that would help to kick off this innitiative in a company, but didn’t find anything several months ago. So it was decided to make something fast for our needs. As we got good initial feedback and we are planning to continue this, i decided to open source this project.
We are working on Version 1.o at the moment. Goal is to increase transparency on how tools is used: to know who shared cookies and for what, add some visualization, small admin section.
Next version - Version 2.0, will include possibility to manage awards when exchange rate is announced.
If you think it’s fun and want to contrinute, you can find everything here - https://github.com/adform/MeritMoney