Yesterday I stumbled upon this software called “Attent™” by Seriosity. Main feature is a virtual currency for emails. It lets workers in a company attach value to their email by adding an arbitrary amount of a limited virtual currency called “Serios” to their emails. Email receivers can collect the amount and put it on their account for later use with other emails.
The aim is to let market mechanisms solve the problem of information overload by making attention scarce. Recipients are supposed to use the Serios received to prioritize their attention to messages, and in return use their Serios to assign appropriate weight to their responses.
I am not sure whether this system helps a company, considering the following arguments:
Serios gives strong incentives to NOT communicate with your coworkers. This is perfectly fine if they don’t have to say anything. But from time to time they might have a piece of information that is very valuable for me but not for them; such as “Hey man, there is a terrible mistake in you power point presentation” or “I have seen an enlightening article about the competitor your are researching”. Why should they care if they have to pay to tell me this? Additionally not communicating seems to be a little bit counterintuitive and contradictory to recent management trends.
There are always jobs in a company with a higher need to communicate. Say a PR manager for internal communication must communicate much more than a regular worker and therefore needs to start with much more of this currency to spend, also the boss or the person who files minutes after a meeting and sends them to everyone who attended. To make the system work you have to provide those “heavy communicators” with much more Serios in the beginning. How are you deciding on those amounts? If everyone gets more of the currency upon request the system gets flawed.
What happens if someone pays you a certain amount for reading his email? You read it and then you delete it, maybe you not even read it – but off course you collect the Serios currency. So people loose a lot and might not get something in return. There is a great discrepancy between reading a mail and actually do what the person who has sent the mail wants you to do. The amount of Serios should not be paid for the attention, it should be paid if you reach the goal (and the goal cannot solely be attention, right?)
The priorities of reading the mails cannot be set only by means of the Serios currency. There is one much more important factor in companies that prioritises your work: Power. I don’t think that anyone would skip a message by his boss just because the boss did not pay any Serios currency.
But the biggest loophole might be the following. The Attent system sets completely wrong incentives. It might work well to better allocate attention, but it might also completely ruin the work spirit within a company. Imagine: I work in company where the Attent software ist used. So my aim is to collect as much of the “Serios” currency as possible. How am I doing that? Easiest way: I can collect more currency if people learn that they have to pay me a lot to make me move my fat ass from my office chair. So first thing to do is: I stop working. I only read and answer emails if people pay a fortune in the “Serios” currency. If they don’t, I practice golf on my office putting green. The less I do, the more people learn that it takes a lot of Serios to make me work, the more they pay – and the more this raises my “Serios” income. On the other hand, hard-working employees that don’t charge much are punished. They perform good valuable work at low “Serios”-prices but are not rewarded for it. The economic incentives set up by Attent might jeopardize the motivation of people to work.
But I am sure that the smart economists at Seriosity have already come up with solutions to this problems ( I did not find them on the website).
UPDATE:
I have just seen that TechCrunch did run a rather critical story on Serios.
