Valve is the company that is responsible for many hours of sleep deprivation during my time in college. Instead of running simulations for my GPRS thesis, I'd be up late at night fragging my fellow hostel-mates on Counterstrike over the LAN. It set a new bar for FPS games and has continued to do so with new titles, including the super fun Left4Dead that pits you and your buddies against the zombie apocalypse.
Valve's employee handbook was recently published on the internet and it is a humorous, well-illustrated and well-written document. It shows what it takes to run a company that relies on creativity and innovation. Much of it resonates well with what Daniel Pink writes about in his book Drive. The core idea is that businesses in the new economy need to think about new ways to motivate (and implicitly, attract) employees. Carrots & stick approaches work well for repetitive tasks where efficiency matters, but not for spurring creativity and innovation. Daniel anchors around three elements of motivation : Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. I've highlighted how Valve puts this in practice, at times quite radically:
Autonomy : Freedom to direct own work
- It starts off with self-directed project involvement. While poking fun at Google's famous 20% time, Valve allows full autonomy for employees to sign up for projects
"We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects. At Valve, that percentage is 100. Since Valve is flat, people don’t join projects because they’re told to. Instead, you’ll decide what to work on after asking yourself the right questions. Employees vote on projects with their feet (or desk wheels)."
- Informal teams instead of hierarchical org structures, titles and job descriptions. Teams and roles are formed and structured organically and are temporal to the project.
"Project teams often have an internal structure that forms temporarily to suit the group’s needs. Although people at Valve don’t have fixed job descriptions or limitations on the scope of their responsibility, they can and often do have clarity around the definition of their “job” on any given day. "
Mastery: Getting better at something that matters
- Explicitly calling out the need for broad skills and expertise within an area.
"The most successful people at Valve are both (1) highly skilled at a broad set of things and (2) world-class experts within a more narrow discipline."
- Evaluating performance closely based on mastery. Instead of performance metrics that are team-based (e.g. sales), evaluation is based on individual contribution and mastery plays a large role. Valve gets the teams to rank their team members based on (i) Skill/technical ability, (ii) Productivity, (iii) Group contribution and (iv) Product contribution.
Purpose: Contributing to something that is larger than oneself
- Being part of top-rated games played by millions of people already should be an impressive purpose, but the handbook goes further in painting out the purpose.
"Valve will be a different company a few years from now because you are going to change it for the better. We can’t wait to see where you take us. The products, features, and experiences that you decide to create for customers are the things that will define us."
All very Utopian... and raises questions to whether if all this is all nice internal PR. I think what makes this real though, is that they recognize what they'll not be good at by taking this path.
As Michael Porter puts it "Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different". Too many companies say they want to do empower employees and remove hierarchy, etc. but in designing their org and policies, also start introducing elements for maintaining consistency, structure, etc. - leaving them with no HR strategy at all and nothing more than a set of hollow new mission and vision statements.
