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"Our goal at Zappos is to inspire -- not motivate -- employees to treat each other like family. For example, most Zappos employees when they leave the office leave to hang out with other Zappos employees. That's behavior you can't force upon employees. They actually have to want to do it." "Many companies are focusing on the current quarter or current year at best. The good news is that information is moving faster and faster and companies are becoming more and more transparent whether they like it or not. As a result, the lag time between brand and culture is becoming less and less, so in the long run I think the 'good guys' will win."

"Courtesy of a plethora of very irked Yahoo employees, here is the internal memo sent to the company about a new rule rolled out today by CEO Marissa Mayer, which requires that Yahoo employees who work remotely to relocate to company facilities. "Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home," reads the memo to employees from HR head Jackie Reses. "We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together." Painfully awkward as this is phrased - I might have used "being present together" - it means every Yahoo get to your desks stat!"

Has email become the new fax machine? Thierry Breton, Atos Origin CEO and Chairman, would have you believe so. Following through with a promise made earlier this year to eliminate email use among company employees, Breton plans to move beyond email within the next eighteen months and initiate a communication policy based on instant messaging and social media sites. As Atos Origin is a major international information technology company, the decision to abandon email has the potential to influence other companies' methods of communication among employees.

Best Buy hasn't been doing so hot lately, and here's another example that shows why. The retailer has a Twitter account @Twelpforce that uses 3,000+ employees to help run it. So far it has worked without a major disaster, despite the exposure it has with so many employees working on it. But at least one Best Buy manager disagrees, and thinks it's basically a load of crap, reports Chris Morran at the Consumerist.

Recognition, one of Herzberg's motivators, is important for employees to feel they are valued. To address this, Enterprise has introduced a system called 'The Vote'. This aims to support and encourage the development of exceptional customer service. It works on the basis of co-workers providing assessment on themselves and each other. All employees in rental branches rank everyone in their team, including themselves, in terms of their customer service efforts. They provide a constructive explanation of the rankings given. These are then fed back to all employees. Read more: http://www.thetimes100.co.uk/case-study--motivation-in-action--96-384-4.php#ixzz1AEO1R3Dw

The typical ambassador ecosystem for a mid to large scale business likely consists of hundreds of employees, customers and partners which can potentially be harnessed for the benefit of the organization. Participation in thought leadership in places Google indexes such as Quora and even Slideshare can influence what shows up on sarch results. Marketing partners should be re-calibrated from focusing primarily on paid media efforts to being active in the overlaps between paid, earned and social media while tapping your companies most active advocates. Your organization has a workforce of employees active on social networks, yet most organizations remain content to have their employees "locked down" vs.being empowered for the benefit of the business.

The more honesty and humility an employee may have, the higher their job performance, as rated by the employees' supervisor. That's the new finding from a Baylor University study that found the honesty-humility personality trait was a unique predictor of job performance.

To get its employees on board with social media, FedEx's team "realized we needed to go a lot deeper" than just one hourlong workshop. So team members ended up developing an online curriculum with 17 courses. In about 18 months, more than 500 employees had completed the coursework, Horne said. "This is probably one of the best investments we could have ever made," she said. To convince leaders that investments in social media platforms made sense, Horne said she and her IT partners discovered some of the "hidden dollars" that departments were spending to build their own, ad-hoc technology to connect and seek out experts.

Previous studies have shown that customer satisfaction plays a key role in the health and future success of any company. When customers are satisfied, they keep coming back to the same store and invite their friends to do the same. Now, a new study from the University of Missouri has found that CEOs who pay attention to employees' job satisfaction are able to boost both customer satisfaction and "repurchase intentions," or the number of customers that intend to purchase products from the store.

Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they've either never done the work or have forgotten how it's done. These are the people who show up when your single best engineer casually and unexpectedly announces, "I'm quitting. I'm joining my good friend to found a start-up. This is my two weeks' notice." You call on the motivation and retention police because you believe they can perform the legendary "diving save". Whether it's HR or a well-intentioned manager with a distinguished title, these people scurry impressively. Meetings that go long into the evening are instantly scheduled with the disenfranchised employee. It's an impressive show of force, and it sometimes works, but even if they stay, the damage has been done. They've quit, and when someone quits they are effectively saying, "I no longer believe in this company". What's worse is that what they were originally thinking was, "I'm bored". Boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.

New Google CEO Larry Page, who stepped into the job this week, believes that Google needs to go "social" to compete.To that end, he sent out a company-wide memo last Friday, alerting employees that 25% of their annual bonus will be tied to the success or failure of Google's social strategy in 2011.

About 20% of information workers report that they have conducted work related activities from a mobile device while driving. That's just one of the findings reported in a Unisys and IDC survey on the consumerization of the enterprise released today. The survey has a number of expected findings - employees are using their own devices for work, IT sees mobile support as a priority, etc. But the survey also puts some numbers on the current "always on" nature of work in the post-PC era.

Marion Crain, JD, suggests looking at other legal models such as marriage law to more accurately respond to the realities of the employment relationship, particularly at termination. "The employment relationship possesses many attributes that we associate with marriage: emotional and economic investment, interdependence, and expectations that the relationship will endure absent bad behavior," she says.

"Effective teamwork among an organization's top management makes employees happier and more productive, with positive benefits to the organization."

Is there a bright line between what you say in "real life" and what you say on social media sites like Twitter? If you are a public figure, a journalist, or an employee at a corporation, do your tweets reflect on your organization or are they merely personal opinions best ignored? Is a tweet "newsworthy" or is it something you say in the privacy of your own internet? Derek Andersen of Startup Grind thinks I'm "clueless" (and apparently every other author at Forbes) because I blogged about a tweet that one of EA's product managers made about Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. In the tweet, Kevin O'Leary called the franchise "tired." To me, this was an interesting display of rivalry.

Interesting on many levels. First is the fact that this entire agency works on big projects in a sort of competition. Second is that a smaller group of employees used email to self-organize a critique (however sophomoric) of the teams of creatives. Third is the danger that one person's lack of digital fluency (he hit the wrong button), or perhaps the organization's lack of digital fluency (could they have been having these discussions on a less-private medium than email?) presented. The fourth is the fact that a powerful/dangerous/fortuitous sort of serendipity emerged. 

During the week of February 14-18, private businesses and government agencies are encouraged to allow employees who normally make the trek into office each day to work from home instead. More than 35,000 companies and organizations have pledged to participate in the event. According to the official Telework Week Website, this would save an estimated $2,451,069 and more than 1,600 tons of pollutants from entering the atmosphere. Where these numbers come from is not entirely clear, but it stands to reason that fewer people commuting would help save money and reduce pollution to some extent.