The hooks of Steem: Career, Community, Cause

I chanced upon an article this evening from the Harvard Business Review which identified three things that employees want from their workplace. I am not a big fan of the "# of things to" types of content, but I thought the three interesting to consider.

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Career, Community, Cause.

Career is about work: having a job that provides autonomy, allows you to use your strengths, and promotes your learning and development. It’s at the heart of intrinsic motivation.

Community is about people: feeling respected, cared about, and recognized by others. It drives our sense of connection and belongingness.

Cause is about purpose: feeling that you make a meaningful impact, identifying with the organization’s mission, and believing that it does some good in the world. It’s a source of pride.

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Today I wrote about skills, market differentiation and consumption and identified purpose as a major driving force and I think that those on Steem who feel a sense of it, are the ones who are also the most engaged, while those who are only looking for financial return alone are among the least committed. I also have mentioned that I see a future where there will be many new job titles created around blockchain and crypto and Steem could well be a headhunting ground for professionals. And of course, community factors in heavily here and always will.

What I think could happen on Steem is that these three things that most people do want in some way, shape or form - could be met through the Steem experience. Even now there are people full-time on Steem and looking to make it a lasting career and many more looking to have it supplement or become a significant part of their income revenue.

Through tokenization and the subsequent gamification that will take place, these points of personal interest can be targeted on Steem applications for more people than on any other platform. Not only does it factor a highly dynamic set of financial tools, it allows for those tools to hook in and own community and individual experiences and in so doing, provide cause for many that enhances the value of what they might already be doing.

There are lots of communities on the internet filled with all kinds of people who spend copious amount of time in them because they believe what they do matters in some way to their lives, or the lives of others. It could be a charitable community or a gaming community, but those who spend significant time in them believe what they do is important. Apply a tokenization layer to them and now they are not only seeing it as important, they are incentivized to play the game.

As said, this can be be used in many ways and not all of them are good, but that is the same for any tool - a hammer can be used to build a house or crack a skull, but the hammer is indifferent to either event.

Once tokenization really gets integrated with value into the internet, the entire game changes for all of these communities and while it will destroy some, it will empower others to grow in ways they never could otherwise. @mobbs wrote an article today about how a Chinese app is going about planting trees through gamification and tokenization and I see this kind of thing becoming the norm, mainstream and - blockchain powered.

However, billion dollar megacorps don't have to run them in order to make a difference, groups of people forming global communities can and, through trustless blockchains and smart contracts, all kinds of things can be organized by distributed people in ways that were not possible earlier without the technological capabilities. This can cause localized paradigm shifts that connect at a global level to bring about all kinds of innovations and changes in behavior.

However, the really interesting thing is going to be what is not mentioned in the article in regards to what employees want, and that is that owners want the same things also and here is something that a company will always struggle to provide - ownership.

What happens when people start getting their sense of purpose from being a digital real estate owner, owner of a community, owner of an experience and owner of stake that means they can never be fired and, can always support their career, community and cause? Where are the thoughts of the employee at work when they are also an owner who gets paid, feels important and has a sense of purpose somewhere other than at their work desk? What will a workplace have to offer in order to retain workers?

Of course, they are in the midst of automating most people out of a job anyway, because while they might like to provide a Sense of career, community and cause, most don't care much about employees other than what they can offer the bottom line or to the book of value. What I see happening is that people will increasingly turn further online for their sense of self and in so doing, find that they can actually build real experiences with others once they take out the centralized agendas and widen the narrow scope of corporate targeting.

In the article by @mobbs, the Ant Corporation is able to do what it is because of the sheer scale and integration of it into the lives of citizens. However, the same thing can be done without a corporation and with a far greater reach through blockchain technologies backed by the users themselves, and the value they generate amongst themselves in millions of ways. The difficulty in making this a reality isn't the as much the technology at this point, it is us as users and our willingness to become owners of our experience. It is always easier to be an employee - while employed.

Pretty much all of the centralized platforms have a failure point as they require users to generate value, but they don't return much of value back to the users that can't be replicated elsewhere. This means that they are at the mercy of the trend cycles. However, the platforms that can integrate a full experience and have the flexibility to scale and evolve with the user base through a feedback cycle of inputs from users and outputs to users that roll back in, has an economy that is near inescapable once it is up and running and, because it it would be decentralized with everyone being an owner, none would necessarily need to escape it at all as all would have ownership of their experience.

Well, for me at least, there are a few things to spend some time thinking about in here in how to better meet the needs of users and help them get interested and stay interested in the communities and platforms they join.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]