Gatehouse Blog
Linden Lab’s Love Machine
Here’s a really cute example of a simple but effective employee recognition programme. It comes from Linden Lab, the creators of virtual world, Second Life. It’s been around for a few years, but I hadn’t come across it before – so I thought it was worth sharing here….
The Love Machine is an intranet-based tool that allows any Linden employee to send a simple electronic thank you note to another Linden employee. You basically go along to an intranet page type in the details (name, what you want to thank them for, etc) and your colleague receives an email saying ‘Love from Lee” and so on.
Okay, so it sounds a bit cheesy to us ‘real world’ UK-based communicators, but stick with me.
What’s clever about it is that it’s hardwired into the performance review system – so all the ‘love notes’ get recorded in a database (which everyone can access) and these then get discussed at appraisal time.
Doing that makes employees and managers take it seriously and, as a result, it’s really taken off says Linden CEO Philip Rosedale.
Apparently at the end of every quarter everyone receives a pink envelope containing cash linked to the number of ‘love notes’ they received.
Cute.
I can’t comment on whether it works or not (Google doesn’t throw up much useful information there) but I think it’s quite a nice example of the sort of thing that fairly small organisations can do fairly easily.
Linden Lab may be a quirky San Francisco-based business, but I could imagine something like this (perhaps with a little fine-tuning!) working well in organisations of all shapes and sizes.
