Two of the most stubborn causes of disengagement — disregarded knowledge and misaligned rewards — can both be addressed with internal prediction markets.
Two of the most serious causes of employee disengagement are:
If you are running surveys, this often turns up as a complaint about poor communication.
It's commonly triggered when executive leadership makes a strategic decision that an employee sees as incorrect. Often the employee has good knowledge of the situation, but their voice wasn't heard. Sometimes there are cultural problems that make it hard to speak up — perhaps systemic across the organisation, or race or gender related, or some other factor. Without transparency in decision making, the lived experience is one of disregard for the employee's knowledge.
This can lead to a downward spiral: employees become more reluctant to share information that could lead to better decisions because they see it as pointless, and then further decisions are made without that valuable input.
It's not easy to break the cycle. Any system for turning around a disregard problem has to be:
This often turns up on surveys as lack of recognition for achievements, or sometimes inadequate compensation.
Often this kind of disengagement happens after bonuses and promotions have been handed out. It's a fraught time, because there's typically a lot of subjectivity around who performed well that year.
When the stated standards of the organisation ("we treat everyone equally") and the perceived standards ("to get ahead you have to be…") drift apart, your best employees start looking elsewhere. The effect is particularly strong for people with unusual backgrounds — culturally distinct, neurologically distinct, or anyone who already feels different from the majority. Which is a great pity: it's their perspectives that take an organisation to greatness.
It's not easy to re-engage employees who have been burned one too many times by perceived misaligned rewards. Any system for turning it around has to be:
We help manage the process from beginning to end. We identify a KPI you could set up a market for, and talk to any corporate sponsors about pairing the market for strategic decision making. We set up the markets, and your staff sign in to make their predictions.
When the market closes (at a time of your choice), we generate reports for your executive team that can also be distributed to staff. Employees see what they predicted versus the consensus, and any strategic decisions in paired markets become very transparent. This is how we address disregarded knowledge — it's impossible to disregard an individual in a prediction market.
When the market resolves (e.g. when Q1 sales numbers are known for a Q1 sales market), we generate reports on how much each staff member earned. The closer they were to being right, the more they get as a bonus. This is how we address misaligned rewards.
After several markets have resolved, we can generate reports identifying staff who are regularly outperforming — your top 1–2% of super-forecasters. These are your next generation of advisors, demonstrably perspicacious and predictive. Access to these people is the superpower that puts you ahead of competitors.