The case for social tokens and NFTs in enterprise culture

COMMENT What do NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and SFTs (social/community fungible tokens) have to do with workplace and innovation workforces? Before we can answer that, what are NFTs and SFTs? If you’re like me, of Generation X or a Boomer, your head is probably spinning. NFTs are unique digital assets that sit on programmable blockchain-customised smart contracts that allow the owner to store, exchange and transmit the value of the NFT. A recent example of an NFT is Beeple’s digital art collage, which sold for $69m (£50.3m), and an NFT of Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, which sold for $2.9m. At the moment the biggest use cases for NFTs are collectibles, gaming, art, virtual worlds and real-world assets. Now let’s turn to fungible tokens, such as Bitcoin. Bitcoin is digital money that has a limited forever supply of 21m coins. Bitcoin is fungible, in that all 21m coins are the same and have the same value, much like a US dollar is a US dollar no matter whether it is digital or physical. Owning experiences At this point you might ask: “What do NFTs and SFTs have to do with enterprises that have an innovation workforce?” It’s a fair question. Let’s start with a basic presumption that in innovation companies, executive leadership teams and their workforce want to “own their experience”. That being the case, NFTs and SFTs can create a paradise for behavioural economics. An example might help. Imagine a dominant tech platform company called FAANG. It decides to create its own community fungible tokens (an enterprise fungible token or EFT) to drive virtue and culture within its business. The EFTs can be earned by the workforce for doing or taking specific actions, they can be minted on non-Ethereum “green” blockchain, and will sit on a third-party exchange. The earned EFTs can be turned in for valuable enterprise “stuff”, some of which maybe valuable enough to convert into an NFT minted on Ethereum. Now the exciting part. As we accelerate toward the great global crossroad called RTO (return to office), this will be a once-in-a-generation moment for innovation enterprises and their workforces to alter or reshape company culture. This will not just be declared from on high (C-suite) for companies whose workforce is made up of innovators, creators and knowledge workers. This talent sits in rarefied air, and has power in their labour unlike any workforce in history. Let me give you a real-life equation to make the point. The late-stage private company Stripe has a private market valuation of $95bn and a workforce of 4,200. The shareholder value creation per individual employee is $23m. Now look at JP Morgan. It has a market cap of $485bn with a workforce of 259,000. The shareholder value creation per employee is $1.9m. Simple maths, each employee at Stripe is creating 12 times more shareholder value. That’s power in labour, and a workforce with a seat at the table. Whether our company FAANG decides to be office-centric, hybrid or fully distributed, the leadership team will be wrestling with three types of culture: Authoritarian — Think Alibaba and TikTok Woke culture — Think Google or Facebook Crypto culture — Think  Coinbase. A business such as FAANG might choose to use EFT to overcome objections and friction to cultural change. A workforce could earn EFTs by being in the office (or not) on certain days of the week, for following health and wellness protocols, or meeting EDI or sustainability goals. Those EFTs could then be traded for high-value rewards such as company stock, more holiday time, dinner with the founder or chief executive, credits for “work near home” hotspots, such as WeWork, Regus, Industrious Operations, food delivery, access to on-site or nearby off-site childcare. Key to survival But where does this lead and what are we to do? Decentralised crypto culture is sitting on a bed of blockchain smart contracts. This, combined with other “God-like” exponential technologies raining down upon us, loudly yell that our pre-pandemic strong opinions should be loosely held. We all have significant blind spots. We are all full of cognitive, anchoring and confirmation biases. Companies will either decide to shift their policies to become competitive, or they will slowly atrophy, because a company that foists full-time, back-to-office mandates on a knowledge workforce may find they have much bigger problems than company culture. Over-control and bad management may lead to a survival problem. Perhaps rather than having a fixed mindset, we should take the Sufi poet Rumi’s words to heart: “Out beyond ideas of right and wrong, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” Dan Harvey is vice chairman of occupier advisory and transaction services at CBRE San Francisco Image © Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Shutterstock