An Unlikely Teacher of the True Value of Money

In order to keep things interesting in the working environment I’ve created for my employees, every now and then I rope each of them in for my own equivalent of a team-building exercise. These exercises are always backed by some proven science and psychology since I liaise with the various, suitably qualified professionals in these fields to come up with the programme, so it’s not simply a matter of me winging it and being overly creative.

So the objective is always to keep the employees engaged in the business in a manner which ensures we always maintain a high standard of quality in delivering the end-product/service, part of which is done through giving each employee a tangible stake in the business from which they get rewarded through dividend-like profit-sharing.

Anyway, that was just a bit of background so that anybody reading this gets the whole picture.

So what I was leading up to is how the concept of the lottery made for what can be said to be an unlikely teacher of the value of money and a very effective teacher at that! I can confidently say that I have won over quite a few more of my employees, moving away from that traditional boss-employee relationship in which what the boss says is final.

I mean for one, any one of the subordinates a figure of authority presides over could actually be much better at a certain job than that authoritative figure, which is why these authoritative figures are really just there in their management capacity – to make sure everything comes together and all the various moving parts of the business are coordinated.

The Team-Building Exercise

So the exercise was a rather fun and exciting one, even if I have to say so myself and it’s in actual fact an ongoing thing. To encourage out-the-box thinking and to instil a culture of exercising initiative and insight among my employees, I set aside some company money (not a huge amount) for a group lottery venture. Yes, you read right – I said group lottery venture!

It’s really not as bad as you may think, particularly because of the fact that it actually delivers on the intended lesson, with our betting platform of choice being that of Multilotto.co.uk.

So the objective is there is some money made available to the whole group of employees which they must use to bet on the lottery, but the catch is that everybody has to agree on the sets of numbers to be bet and the manner in which these numbers were selected needs to convince management of its strategic astuteness to justify the continued funding of this “group lottery venture.”

Things got really interesting because somehow everybody suddenly put their heads together and eventually came up with what turns out be a great betting strategy, quite simply because some winnings have been amassed, even though they’re nothing quite in the mould of the millions available, but for the life of me I now have a group of employees who have managed to use the lottery to generate the company some money!

Of course all the winnings are shared out equally – either that or they’re channelled into investments from which the profits are shared out equally and that for me is the ultimate lesson in the value of money, i.e. more of it can be made quicker if more people with a common goal are working together to make it happen.