Improving engagement at work, however, is about more than just deploying yet another new SaaS tool or offering hammocks and catered lunches in the office.

Work is changing.

It’s clear employees today expect more than just a paycheck — employment is an important part of our lives, and it should serve to empower a person beyond just paying the bills.

But according to a recent Gallup poll, close to 70 percent of American workers are either not engaged or are actively disengaged at work. Additionally, in another report, Gallup states that employee indifference costs businesses an estimated $450 to $550 billion annually.

Improving engagement at work, however, is about more than just deploying yet another new SaaS tool or offering hammocks and catered lunches in the office. The challenge is in aligning the incentives of everyone involved so that they feel ownership in their work, whether it be full-time, part-time, or anywhere in between. For employees today, rewards are exactly the same no matter their level of output. There’s no reason to try and create more value for their respective organizations because the number on their paychecks will remain the same.

Disengagement also impacts loyalty. Salary in many cases becomes the sole motivator; and in markets where demand for labor is high, like in Silicon Valley, engineers regularly change jobs. This results in them rotating around whoever offers the highest compensation, whether it be Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.

This presents a unique problem for startups. Founders are often surprised when a new employee doesn’t have the same connections or commitments to his or her visions and goals. They’re quickly forced to understand they won’t get the same levels of engagement they find from a fellow co-founder.

At Quidli, we believe the reason (and solution) for this problem is simple: Equity! Founders own equity and therefore have strong incentives to execute and deliver. The same can’t be said for hired employees. But if equity is distributed to founders AND employees, their work becomes directly aligned with a company’s results — the more one gives, the bigger their reward.

Employees can, of course, get equity today via vesting plans. However, these plans are often reserved for executive-level employees. They’re also frequently fixed and inflexible, and can become misaligned with employee goals or other company incentives over time.

And so Quidli has developed a platform for organizations to dynamically reward employees with equity instead of cash, incentivizing work in ways that are adaptable to the interests of ALL contributors. When onboarding new employees, a company can define how much of their compensation will be in cash and how much in equity; equity plans can be partial or total. With its adaptable nature, this platform can contribute to productivity and increase value creation by motivating both partners and employees, while hopefully inspiring them to be available for services in the future.

With traditional vesting plans, you don’t actually own anything in the beginning — instead, an equity distribution is scheduled over four years from signing, with no consideration of an employee’s performance or the success of the company. But Quidli enables immediate distribution. Value creation is rewarded upon completion as an amount of equity pertaining to the company’s valuation on the target day. And distribution is fair because it rewards employee contribution exactly, no more, no less.

Rewarding value creators with equity allows a company to share in its ownership not just with investors but with doers as well. Giving value to those who create value serves to better align the incentives of workers the companies they work for — if the company performs well, the shared value will increase and their rewards will be bigger. And this in turn can be an extremely powerful motivator.

Such a system also has a positive impact on company loyalty without spending significant cash upfront. It’s normally founders who own equity and so their motivations are understandably higher than that of employees. But if you can easily and flexibly reward employees with equity, everyone can become real stakeholders. In my last company, Skylights, we employed this system between extremely talented founders and employees. In four years of building, nobody left the company. This is despite multiples job offers with higher cash compensations that our developers received regularly.

To make a long story short, work is changing — with the increasing desire by today’s workforce to find work that’s meaningful to them, it’s becoming necessary for companies to think about more fairly distributing equity in what they build and produce. And a more equitable work environment starts with companies offering real incentives for their workforce. Accordingly, our aim at Quidli is to foster work cultures that empower employees to work as stakeholders. And our belief is that work for equity will be a building block for the companies of tomorrow.

Let’s rework work together! Follow us to learn more about the future of work, equity-for-labor, blockchain protocols, and to stay updated on Quidli’s progress.

Feel free to directly connect with the team as well via the Quidli Telegram group!