Let's roll out a couple of organizational realities today to get into the topic at hand:

1. You've got employees.

2. The employees come to work each day.

3. The employees give you minimal effort without you asking.  That's what you get in exchange for salary, benefits, etc.

4. You can get more than minimal effort for your money in several ways. You can scare your employees through punitive measures (although the returns are short-lived), you can become best in class in measuring results and performance management, etc.

5. It's hard to get more than minimal effort.  Damn hard.

6. The easiest path to get more than minimal effort is to hire people who traditionally give more than the minimum.

7. There's only so many of those to go around.

8. For everyone else (those that migrate to giving the minimum), you've got to come up with a culture and strategy that engages employees to give more than the minimum (I'll call this DISCRETIONARY EFFORT), often with no financial rewards.

In short, you need to think like an online community.  You know the type of community - one like Yahoo Answers that engages readers to provide increasing amounts of time and labor with no direct path to increased rewards.  All because they LIKE AND ARE ENGAGED BY THE CONTENT/TOPICS and get a non-financial high from contributing.

Need an example?  How about ThisNext out of Santa Monica and how it corrals the sweat equity of volunteers.  More on getting free labor from the engaged user at BusinessWeek:

"It's dawn at a Los Angeles apartment overlooking the Hollywood Hills. Laura Sweet, an advertising creative director in her early 40s, begins to surf the Net. She searches intently, unearthing such bizarre treasures for sale as necklaces for trees and tattoo-covered pigs. As usual, she posts them on ThisNext, a social network where people exchange shopping leads. Why does she spend so many hours each week working for free? "It's sort of a cool feeling that you're influencing people," she says.

A half-hour's drive to the west, a serial entrepreneur named Gordon Gould strolls into the Santa Monica offices of ThisNext. Gould has managed to entice an army of volunteers, including Sweet, to labor on his site without pay. Traffic on ThisNext is soaring, with unique visits nearly tripling in a year, to 3.5 million monthly. Revenue comes from advertisers, who pay to display their wares amid so many shoppers. What's in it for the volunteer workers? "They can build their brands," Gould says. "In their niches, they can become mini-Oprahs."

Here's how it works: Entrepreneurs like Gould build meeting places that provide visitors with tools to express themselves, mingle with friends and strangers, and establish their personal "brands." The result, when all goes well, is an outpouring of creativity. These bottom-up efforts have produced not only ThisNext but also YouTube (GOOG) and even American Idol.

The challenge for managers all across the economy is to harness as much of this free labor and brainpower as possible to their own enterprises. From universities to the computer labs of Internet giants, researchers are working to decode motivations and perfect the art of enlisting volunteers. Prabhakar Raghavan, chief of Yahoo! Research, estimates that 4% to 6% of Yahoo's (YHOO) users are drawn to contribute their energies for free, whether it's reviewing films or handling questions at Yahoo! Answers. If his team could devise incentives to draw in an additional 5%, it would enhance Yahoo's pages, bringing more traffic and advertisers to the site. Incentives might range from contests to thank-you notes."

Now think about your company, specifically our exempt/salaried ranks.  They've got a choice if you aren't really focused on what they are doing.  They can do the socially acceptable norm (40 hours) and go home.  Or, you can figure out what makes them tick, maybe give them tools to work remotely so they can find work/life balance, and watch the hour count go up as they become more engaged in their role and the mission of the company.

It's the holy grail of engagement, and it's part hiring for motivation, and part motivating and engaging once they're in the door.  I suspect much like the woman featured in the BW clip above, the secret sauce to this type of engagement is part praise, part visible scoreboard, and part future career promise for the individual moving forward if they put in the time.

Kind of like why I blog each day, right?  Think about it and figure out what you can do to create that type of "discretionary effort" in your employees.  Remember, they don't have to give you the last ten hours of a 55 hour workweek - the key is to make the value proposition better than Xbox or TV... without money...