The TechCrunch Disrupt conference was in San Fransisco last week, and as always a few pretty cool things come out of this event.  One in particular caught my eye and gave me a great idea for HR Pros!  From Forbes – The Craziest Company At TechCrunch Disrupt:

I give you Talk O’Clock. The “social alarm clock” with the tagline: “Let a stranger wake you up.” Instead of using a regular alarm clock, you can have a random person you don’t know call and wake you up. You don’t know who will call you, though you can choose the gender of the caller. Users don’t get each others’ phone numbers because the company will dial the caller first, then connect him or her with the sleeper.

People who want to, say, yell and scream to wake others up, can choose who they want to call–they only see the person’s first name–and select who they want to call.  If the caller isn’t there or no one is available at that time to wake a person up, Talk O’Clock has a robot caller.

Why in the world would you want a stranger calling you and why would you want to talk to someone when you’re half asleep? Sometimes it’s hard to wake up and hitting the snooze button doesn’t work, says Alexy Kistenev, founder and CEO of Talk O’Clock. But a real person is much more likely to wake you up if they’re talking to you.

Isn’t that the coolest thing ever!  Some random person in the world calling you to wake you up!  No me! You!  If they tried calling me, that wouldn’t be cool at all.  But! It got me thinking – what if we designed something similar for HR Pros to use to wake up their employees who have trouble getting to work on time!  Now we have a useful tool.

Just think about this for a minute.

This could have awesome Corporate Cultural benefits.  I’m talking rope course-if-one-goes-over-the-wall-we-all-go-over-the-wall life changing, culture changing kind of momentum.  Stick with me.  Let’s say Mike struggles to get to work on time.  Mike isn’t a bad guy, he just has a thing with mornings, in that, mornings aren’t his thing.  Otherwise he’s your above average performer.  Most companies put him on some sort of “Progressive Discipline” process, and eventually Mike gets fired.  What if, instead of firing Mike, you let random employees at your work wake Mike up each morning!  Wouldn’t that be fun!  I mean, for the employees doing the waking.  Plus, Mike gets to feel the love to – the company cares enough about him to get his butt out of bed every morning.

I haven’t come up for a name yet for my new company that wakes employees up, by using their co-workers as alarm clocks – so I’m open to suggestions – hit me up in the comments and let me know what you think.