Why is engaging knowledge workers so hard? And it’s not because knowledge workers are hard to engage.

Why is engaging knowledge workers so hard? And it’s not because knowledge workers are hard to engage. Gallup recently published a summary (State of global workplace 2013) of their many survey’s on employee engagement. Which they define as “employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company, they drive innovation and move the organisation forward’. Globally only 13% of employees were engaged. The numbers for Australia are slightly better at 24% engaged, 60% not engaged and 16% actively disengaged, the actively disengaged workers actually sabotage their employers and work colleagues. Why do most companies get engagement so wrong? Even Taylor’s studies back in the dawn of scientific management showed engaged workers are more productive, and that was on assembly lines where knowledge was not the premium human resource it is today.

I have written before at my bemusement of watching senior management struggle with engagement and plan more meetings, more incentives and if that fails more beatings to improve ‘engagement’. I have always had a pretty simple measure of engagement “if you leave the office feeling you have achieved something that day, then you are engaged”, the problem then is how to get employees to feel successful and valued. That is why engagement scores of divisions in a company that are meeting targets and gaining positive attention are always higher than divisions that are viewed as not meeting targets or ‘just cost centres’, it’s not that hard.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter a Harvard professor has recently added more depth to the concept of ‘feeling you have achieve something’. She identifies 3 factors strongly linked to employee engagement, they are:

Mastery: Developing and improving deep skills, being challenged to do things betters and faster.

Membership: Create community by honouring the individual, allowing the whole person to surface. Encourage people to communicate and form bonds across the company.

Meaning: Emphasise the positive impact each employee has, along with a bigger purpose that everyone is working towards. She argues that a mission and larger purpose can make even mundane tasks meaningful.
Kanter concludes that “highly engage people who contribute more of themselves can recite Shakeshpere to win customers, weddings in the lobby that create community, or the ultimate prize: innovations that change the world.

It is time we as managers had a really good look at how we organise and manage staff, and make engagement an embedded factor of organisational life not a side goal to be agonised over annually to meet my KPI’s.

References:
http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/10/three-things-that-actually-motivate-employees/
www.gallup.com/strategicconsulting/164735/state-global-workplace.aspx

David Gwillim
Exploring the value of IT to organisations
email: david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au
blog: http://www.businessitvalue.blogspot.com/

Ownership of IP a big issue for knowledge workers

I have recently been involved in a very interesting discussion around ownership of IP in the knowledge economy, is the industrial model of all IP being owned by your organisation appropriate or should a more sharing based model be used? Should Facebook, Google, Woolworth's and other corporations be able to harvest your data and sell it without any compensation to you.

A relevant article was recently published by Wharton School of Business, interview with Felicia Day , it is an interview with Felicia Day, an American actor, writer and producer who got frustrated with Hollywood and pioneered the creation of a "TV like series" on YouTube in 2007 called "The Guild". What is interesting is that she was able to keep IP of the project because she partnered with IT companies who did not have a business model that demanded ownership of content the way the movie industry does. One of the conclusions of the article is that this ability to maintain IP ownership on the web may be fleeting as traditional media production companies move into web production and bring their business models with them.

If you are interested in more discussion around IP and knowledge workers I can recommend the Linked-in discussion group initiated by a colleague at University of Technology Sydney Building the Organisation of Tomorrow.

David Gwillim
Exploring the value of IT to organisations
email: david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au
blog: http://www.businessitvalue.blogspot.com/

The key to employee engagement – allowing your employees to be successful

Over the past 2 decades it has become popular to measure employee engagement. And the results are always the same, senior management declare that employee engagement needs to rise to x% and the Human Resources team will help you develop a plan to ‘engage’ your team which usually involves increasing the number of ‘communications meetings’ as the only actionable questions ever asked in the standard surveys such as Hewitt’s Best Employer survey are around “has your/senior management communicated enough”. This focus on communication, a ‘nice’ working environment or other small changes has always seemed to miss the point to me. In my observations over three decades of management I have seen highly engaged teams who are working in poor environments, working huge hours, who are under paid and who are under constant pressure and stress in rapidly changing and highly uncertain environments. The common thread to the extremely high levels of engagement I have observed in these employees is that “they go home every day feeling that they have achieved something of value” yet this is so often missing from discussion around employee engagement.

This is the focus of a recent McKinsey Quarterly article by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer who phrase engaged employees as those to whom “work has meaning”. Amabile and Kramer’s study focused on how senior executives can destroy meaning for employees and list four key meaning destroyers (they call them ‘traps’):

1. Mediocrity signals – everyone wants to feel they work for the winning team, however top management can often become focused on ‘me too’ management such as cost cutting and other reactive rear guard strategies that devalue the lofty goals of most strategies and devalues the work that employees are doing to achieve those strategies.
2. Strategic ‘attention deficit disorder’ – Most strategies take many months or years to fully implement and see the benefits from (and the employee satisfaction that comes from achieving those strategies). It is almost impossible to get employees to support a strategic direction when it changes every month or is unclear, again devaluing an employee’s efforts to make a difference.
3. Corporate Keystone cops – displayed through complex reporting structures, empire building, rogue departments, rushed analysis, failure to reward success or enforce accountability and results in organisational chaos (or should that be KAOS).
4. Misbegotten ‘big, hairy, audacious goals’ – in many companies these are so grandiose to be meaningless. BHAG’s only have meaning if employees believe that the BHAG has relevance to the organisation and that senior management truly believe in it and behave accordingly.

Amabile and Kramer conclude with a series of actions designed to avoid these ‘traps’. I feel the recommendation fall into a bit of a trap themselves but the overall article is excellent and well worth the time to track down and read.

https://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Governance/Leadership/How_leaders_kill_meaning_at_work_2910

David Gwillim
Exploring the value of IT to organisations
email: david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au
blog: http://www.businessitvalue.blogspot.com/

Collaboration spaces - a new way of working, office design of the future

Collaboration and innovation are popular catch cries in many organisations these days, but how many organisations actually take the time to do more than just talk about it?

In our industrialised economy there is almost 200 years of managerial processes dedicated to exploiting workers as a ‘pair of hands’, indeed Henry Ford famously remarked "Why when I only want to hire a pair of hands, do I get a whole person?“. The ‘scientific management’ movement that pervades our management thinking and practices today never considered employees as a source of innovation or that employee collaboration should be encouraged.

While many organisations give lip service to innovation and collaboration very few seem to be making the broad range of changes necessary to make it a reality. As McKinsey’s 7’S model shows organisational change requires a wide a range factors all of which need to be addressed to achieve change. Setting a vision or goal for collaboration is only one part of the change process. Another area that needs to be addressed are the structural changes to where and how employees work, as offices, cubicles and assembly lines were designed for productivity and control over employees not collaboration or independent thought. In recent weeks I have been privileged to view a few examples of how some companies are restructuring the way people work.

Microsoft Australia has removed many of its offices, cubicles, desks and allocated parking spaces and replaced them with ‘first in’ open working spaces nobody owns, each employee has a locker/trolley for specific documents, devises. To work they choose a seat and plug in. Microsoft claim this has reduced office space needs by 20%, what is of more interest to this blog is that Microsoft found that staff from different departments are sitting together and interacting in ways they never would have before. In considering this observation Microsoft concluded that humans are creatures of habit and that staff in traditional office environments made ‘tracks’ from the car park, though a specific pathway to their desk, kitchen, bathroom and rarely ventured beyond that. The outcome was that staff rarely intermixed beyond their particular department. The changes are quite new but the feedback from Microsoft management is very positive.

I also visited Google’s Sydney offices, along with the legendary free canteens, play areas and chill out rooms are a host of collaboration spaces. These vary from ‘traditional’ meeting rooms (often with quirks such as the upside-down room where chairs and tables are suspended off the ceiling to provide fun to those video conferencing into the room) to a whole host of informal meeting rooms and meeting spaces resembling a plush bar or cafe. While traditional meeting rooms are ‘booked’ in the usual way, the informal meeting rooms and all other meeting spaces are on a ‘first come basis’. Every meeting room and most meeting spaces come with video conferencing and all have power for device connectivity. There are also groovy single person spaces (with video conferencing of course). The dedication and collaboration of Google staffers is the envy of all other companies, maybe the environment they have created plays its part.

The Wall Street journal also ran an article this week on the trend of unassigned working spaces, while they note companies have been motivated by cost factors they too are discovering the collaboration benefits of these arrangements.

Paradoxically one of the last bastions of personal cubicles and private spaces seem to be our universities, the very places where innovation and collaboration are supposed to endemic. In the faculty I where I teach part time, each permanent staffer gets their own little lockable office (swinging a cat inside could be a challenge for lower ranking academics), there is a kitchen area and breakout area but it is sterile and uninviting and I never see anyone using it, let alone lounging near-by to chance bumping into others. To add to the sense of isolation the departments of the faculty are spread out across the campus, not only is the opportunity for mixing ‘accidentally’ with other departments in the same faculty limited, the likelihood of informal contact with other faculties is almost non-existent. Of course there are research groups and plenty of meetings but it could be so much more. This could be acceptable if it was not for the call for more cross-discipline research that is considered essential if academia is going to help solve societies biggest dilemmas and contribute positively to human well being. Perhaps re-modelling the university and redefining the meaning of ‘faculty’ would create the environment for true collaboration.

If collaboration is essential to your business, what are you doing to ensure the environment you create truly supports human interaction?

David Gwillim
Exploring the value of IT to organisations
email: david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au
blog: http://www.businessitvalue.blogspot.com/

The commoditisation of scale and other technology disruptions

In a recent Harvard Business Review blog Maxwell Wessel wrote a thought provoking piece on the commoditization of ‘scale’. Wessel argues that a major bastion of industrial revolution competitive advantage the ‘economy of scale’, where very large organisations gain advantages in the market due to their large size (scale), effectively creating a barrier to new entrants and smaller players in the market is becoming commoditized and therefore no longer confers competitive advantage due to advances in technology which enable any size of company to access the advantages of scale. He asserts “in today's world, you don't need to have scale to enjoy scale”. For example even micro companies operating out of a residential garage can access the global market over the internet for very small outlay, compared historically with the need for expensive distribution channels a physical presence in each country and expensive advertising to reach the same market. This will radically change the nature of competition in the economy and lead to hyper-specialisation. Wessel’s blog is well worth reading.

The commoditisation of scale is just one of many ways emerging technologies are revolutionising businesses and economies, it also illustrates just how disruptive these changes will ultimately be. Technology has already enabled the ‘global supply chain’ with outsourcing to the lowest cost market, the internet has radically changed digital distribution especially audio, print and visual media and  3D printing is set to revolutionise many areas of production to name just a few. It is indeed an exciting time.

This is leading to many commentators to call for fundamentally new ways of organising and managing businesses, one Australian forum ‘Building the Organisation of Tomorrow” on linked-in provides a fascinating forum on the changing nature of organisations. It is well worth monitoring for the latest thinking on organisational change.

David Gwillim

Exploring the value of IT to organisations

email: david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au

blog: http://www.businessitvalue.blogspot.com/

Should information on the internet be certified for credibility?

Once upon a time IT was a black box managed by introverted magicians who were kept out of sight if not out of mind in the back rooms and cupboards of an organisation. IT is still complex, in many ways it is much more complex than 20 years ago, there is certainly many less ‘user serviceable parts’. Conversely it is also exponentially easier to use, in the way a car is increasingly complex but easier to drive than ever, some even park themselves. My teenage daughters know nothing of the underlying file systems or programming logic that underlies a modern laptop, yet they use the technology and have a relationship with it, that is radically different to my experience of technology. This simplification in the use of IT and the explosion in communications and information it has spawned what has been referred to as the democratisation of information.

At the same time, experience in the US shows that today’s college students are loosing the ability to critically assess the credibility of information that is presented on the internet. It has been suggested that we may the moving from the information age into the age of miss-information. The internet has provided access to a wealth of information, I am always staggered (and greatly enjoy) what I can find. As most of it is un-curated or moderated I am also very wary of the validity of the information as there is no easy way to assess its credibility. There is a pressing need for a reality check on the information on the internet especially given the plethora of health and wealth advice. Maybe in the not too distant future we will see information ratings agencies springing up giving ratings on the credibility of each site in the same way that ‘made in Australia’ or ‘certified organic’ does today.

David Gwillim
david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au

BYOD computing puts people back into the IT equation

I have been fascinated by the trend towards ‘bring your own computing’ normally staff would be very reticent to provide their own gear instead insisting the company provide it (for cost, repair and support reasons). This is engaging more people than ever in the leading edge of IT innovation and this is a good thing.

Of course this is also symptomatic of the fact that consumer IT innovation is outstripping corporate IT innovation by a large margin. Once upon a time if you wanted to play with the latest IT toys you needed to join an IT department. Today your lounge room is more It savvy with the iPhone, Twitter, Facebook and gaming consoles leading the IT revolution.

As far as BYOD in the work place goes there is a precedent, in the early days of ubiquitous mobile phones employees often used their own personal mobile before company policy and corporate thinking recognised the value and essential need for wide distribution of mobile phones in the office (initially they were issued to executives, then senior mangers etc, desktop PC’s had a similar evolution, as iPad’s are today with many boards of directors. I-pads and twitter are slowly making their way into the mainstream office too. The billion dollar question is where will innovation come from next – the corporate or personal world?

David Gwillim
Exploring the value of IT to organisations
email: david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au
blog: http://www.businessitvalue.blogspot.com/