Let Transparency & Connectivity Rule Your Office Culture
His eyes locked onto mine, his jaws set he said with a steely tone: “You know what would happen if we allowed our employees to freely access Facebook, Twitter and YouTube? Do you!?”
Mr. X, the 50+ year old C-Suite manager of a major MNC, looked at me with the ire normally reserved for recalcitrant youngsters who still dream of unicorns in a ‘real’ world.
How had we come to this seemingly unsolvable gap of opinions between the ‘old’ world and the ‘new’ that left the rest of the management team wallowing in uncomfortable silence?
We had been talking about how total connectivity had changed the rules of the game, how today’s society is global, connected and transparent. These changes had brought the management together to come up with some ‘cool’ values like: trust, ownership and all the usual potboilers some designer would then transform into glitzy posters & coasters to be distributed to the masses to show the team that the company was still up-to-date.
Stop The Printer & Show It Baby
The truth is that people have seen one too many posters with the Olympic sculling team standing in for ‘teamwork’ and the other one with the stern looking American Bald Eagle printed above some platitudes about ‘leadership’. Save the trees and start showing that you truly mean what you say.
Living In A Transparent World: If You Think You Can Hold A Secret… Think Again!
Wikileaks, Groupon and a myriad other companies/organizations have created a hitherto unknown level of transparency. The genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going to get back into it!! We will need to learn to live in a transparent world. Zappo’s has learned this lesson early on and has created a culture of ownership and transparency.
Instead of wasting energy and resources by playing their cards close to their chest they have turned transparency to their advantage: Zappos invites you to learn what they are doing right, tour their facilities, talk to the team and even buy their latest strategies for a monthly fee of U$ 39.95 at Zappos Insights!
Too much transparency say you? Far from being suicidal, this total transparency strategy creates an immense internal drive for innovation, driven by the team members themselves. The company thrives on openness, and the respect they have for each individual team member to come up with new ideas that can become game changers. In this environment of transparency and trust the values are not on the posters, they are lived by the team day-to-day.
It’s Not About Products – It’s About Team Speed
The winners in the 21st century will be propelled to success by the speed with which their teams research, ideate, communicate and create new solutions. Far from getting stuck in endless meeting cycles and structural jungles, these flat organizations operate with turnaround times that seem ‘magical’ to the outsider. Case in point: Local Motors is able to launch a brand new car model from initial inception to hitting the road in 18 months, as compared with an average of 4-6 years for major brand car companies.
Team Speed = Trust & Emotional Maturity
The main differentiator between top-heavy management-driven organizations and modern, fast, flexible and flat operations is the emotional maturity of the individual team player.
This emotional maturity of each team player leads to a simple result:
I know that I chose to join this company, I know why I chose to join this company and I am actually interested in what I do within this company. I don’t need a boss to supervise me, when I need advise I will go and look for it. My goal is to contribute, to achieve measurable results. To achieve these measurable results I need to do research to get new ideas.
Unlock The Doors To Information & Creativity
20 hours worth of new videos are being downloaded into Youtube every minute! Facebook is mutating from being a mere social ‘waddayadoing?’ tool to becoming a business communicator and Twitter has become the main source for up-to-date information and the hottest game changers. Locking your team out of using these tools is tantamount to treating them like silly teenagers who need total supervision. It cuts them off from some of the most powerful information gathering, sharing and brainstorming tools available and gets out the message that all the posters you printed about ‘respect’, ‘ownership’ and ‘leadership’ are bulldust.
Will The Mice Play If The Cat’s Away?
Of course the fear in an existing and traditional corporate culture will be:
As soon as we allow the team to surf freely we can wave our productivity good bye…
That may be true for a moment, until the team adjusts and matures into living responsibly with this newfound freedom, here is why.
Charlie In The Chocolate Factory
It is a golden rule for all companies involved in the manufacture of sweets, lollypops, chocolates and other dental cavity creators to allow every employee to eat as much candy as their heart desires. Of course it stands to reason that everyone’s most outlandish childhood dreams will express themselves in an endless scoffing orgy at the conveyor belt, leaving the company with little to sell to the market.
What really happens is: of course every new employee will go through a gorging phase in his/her early days at the company, but the novelty of eating all that free candy wears off quickly and then a mature balance sets in. You will take a candy once in a while, but otherwise you will focus on getting the job done.
Live Freedom – Get Connected
Save the trees, don’t print more posters with ‘cool’ values no one cares about. Open your channels of communication. Allow your teams to surf, watch Youtube, connect on Facebook. Misuse will spike for a few days, the novelty will soon wear off and then the appreciation of the trust you have given the team will rise. The team will find the correct balance between their private social needs and the immeasurable benefits of being connected to a global database of information and cutting edge know-how that will be transmuted into new ideas to keep your company at the cutting edge.
