The Future of Work

I have been spending some time digging through old notes and thoughts on leadership and work culture as I prepare for the first Brainpark staff offsite. Our gatherings up until this moment have been all focused on product design and development. This retreat we are focused on who we are as a company and what we hope to become when we grow up.

In the process of my homework I interviewed Razor Suleman from I Love Rewards (who just closed their Series A financing yesterday from JLA). The main overview of topics we covered were as follows:

• The role of transparency in the workplace
• How rewards and recognition impact employees
• What are the benefits and challenges associated with rewarding employees
• Intersection between rewards/recognition and democracy in the workplace

The reason for being so diligent in my research is that I believe the current forms and systems of many organizations has created some form of half-life zombie employees. People who are not utterly dead but lack the life and passion of genuine humanity. Their voice is no longer heard and their contribution is prescriptive. The search for new ways to gain employee engagement is essential for building great 21st century corporations that have cultures where people want to belong.

Razor talked about creating a culture that over-communicates so that more people have more information that empowers them to make decisions. Within I Love Rewards they have structured several ways to elicit the information that is often buried in other organizations. One of these mechanisms is a simple quarterly report called "Brutal Facts" which highlights the mistakes being made in order that they may become a true learning organization that adjusts based on external feedback. By a show of hands they then vote on the top 2 issues and discuss how they will tackle it before the next quarter.

Another interesting process Razor has set in place is that each week every employee gets a blank "thank you" card which they can fill in and give to someone else in the organization who has made their lives better or more productive within the last week. This one reminds me of one I learned from Philip Rosedale (Founder and Chair, Linden Lab - Second Life) called The Love Machine. This is a simple online tool they developed where at any point in time during a day someone could give a specific thank you to anyone else in the organization. Beyond the immediate positive culture this creates they discovered many side benefits that show flash points and contribution within the company.

The final thing I will note in this post about the interview with Razor was that they instituted monthly rewards and recognition lunches where everyone in the company can clearly see who is doing well. These meetings are celebrations that are open to their clients also. I was kindly invited to show up and experience one of these the next time I am back in Toronto.

When I was in Vancouver yesterday I mentioned some of this to Kareem Mayan and he kindly sent me over his Delicious research list on the topic which will keep me reading for a while...

If anyone has any recommendations of helpful processes that can create a high performance and engaged company I would love to hear from you. This next week we will be wrestling through and dreaming about the basic and simple things we can do that make us a desirable place to work.

For those interested in leadership, democracy, and empowerment I would highly recommend coming to New York for the Worldblu Live conference.  Download worldblu_live_2008_oct. 16-17 NYC.pdf

Comments

[Curt Bushko]

You might want to check out anything by Ricardo Semler (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler) though his Seven Day Weekend book is very hard to get a hold of. Some people label his philosophy to being very similar to Ayn Rands book Atlas Shrugged (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_Shrugged)

Semler is the CEO of a company in Brazil that "does nothing" meaning that they are not defined by one product/business. When he took over Semco CA and applied his management philosophies the company began to succeed at an astounding rate. From what I have read, people in Brazil are lined up to work there.

You can check out the first chapter of his book at: http://www.inc.com/articles/2004/03/7dayweekend.html

[Dave Ferguson]

I'm intrigued by the approach and appreciate the links (yours and those of commenters). I'll look forward to seeing how things like "Brutal Facts" work out -- my own take, not that you asked, is that the label needs to be clearly tongue-in-cheek. Otherwise, you risk getting some sort of in-crowd self- and group criticism, which makes me think of the Red Guard.

I have seen efforts at instilling positive values succeed -- to the extent that a worker on a pharmaceutical packaging line, discussing operating procedures, said "People say you can do X, but I do Y, because I don't think X is good manufacturing practice."

She was right; X wasn't. But the plant didn't have a good mechanism for her to highlight a perceived discrepancy other than telling her supervisor, who was focused for some odd reason on meeting his production goals.

[Jonathan Burns]

Mark,

If you are looking for inspiration on creating a high performance and engaged company one of the best books in the past 15 years is "First Break All The Rules" by Marcus Buckingham which summarizes 20 years of Gallup research on the subject. The key to an engaged workforce is people working in areas of talent and passion and the key enabler is having great frontline managers for your people. The book explains how.

Cheers,

Jonathan

[kareem]

i'm planning to be in ny for the WB gathering - hope to see you both there!

[Mark Dowds]

Thanks Brydon and Kareem. It would be great for all 3 of us to get in a room sometime and talk about this. Maybe we could all go to NYC for the worldblu gathering together?

[kareem]

thanks for the shout-out, mark. my co-conspirator eric (www.beermenus.com) contributed a ton to the delicious links.

kohn and pfeffer are excellent, as is pfeffer's co-author on a bunch of books, bob sutton (he's in your neck of the woods, mark):
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/

brydon, shame we didn't meet in van, looks like we'd have a lot to talk about!

kareem

[brydon]

Exciting times for bp. On pure carrot/stick business and how competition impacts environments, anything by Alfie Kohn is great... http://www.alfiekohn.org/index.html

On the business side, I've enjoyed all Jeffrey Pfeffer's work... http://faculty-gsb.stanford.edu/pfeffer/