“There is a need for organizations to drive change, value, innovation, profit maximization and CSR through a “genuine involvement” of the people that work for them”
Femi Oni talked about the need for brands and businesses to change rules, I say some are already revolutionizing the way business is done but a lot more need to get on board and come to terms with the fact that the same old rules will no longer deliver sustainable growth and development. The die is cast!
Hierarchy will and should continue to varnish
I came across the story of Zappos a while ago, a fast growing retail outlet that is changing the face of conventional management by giving more power to the “People” that work for the company. One thing the company has successfully done is to lessen the dangerous consequences of hierarchy and place more emphasis on value, which is why we are here in the first place. To achieve this, they have employed the non-conventional principle of holacracy which has ensured that more emphasis is placed on the “people” side of things and the fact that every single employee has a unique and appreciated role to play in the company’s value chain. Everyone is unique! No sacred cows.
(You can read more reports on this by Quartz or Washington post).
“The holacracy concept is the brainchild of management consultant Brian Robertson, a serial software entrepreneur who says he launched the idea after realizing he was “more interested in how we worked together”
Other adopters of the Holocracy concept include twitter cofounder Evan Williams who has applied this principle to run his own private startup, Medium.
In as much as hierarchy would be totally difficult to phase out, I can tell you that there are encouraging signs to that effect. If you get an insider pass into the big modern day successful brands of our time, the Googles and Facebooks, it won’t be a strange sight to see Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg in a heated debate with their junior programmers on the best approach to a new product development project while shockingly and in contrast to norm such an action does not result in hard feelings or firing of such an employee. That is the way these new firms operate. Everyone is working for the company to generate value, even the billionaire CEO. As a result, hard feelings or hierarchy are given limited chance to play a role in the scheme of things. I can go on and on about how the modern day work environment has changed and how employees are beginning to gain more freedom and sense of authority from their employers. I guess the most important criteria nowadays is getting the job done even if that means you have to do so wearing shorts and flip flops to work.
In sharp contrast to what obtains now, offices decades back didn’t have gyms in their basement or a music booth around the corner where workers can take a breather while they reflect on how best to carry out their jobs. All these developments point to the fact that the modern organizational sphere and its people are indeed changing.
Collaboration, diversity, constructive arguments and collective efforts all together should form the basis and operational code of modern day brands
The morale of my rant is simple, I feel many brands and businesses still don’t get the message of love. They have refused to see the downsides of using their employees just as mere tools for shareholder satisfaction as accounting specialist would put it. Why not get your employees into the thick of the process? Give them stock options just like companies like Google and others have done? Why not give them that sense of believe that they are working for their own company too. After all they are also shareholders!
Employees are not tools, they are players with a specific role in the value chain. From the top to the bottom, every single person has a role to play. This message should be visible in the operational and functional look of things in any modern day brand or business.
This is the only way genuine value can be sustained and delivered.
And call it what you like, love is indeed a viable business model if well channeled in the right direction. One of such direction is towards the people that “sometimes” forego their personal dreams to be part of an organization they believe or would love to believe in.
Why not make the best use of this? Like I always say, hire the people you trust and believe in, empower them, give them a sense of belonging and watch your business rise to greater and sustainable heights.
BJA | TDM 