Stop press – people LOVE working in progressive organisations

Stop press – people LOVE working in progressive organisations

Right now there is much to celebrate in the world of progressive organisations… 

Haier, the world’s largest networked organisation (at 75,000 people) is enjoying both unrivalled growth in their sector and great notoriety given its story of organisational innovation.   Spotify has had to do a lot of things right to become a $46Bn dollar business and the most used music streaming service on the planet, a sector which is riddled with the corpses of other services that couldn’t make it.   One of the earliest progressives, Gore, (of Gore-Tex fame) was founded in 1958.  From the beginnings it has sought to relentlessly innovate its approach to management and how it organises itself, with the belief that that product and market innovation will follow.  With a product portfolio including everything from guitar strings to synthetic medical implants to outdoor apparel, they have proved their point.  

What mostly gets written about these organisations are their strikingly radical organisational designs.  Haier a “an ecosystem of entrepreneurial micro businesses”, Spotify also championing team autonomy but with a different approach where “squads, tribes and guilds” are the order of the day. Gore have always aggressively minimised bureaucracy, a big part of which is to have a very different approach to hierarchy, one where it is the teams who decide who they want to be led by.

If, as a leader, you would like to emulate these organisations and the innovation, growth and employee experience they enjoy you may well be wary of a step into the unknown by pursuing a new, radical organisational design.  And well you should. 

We have been researching and working with organisations who have the innate ability to innovate, change and retain the best talent, and those that cannot, for decades.

Our research found that the single strongest determinant of success in these three areas was not structure, size, sector, or age of the firm; it was management practices.  This has been borne-out by Gallup’s recent research which indicated that management practice was the biggest single determinant of employee engagement at around 70%.

Therefore, our strong advice would be not to restructure as a first step.  The biggest gains can be made by comparatively small (not necessarily easy; old habits are hard to break) changes in how we “show-up” as leaders; what we do, how we do and the decisions we make.  But where to start? Who has influence, what things should we change, what changes to make and how to make them? 

This is where The Vitality Index© comes in; it is able to zero-in on the management processes, practices and behaviours, that, if changed will have greatest benefit in engendering not only high levels of engagement, but also enable an innovative, change enabled culture to emerge.  These are specific to each organisations context at a precise moment in time and can be filtered by any attribute; region / business unit / function / team etc.

The Vitality Index© diagnostic is different to polling your people by way of the “employee engagement survey” in a number of different ways:

  1. Such surveys tend to ask direct, judgemental questions. Whilst, on the surface this may seem to be appropriate, these types of questions invite a significant amount of bias, both conscious and unconscious, and this data contamination severely affects the validity of the output.  Improvement actions informed by unreliable data are unlikely to bring the desired impact.
  2. Engagement surveys usually don’t have a diagnostic capability; they aggregate 1000’s of responses into visually appealing bar charts, depicting the respondent’s judgement of various symptoms that they experience. By contrast, The Vitality Index© diagnostic capability is based on our own empirical research of organisations, through this artificial intelligence is able to pin-point the specific and addressable management practices that reside below the surface level symptoms.
  3. Indexer offers concise, actionable insights. A typical Investors in People “Insights Assessment Report” runs to around 50 pages of words, numbers, charts and graphics.  In our experience, at this weight, most with line management responsibility leave them unread, and even if read, unactioned.  In contrast, a line manager on the receiving-end of The Vitality Index© output only receives the information that s/he needs to make improvements, things they can get started with that hour.  
  4. Many of the most commonly used employee engagement surveys guide organisations towards a “gold standard” that is anything but “progressive”, aligned to a style of management more relevant to the world of work in the 1910s. This was a time when repetitive manual labour was the norm, this is not the management we need if we wish to create an environment where highly intelligent and skilled knowledge workers can bring their very best creativity and intellect to the fore. Enlightened leaders know this, they are looking for ways to break away from a “parent-to-child” relationship prevailing in the management dyads of their organisation.  The Vitality Index©directs organisations towards management practices based on what science tells us, not what we’ve always done.   A working environment where everyone, regardless of their role or status shows-up in an adult-to-adult climate, able to speak freely and give of their best.

If, as a leader, you are thinking about pursuing a more progressive approach to the point that you are ready to commit to change yourself, then we hope this article has been useful and we are cheering you on all the way.  Beyond that, if you think some guidance in identifying knowing exactly what to do, and how to do it, based on causes (not symptoms) specific to your organisation at this precise moment in time might be of interest, then please get in touch. 

Let's talk

The conversation has the potential to change the future of your organisation.

Just how do you preserve your culture as your organisation grows?

Just how do you preserve your culture as your organisation grows?

You can only grow your business at the rate at which you can scale its culture.

This statement is an interesting one, and both right and wrong.  What is undeniably true however is that as owners grow businesses from employing 10’s, to 100’s and then 1,000’s of people, often one of their constant concerns is how to maintain the healthy, creative and innovative culture that has been the engine room of their success to date.

A quick bit of research into organisations that have been successful in this over the long term reveals some interesting patterns.  Going back to 1958, Bill Gore left his highly successful career with DuPont with the idea of creating an entire organisation that was as innovative, fun and creative as the R&D functions that he had worked within.  Sixty years later WL Gore has revenues of $3.5bn and employs 9,500 “associates”.  In more recent times Spotify has had to do a lot of things right to become a $46Bn dollar business and the most used music streaming service on the planet, a sector which is riddled with the corpses of other services that couldn’t make it. 

What mostly gets written about these organisations is their strikingly radical organisational designs.  Gore pioneered the lattice structure where it is the teams who decide who they want to be led by as part of their aggressive approach to minimise bureaucracy.  Spotify also champions team autonomy but with a different approach where “squads, tribes and guilds” are the order of the day.   The reality is, however, that having a radical org design is just one of many vital ingredients that make up a truly holistic way of working in these “progressive” organisations.  At some stage it might be appropriate, but in and of itself structure alone is woefully insufficient, and certainly not the first step.

At VitalOrg we have been researching and working with organisations who have the innate ability to innovate, change and retain the best talent, and those that cannot, for decades. Our research found that the single strongest determinant of success in these three areas was not structure, size, sector, or age of the firm; it was management practices.  This has been borne out by Gallup’s recent research which indicated that management practice was the biggest single determinant of employee engagement at around 70%.

This seems to echo wider research about highly innovative organisations who have grown to a large scale while preserving the fun and creative culture that they had when there were just a handful of employees.  What we notice about these organisations is the priority they give to innovating management practice first, knowing that innovative products and services will follow. So, we need to innovate management, to break free of the tacit assumptions that were developed 100 years ago but still live on today in the vast majority of organisations and contemporary HR practices.  But where to start? Who has influence, what things should we change, what changes to make and how to make them? 

 

That is where The Vitality Index© comes in; it is able to zero-in on the management processes, practices and behaviours, that, if changed will have greatest benefit in engendering not only high levels of engagement, but also enable an innovative, change-enabled culture to emerge.  These are specific to each organisation’s context at a precise moment in time and can be filtered by any attribute; region / business unit / function / team etc.

The Vitality Index© diagnostic is different to polling your people by way of the “employee engagement survey” in a number of different ways:

  1. Such surveys tend to ask direct, judgemental questions. Whilst, on the surface this may seem to be appropriate, these types of questions invite a significant amount of bias, both conscious and unconscious.  This leads to data contamination which can severely affect the validity of the output.  Improvement actions informed by unreliable data are unlikely to bring the desired impact.
  2. Engagement surveys usually don’t have a diagnostic capability; they aggregate 1000’s of responses into visually appealing bar charts, depicting the respondent’s judgement of various symptoms that they experience. By contrast, The Vitality Index© diagnostic capability is based on our own empirical research of organisations; through this, artificial intelligence is able to pin-point the specific and addressable management practices that reside below the surface level symptoms.
  3. The Vitality Index© offers concise, actionable insights. A typical Investors in People “Insights Assessment Report” runs to around 50 pages of words, numbers, charts and graphics.  In our experience, at this weight, most with line management responsibility leave them unread, and even if read, unactioned.  In contrast, a line manager on the receiving end of The Vitality Index© output only receives the information that s/he needs to make improvements, simple things they can get started with that hour.  
  4. Many employee engagement surveys guide organisations towards a “gold standard” that is showing its age, aligned to a style of management more relevant to the world of work in the 1910s. This was a time when repetitive manual labour was the norm. This is not the management we need if we wish to create an environment where highly intelligent and skilled knowledge workers can bring their very best creativity and intellect to the fore.   Enlightened leaders know this, they are looking for ways to break away from a “parent-to-child” relationship prevailing in the management dyads of their organisation.  The Vitality Index© directs organisations towards management practices based on what science tells us, not what we’ve always done.   A working environment where everyone, regardless of their role or status shows up in an adult-to-adult climate, able to speak freely and give of their best.

Returning to the opening statement; perhaps the real question is not one of “scaling culture”, more a question of making informed and deliberate choices about how we lead, organise and manage that will enable the positive evolution of your healthy culture appropriate to the scale and maturity of the organisation.  If your aim is to keep the vibrant culture you have created alive, our strong recommendation is to actively avoid adding bureaucracy (rules, procedures, central controls).  This can be achieved by adopting principles instead of rules and distributing decision authority within your growing firm.  If you are interested in how to get started down that path or to find out more about how The Vitality Index© can bring insight to those decisions, please get in touch.

Let's talk

The conversation has the potential to change the future of your organisation.

The Vitality Index – A Force for Good Management

The Vitality Index – A Force for Good Management

By prioritising a positive impact for their employees, communities, and the environment, Bcorps are leading the way for business and being a force for good in this most crucial time in the planet’s history.  Meanwhile, the wider business community has struggled for at least two decades with poor and stubborn-to-shift levels of employee engagement.  A contributing factor to this has been the hangover of a “shareholder value maximisation” mindset.  Employees are not energised by this; they have known for a long time that in order to be truly intrinsically motivated they need to feel they contribute to a higher purpose, beyond profit.

Many Bcorps have benefited from this; they are better able to attract and retain talent, and vitally tap into those levels of motivation that prevail when we know our efforts at work are contributing to a greater good.   This is great news for all, but unfortunately in and of itself it is not sufficient. Recent Gallup research indicates there is one single factor that influences employee engagement more (70%) than all the others put together: management.

That is where The Vitality Index comes in. It is able to zero-in on the management processes, practices and behaviours, that, if changed will have greatest benefit in engendering not only high levels of engagement, but also enabling an innovative, change-enabled culture to emerge.  These are specific to each organisation’s context at a precise moment in time and can be filtered by any attribute: region / business unit / function / team etc.

The Vitality Index (VI) diagnostic is different to polling your people by way of the “employee engagement survey” in several different ways:

  • Engagement surveys usually don’t have a diagnostic capability; they aggregate thousands of responses into visually appealing bar charts, depicting the respondents’ judgement of various symptoms that they experience.  By contrast, the VI’s diagnostic capability is based on our own empirical research of organisations and how they are led, managed and organised. From this evidence base, artificial intelligence is able to pin-point the specific and addressable practices that reside below the surface level symptoms, thus the things to start experimenting with.
  • The Vitality Index offers concise, actionable insights.  A typical Investors in People (IIP) “Insights Assessment Report” runs to around 50 pages of words, stock images, numbers, charts and graphics.  In our experience, at this weight, most with line management responsibility leave them unread, and even if read, un-actioned.  In contrast, a line manager on the receiving end of the VI output for their team only receives the information that s/he needs to make improvements, things they can get started within an hour.
  • As mentioned above, recent data from Gallup, the leading authority in employee engagement globally, identifies that 70% of resultant employee experience can be tracked back to management and management practices.   It is at this causal level that Indexer operates. It is so far as we know none of the  engagement surveys do this.
  • Getting insights from employees is relatively easy compared to getting hearts-and-minds change to happen informed by those insights.   In recognition of this, we integrate a package of support that ensures that there is follow through and systemic change results.
  • The Vitality Index operates at the level of small teams.  Changing the climate of each and every team changes the culture of the entire organisation in a way that “top-down” initiatives never could.
  • Many employee engagement surveys guide organisations towards a “gold standard” that is showing its age, aligned to a style of management more relevant to the world of work in the very early 1900’s. This was a time when repetitive manual labour was the norm. This is not the management we need if we wish to create an environment where highly intelligent and skilled knowledge workers can bring their very best creativity and intellect to the fore.   Enlightened leaders know this, they are looking for ways to break away from a “parent-to-child” relationship prevailing in the management dyads of their organisation.  The VI directs organisations towards management practices based on what science tells us, not what we’ve always done.   A working environment where everyone, regardless of their role or status shows up in an adult-to-adult climate, able to speak freely and give of their best.
  • Most employee engagement surveys have a strong benchmarking and “league-table” element. This has held great appeal with conventional leaders who have been conditioned to have a scarcity mindset.  Younger leaders and more progressive organisations have realised that an abundance mentality;  sharing, learning and collaborating is a much better way to go in the current era of business.  Our service is very much aligned to the latter; the emphasis is to improve from where we are as an organisation, as opposed to trying to beat or emulate other organisations, whose context is very different.
  • Engagement surveys tend to ask direct, judgemental questions.  Whilst on the surface this may seem to be appropriate, these types of questions invite a significant amount of bias, both conscious and unconscious, and this data contamination severely affects the validity of the output.  Improvement actions based on by unreliable data are unlikely to bring the desired impact.

If you are the leader of a Bcorp, or a leader finding your own way to having a more holistic and positive impact, we are cheering you on all the way.  You are already committed to enabling your people to do the best, most rewarding work of their lives, and give them the best possible employee experience.    That desire is commendable.  However, desire is one thing; knowing exactly what to do, and how to do it, based on causes and not presenting symptoms is much more challenging. 

This is precisely where the Vitality Index comes in.  It is able to identify, for each and every team in your organisation, what practices, processes and behaviours will, if changed bring greatest benefit.  We support those teams to get started with change right away, change that they own and change that they feel good about.  

If you would like some help, then it fits perfectly with our purpose to support you. Why not get in touch, we love a good conversation.

Let's talk

The conversation has the potential to change the future of your organisation.