In his Management 2.0 blog, Gary Hamel shares some thought-provoking questions about counterintuitive, yet common, IT policies that seem to discourage productivity and innovation:
- How is it that companies are willing to trust employees with their customers, their expensive equipment, and their cash, but are unwilling to trust them when it comes to using the Web at work or loading their own programs onto their workplace PC?
- Do IT staffers really believe that conscientious, committed employees turn into crazed, malicious, hackers when given a bit of freedom over their IT environment?
- If leading edge IT tools are, as many claim, essential to unleashing human creativity, why would any company force all of its employees to use the same computers, phones and software programs?
Hamel recommends giving employees more freedom over their IT tools. We agree. One of the best ways to cultivate innovation and engagement is to empower people with the ability to decide how they can best do their jobs.
Management guru Gary Hamel provides an excellent explanation as to why only 21% of employees are highly engaged at work. Contrary to common belief, it is not the type of job or salary level that determines the extent of one’s motivation, which is why companies such as Wegman’s Food Markets and QuikTrip convenience stores in “unglamorous” industries like retail consistently rank among the best places to work.
“The real damper on employee engagement is the soggy, cold blanket of centralized authority. In most companies, power cascades downwards from the CEO. Not only are employees disenfranchised from most policy decisions, they lack even the power to rebel against egocentric and tyrannical supervisors. When bedeviled by a boss who thwarts initiative, smothers creativity and extinguishes passion, most employees have but two options: suffer in silence or quit.
“In a well-functioning democracy, citizens have the option of voting their political masters out of office. Not so in most companies. Nevertheless, organizations here and there have taken steps to make leaders more accountable to the led. HCL Technologies, a progressive Indian IT services company, encourages employees to rate their bosses, and then puts those ratings up online for all to see. Bullies and bunglers have no place to hide. And W.L. Gore, the Delaware-based maker of Gore-Tex and 1,000 other products, lets its highly decentralized teams appoint their own leaders. These are interesting aberrations from the norm, but in most organizations, power is still allocated top-down.”
Until people are free from a system where their boss wields compete power over their livelihoods, companies will find it difficult to harness and benefit from the full potential of their most valuable asset.
The key to unlocking employee engagement lies in flattening the organizational hierarchy and democratizing the decision-making powers. A good place to start is to allow employees to set their own salaries. Teams of employees must also be trusted with the power to hire and fire their leaders and coworkers.
Gary Hamel, best-selling author of The Future of Management and one of the leading proponents of decentralized, innovative, and democratic management practices, recently wrote an excellent article about the following three forces which he feels “will mostly destroy management as we know it”
- New web-based collaboration technologies
- Dramatic changes that have made the competitive business environment more challenging
- New expectations that “Generation Facebook” will bring as they enter the workplace
Hamel believes that we are on the verge of a management revolution that will transform society as much as the industrial revolution and that will put an end to the command-and-control hierarchical structure that has characterized the 20th century workplace.
It will become common practice for companies to share information freely amongst all employees, and decision-making responsibilities will migrate towards the team members closest to the customers.
This shift of power and influence from top executives to the customer-facing employees carries both opportunities as well as risks for companies. The people closest to customers obviously receive a more accurate picture of customers’ problems and are potentially better equipped to develop and deliver solutions to meet customers’ needs.
The main challenges that executive managers will encounter will be to ensure that all employees have the ability, the freedom, and the motivation to do their jobs properly. The best way to engage employees is to democratize management practices by making information accessible to all team members, decentralizing the decision-making abilities, and sharing financial incentives with the entire workforce in a more equitable manner.