Life Changing: A Philosophical Guide. Why This Company Puts On A Mass Wedding For Employees. Mexican maquiladoras--manufacturing operations on the U.S. border--are known for having poor working conditions and low pay. As a result, annual turnover rates often reach as high as 100%. At Plamex, a maquiladora in Tijuana that builds devices for Plantronics--annual turnover is just 36%. It might have something to do with the weddings. Every year, Plamex puts on a wedding for employees, complete with music, decorations, and approving family members to watch the procession. This is not standard practice (though two other maquiladoras have adopted it since Plamex put on its first wedding a decade ago).
When Plamex started the mass wedding program, the city of Tijuana required people who wanted to get married to bring back original birth certificates from their hometowns. Plamex is obviously filling a need--540 people have gotten married in the mass weddings, and 28 couples signed up for this year’s wedding, held on February 17th (see slideshow above). Report: Making The Business Case For Enterprise Social Networks. In 2011, the US hit a milestone — more than half of all adults visit social networking sites at least once a month. But when it comes to using social-networking technologies inside organizations, many business leaders are at a loss to understand what value can be created from Facebook-like status updates within the enterprise.
Some organizations have deployed social-networking features with an initial enthusiastic reception, only to see these early efforts wither to just a few stalwart participants. The problem: Most companies approach enterprise social networks as a technology deployment and fail to understand that the new relationships created by enterprise social networks are the source for value creation.
Yesteryear, internal technology departments could force software on business units, but in today’s consumerized world, business units can adopt enterprise software, often without IT ever knowing. Encourage sharing.Capture knowledge.Enable action.Empower employees. Data Highlights. BRAVE Framework for Thinking About Culture | PrimeGenesis. Organizational Culture: So Important – So Misunderstood We created some new frameworks for the 3rd edition of our book The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan.
One of those is the BRAVE cultural framework. At some level, everyone knows culture is important, but people struggle to define, understand, and influence it. Since we originally created this framework, many have found BRAVE helpful in building shared cultural understanding and action and, of course, continually evolve it. So this post may not match our book exactly. BRAVE Cultural Framework BRAVE encapsulates components of culture including the way people Behave, Relate, their Attitude, Values, and the work Environment they create: Behave: What impact.
Focus of actions: internal vs. external.Discipline or lack thereof with which people act.Unit of organization ranging from individual to team. Relate: How connect. Attitude: How win. Values: What matters. Environment: Where play. Applying BRAVE to Onboarding and Leading Interviews Due Diligence. Recruiting: 8 Qualities Your Best Employees Should Have. Great employees are reliable, dependable, proactive, diligent, great leaders and great followers... they possess a wide range of easily-defined—but hard to find—qualities. A few hit the next level. Some employees are remarkable, possessing qualities that may not appear on performance appraisals but nonetheless make a major impact on performance. Here are eight qualities of remarkable employees: 1. They ignore job descriptions. When a key customer's project is in jeopardy, remarkable employees know without being told there's a problem and jump in without being asked—even if it's not their job. 2.
People who aren't afraid to be different naturally stretch boundaries and challenge the status quo, and they often come up with the best ideas. 3. Remarkable employees know when to play and when to be serious; when to be irreverent and when to conform; and when to challenge and when to back off. 4. 5. 6. An employee once asked me a question about potential layoffs. 7. 8. Forget good to great. Great Company Culture Isn't Pricey. Corporate Culture: The Only Truly Sustainable Competitive Advantage. Women And Collective Intelligence Will Solve Our Planetary Crises. Sustainability is a so-called wicked problem. It is complex, difficult to define, impossible to solve in a linear fashion and the aspects of the problem are so interrelated that it is impossible to consider (and therefore impossible to model) all of the unintended consequences that might accompany any single “solution.”
This complexity makes us anxious. The common approach in the past has been to reduce the problem to smaller parts, solve for “x,” and hope that these disparate solutions aggregate positively. The nature of wicked problems is that they yield to the truth of systems--the consequences of one action are difficult to completely predict because of the many moving parts and interacting factors. History and evidence shows us that in spite of the cult of heroic individualism and the lone-ranger innovator, all great innovation happens within groups. The good news is that we’ve learned a lot about what maximizes group intelligence and the innovation it sparks. The Fun Theory. Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch. Get on a Southwest flight to anywhere, buy shoes from Zappos.com, pants from Nordstrom, groceries from Whole Foods, anything from Costco, a Starbucks espresso, or a Double-Double from In N' Out, and you'll get a taste of these brands’ vibrant cultures.
Culture is a balanced blend of human psychology, attitudes, actions, and beliefs that combined create either pleasure or pain, serious momentum or miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively guide the way a company operates. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy.
Performance-oriented cultures possess statistically better financial growth, with high employee involvement, strong internal communication, and an acceptance of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve new levels of innovation. Culture Vs. Strategy Is A False Choice. Strategy seems to have fallen on hard times. In his recent Fast Company piece “Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch,” author Shawn Parr joins a long list of commentators, psychologists, authors, and consultants who’ve used that dietary line to argue that company culture is a greater determinant of success than competitive strategy.
A strong culture is important, and for all the reasons Parr mentions: employee engagement, alignment, motivation, focus, and brand burnishing. But is it the most important element of company success, as the more ferocious of the culture warriors assert? Is long-term success, as Parr writes, “dependent on a culture that is nurtured and alive”? If history is any guide, the answer to both questions is no. Certainly, Southwest Airlines has a great culture and funny flight attendants.
Employees seem genuinely enthusiastic about their employer. Parr attributes the success of Zappos to a culture that is “inclusionary, encouraging, and empowering.” Bosses, Stop Caring If Your Employees Are At Their Desks. In 2005, the Best Buy headquarters in Richfield, Minnesota, started shifting over to a “results only work environment,” or ROWE. Employees could decide when and where they worked as long as they met certain measurable goals.
No more Monday-through-Friday or 9-to-5. Want to come in at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday? Great. You don’t even need to notify your manager, as long as you get that report done by the end of the week. Two University of Minnesota sociology professors, Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen, recently gathered data from 659 Best Buy employees, both before and after the shift to ROWE. Kelly and Moen--who published their work this week in The Journal of Health and Social Behavior--found that employees who switched to ROWE took better care of themselves. They were healthier and they were also, it seems, more invested. The ROWE program was developed at Best Buy by Cali Ressler and Jodi Thompson. Is it easy to switch? Meg Whitman Makes HP Execs Give Up Cushy Offices To Work In Cubicles. Here's How Screwy HP's Culture Was. Sorry, you're not funny enough to work here.
Real estate April 25, 2014 at 6:36 PM ET Down-to-earth actress Ellen Page has listed her Studio City home for $1.05 million. She is trading up, having bought Venus Williams’ Hollywood Hills post-and-beam home earlier this month. Zillow Ellen Page is selling her two-bedroom, 1.5-bath home in Studio City. Page bought the 1,499-square-foot, two-bedroom, 1.5-bath home at 11283 Canton Dr. for $885,000 in 2011. The updated Cape Cod traditional has lots of windows, beamed ceilings and a pool. Her new mid-century modern in Hollywood Hills, which she bought for $1.701 million, is not huge, either. The 27-year-old “Juno” star, whose latest credit is the star-studded new “X-Men” movie, joins other young stars buying homes in Los Angeles, albeit with more modest taste than some.
Page made headlines on Valentine’s Day when she came out as a lesbian at a Las Vegas conference. Ellen Page's Studio City home has lots of windows and beamed ceilings. See more photos of Page's home on Zillow Blog. Bitwizards's Channel. Is technology at work taking the humanity out of our personal relationships? | CIO Insights. Guerrilla Artist Replaces Ads With Poetry. The Scottish artist, Robert Montgomery, like countless street artists who came before him, hijacks billboards and bus stops to display his melancholic verse.
For ten years, he’s been replacing ad pitches with poetry and presenting commentary on culture, ranging from consumerism to beauty in bold white type set against a black background. Though not really a street artist, Montgomery takes inspiration from the Situationist tradition of détournement – capturing the audience’s attention in unexpected ways within the public realm. In his latest show, at London’s KK Outlet (running through February 25), the featured work references the Occupy movement, Capitalism and its moral failures, as well as what freedom means in the city today. Promoting ideas that strike a chord with each passerby, Montgomery seems an artist very much aligned with the struggles of this generation.
Share with us how you feel about advertising and its place in society? Robert Montgomery. The Culture Game - ... a beginner at something. Daniel Mezick's new book for the agile manager due out in March. He was so kind to offer me a preview, from which I quote. Everything is changing, and changing more rapidly than ever before. The rate of this change is increasing like never before. In 1978, Chris Argyris & Donald Schön published Organizational Learning. In 1990, Peter Senge published The Fifth Discipline. In 2001, a tribe of pioneering people in software wrote The Agile Manifesto. In 2008, Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright wrote Tribal Leadership. The Culture Game, first published in 2012, builds on the shoulders of these giants. Ok, as I have not read much of the book yet, let me skip close to the end and see if there is some value for Polytopia.
Here is to meetings, apparently (preview page 44) Working agreements are exactly that - agreements. Core working agreements. Who must leave. Start and stop time. Cell phone usage. Use of laptops. Breaks. Punctuality. One conversation. Anything else. The CLOUDFinance Daily. What do employees really need? A recent Inc.com article states that employees need freedom, expectations, input, and consistency, among other things. Did it nail everything? By Matt Wilson | Posted: February 16, 2012 As career analyst Daniel Pink succinctly put it in his TED Talk from 2009, money isn't always the best motivator for employees. Science says so . So what does motivate employees? Pink says it takes three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. To continue reading this article, you must be a member of Ragan Select.