Listening to employees: The ‘Beyond Bureaucracy’ winners - McKinsey Quarterly - Organization - Strategic Organization. The Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge is the second of three contests in a yearlong competition in which executives describe inspiring management innovations. (In September, we published the winners of the first phase, the Management 2.0 Challenge.) In this second phase, managers were asked to describe practices that better engage their employees, empower them to manage themselves, or provide a perspective on the organization from the outside in.
A panel including McKinsey partners and external experts chose seven winners from a field of 106 entries. These winners come from a wide range of companies, including technology leaders, industrial organizations in Brazil and Norway, and a Japanese insurance company. While the programs differ in form, they share an awareness of the connection between employee engagement and organizational productivity. Editors’ note: The judges for the MIX contest include business leaders, academics, editors, and McKinsey consultants. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Professor George Lakoff on Non-Conscious Mental Processing. Re-engaging with engagement | BUSINESS RESEARCH.
One Great Employee’s Worth Three Good Ones Today I posted a tweet (@jtodor) about “friendly” employees after reading Grant McCracken’s blog post titled “The Coming Point-of-Sale Revolution.” In my tweet I mentioned that the Container Store believed that one great employee is worth three good ones. That statement came from their website in 2007. I notice that it is no longer there but if look under Careers on their current website, you will see that the same philosophy is still in place. It doesn’t surprise me that the Container store has extended their progressive business practices to the social web. Shortly after my tweet, I got a reply from them (@ContainerStore) asking me to share my experience interacting with their salespeople. Here is the back-story. How can a company ensure that their employees greet customers with Duchenne de Boulogne smiles?
“Do you know how great it makes you feel when you can really help customers?” That quote came from a young lady working in the Walnut Creek, California store. A Brain on Laughter. Stopped in your tracks by pressures from financial woes? Tired of a job that’s going nowhere? Without good ideas to lead your next innovation? Let laughter crack you up and stir up new aha moments when you need them most. A Brain on Humor Want much more than coping? You can discover new initiatives through comedy, because a lighthearted attitude often brings eureka moments of unexpected inspiration. Discover Laughter’s Innovative Triggers When I taught at McGill University, and worked with Inuit leaders in the most Northern communities on Baffin Island, we laughed a lot.
Humor melds insights across ages, bridges beliefs, and draws the best from brains, often separated by barriers few can cross well. How Laughter Opens Minds If tensions flee in the wake of a simple joke, and brainpower boost over a funny faux pas, what holds you back at work? If you cut up over one-liners – you’ve likely also seen humor’s upshot to your brain when laughter leads to insight. Sadly, the opposite is also true. The Geeks Are Graying.
Ninety percent of technology marketing targets 10 percent of the population: the young, the cool, the perceived digerati. A few niche companies address the senior market with products so simplified your cat could use them. What almost everyone misses is how the growth of mobile, social, and local applications is colliding with two decades of Internet acumen to create a new social phenomenon: the long tooth of technology. Technology once divided the generations. Now it brings them together—and not in a patronizing, "let's get Grandma on Flickr so she can see photos of the kids" way. Instead, the old and young are converging over shared interests. Grannies Inc. is a hot British start-up whose cross-generational platform is based on commerce rather than collaboration. Even businesses that cater exclusively to a white-haired audience are increasingly marketing with technology.
The consulting firm Gartner Research outlines five stages of technology adoption in what it calls a Hype Cycle. Intelligence Lost: The Boomers Are Exiting. The U.S. business community is facing a war of intelligence attrition. Fortune 500s will see countless experienced knowledge workers walk out the door over the next two decades. The U.S. Armed Forces are losing millions of officers and key personnel to retirement. Some 900,000 white collar workers from the executive branch of government, and another 5,400 federal executives, will be up for retirement by 2016, according to a 2007 study from the video conferencing company Tandberg. A 2007 McKinsey Quarterly survey found that the Baby Boom generation is "the best-educated, most highly skilled aging workforce in U.S. history. " As the boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) retires, executive leadership faces a daunting task: how to ensure key intelligence and know-how doesn’t walk out the door when they retire.
Even those organizations with young employees must consider knowledge management. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Encourage people to document and share what they know. Employee Engagement.