The Workplace Community

A Guide to Releasing Human Potential and Engaging Employees

I. Gee, M. Hanwell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137441676
• eBook ISBN: 9781137441690
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

The Workplace Community offers a structured, practical guide to developing collaborative knowledge-based communities in the workplace, from introducing employees and managers to new ways of working, to measuring effectiveness and providing corrective interventions for those who haven't achieved the desired results.

chapter 1

Introduction

Welcome to the world of workplace communities!

Our aim in writing this book is to introduce you to the world of workplace communities. All of us are familiar with the idea of social communities, whether it is a club of some kind we belong to, either physically or virtually, or the local community we live in. Communities are one of the oldest ways of organizing and getting things done. People coming together and organizing around something that is important to them. A place where they feel their contribution is valued and can make a difference. Contrast this with most of today’s organizations, where people organize around hierarchy and annually defined tasks and targets, working to fixed, often outdated, job descriptions.

Most companies carry out some form of annual or biannual staff survey, and in the majority of cases leaders and managers spend time pondering why the ‘holy grail’ of employee engagement cannot be found in their workplace. We believe that consciously and actively developing communities inside the workplace, which are organized around what matters to people, is a way of overcoming this. This book will show you how to do this. To identify if and when a community approach is right for you, the steps you can take to introduce one and how to support, develop and enable it so everyone can reap the rewards community ways of working can bring.

Target audience

Our target audience for this book is leaders, managers and employees. If you are a leader or a manager who senses or knows there is something beyond hierarchy but you are struggling to find it, someone who truly wishes to unleash the latent potential within their organization, and to reach new levels of engagement and performance, then this book is for you. If you are an employee who feels your current ways of working are not enabling you to contribute in ways you know you would like, and you want to find other ways of working, then this book is for you. It will give you the support you need to open up discussions with your leaders and managers and help you to work with them to explore the possibilities and create the opportunities to achieve more together.

Tomorrow’s workplace today?

As you read this book we ask you to imagine a workplace where people are not bound by departmental barriers, a place where employees feel a commitment to the whole organization and not just their separate silo. Employees who see the organization ‘in the round’ and know where their contribution could make a difference, despite this being not part of their job description or annual tasks and targets. The kind of workplace where people feel such a strong sense of community that being a partisan is not an option. Workplaces where fiefdoms and territorial conflicts are consider things of the past and to be laughed at! This is the kind of workplace that a community way of working can bring you. An organization where people feel their contribution is not bounded by their role but is open and expressive across the whole of the organization. Where people feel a commitment to not just their own tasks, targets and outcomes but those of the whole organization.

By workplace communities, we do not mean people sitting around in a circle fighting over who is going to get the talking stick next! We mean, a structured and planned way by which people have the opportunity to contribute and work outside of the traditional hierarchy and silos of organization. Engaging with each other in very different ways and in doing so creating extraordinary results. We believe workplace communities, if implemented with diligence and care, can unleash latent talent, capability and capacity in the organization and have a positive impact on business results.

We believe that developing and supporting workplace communities provides any organization, private, public or not for profit, with the opportunity to deliver excellent business results and at the same time provide the kind of environment where people can do the best work of their lives.

Engagement and contribution

Giving people the opportunity to be part of a thriving workplace community not only increases their engagement and commitment to the organization as a whole but also helps them develop their skills and capabilities. In some cases these will be new skills and abilities, but in many cases they are skills and capabilities that, although active in employees’ lives outside of work, remain dormant and not accessed in the workplace. We believe that recognizing this will help you to reshape your current ways of working and help you secure the future success of your organization. By following the practical guidance offered in this book you will be able to move beyond traditional organizational boundaries and ways of working and unleash the pent up creative passion and excitement of both your employees and yourself.

Default position

Have you ever asked yourself why the way we organize work has not changed? If you have, then this book is for you! Many of us work very differently from our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. That is, we don’t necessarily go to the office, factory or mine every day. We work remotely and increasingly in a global context with higher levels of autonomy. What has not changed however is the structure of work. Hierarchy is still the dominant way of organizing how we contribute to the enterprise, how we manage and how we get recognized and rewarded for our contributions. There is nothing inherently wrong with hierarchy. It certainly has its benefits when properly instigated. However as a ‘default position’ for organizing we believe that it has outlived its usefulness. By ‘default position’ we mean we automatically make this choice without thinking or considering what other options might be available. We may not even know or understand that we have other choices as to how we work.

One way of thinking about this is to think about your computer. When you switch it on it automatically defaults to its ‘C’ drive and if you want to work on another drive you have to make a conscious choice, enter the computer’s settings and choose that drive you want. Most organizations cannot think of any other way of getting work done other than with an organizational chart that shows where you ‘sit’ in the hierarchy, job descriptions that define roles and responsibilities and employees contained, we would argue and constrained, by both.

Hierarchy has its place in the organization, for example the organization of routine tasks and activities or when work requires absolute structure and precision. Here is an example, when the fire service responds to a ‘shout’ having a clear command and control structure is essential. Firefighters, men and women, need to be clear on their roles and responsibilities and know when and how to respond to commands. Similarly hospital emergency rooms rely on a clear and understood hierarchy to save lives, likewise, the military. Ask yourself, how often in today’s businesses do we need to operate like the military or emergency services?

In our view hierarchy should be a positive choice and not a default. Overused, hierarchy drives out creativity and the opportunity for the unexpected to bring innovation and the possibility of positive difference. In the organization context it makes sense to use hierarchy to organize say payroll or compliance services. These are areas of business that rely on certainty and predictability. They are repetitive activities in which variation needs to be planned, controlled, monitored and recorded. However we would argue that well over 75 percent of the work of most organizations does not necessarily require hierarchy as the dominant organization form. Hierarchy may be sufficient to get the job done, but it may not actually be necessary. By making hierarchy a default position we drive out the possibility of getting much better outcomes and results and of raising the engagement of employees.

Sector specific?

The potential for implementing and developing a workplace community that delivers excellent results is not sector specific. There may be differences in how you approach the job of engaging people, leaders and employees with the ideas contained in this book and how you manage your current governance structure. How you measure success in terms of outcomes may also differ. But the basic principles remain the same. This book will guide you as to how to have the discussions you need to be persuasive and stimulate thinking about the possibilities and potential that workplace communities can offer your organization.

Not only do we believe that the current workforce is looking for new ways of working and achieving but we also know from our research that the new generations entering the workplace, Gen Y or the Net Gen, are looking for a different relationship to work, one that is not bounded by the traditions of those that have gone before them. We are increasingly working in a multigenerational, digital, knowledge-based, global workplace – enabled by Internet and social media. A lot of research has shown that the new generations entering the workplace expect and demand a different experience of the workplace from earlier generations. They have grown up with the web and associated technology and are expecting to experience the kind of freedoms and opportunities for both business and personal achievement that this provides.

In our experience, most organizations are laced with communities; however these may remain small, often invisible and hampered by a lack of explicit support and license. In the increasingly knowledge-based economy, what we know, our thoughts, ideas, creativity, innovation and our willingness to share and collaborate, are critical for creating value for organizations and the individuals who work for them.

Many progressive organizations are seeking ways of emulating the innovation and passion found in startups and the work of entrepreneurs. Developing a workplace community provides a way for older, more established organizations to tap into this collective intelligence, engage people in a common sense of direction and provide the opportunity for unleashing ‘intrepreneurship’ across the organization. Most entrepreneurs tend to favor community ways of working during their startup stage. This is often stimulated and supported by the innovation hubs in which they work, and which, by their very design, encourage cross-pollination and the sharing of ideas and approaches. It is only as they develop and start to formalize their ways of working that hierarchy becomes the default. When we have talked to entrepreneurs they often speak wistfully about the excitement and creativity that was present at the start of their work and how they seem to have lost this as they grow bigger and start to institutionalize their processes and ways of working.

Not by accident

Workplace communities do not come about by accident; they require intentionality. In this book we will provide you with a clear definition of a workplace community and ideas as to when this is best applied. We will explain how to initiate one, how to map the developmental stages they naturally go through, what to do if your community gets trapped at a particular stage of development and how to measure its effectiveness.

If you do already have a workplace community in place, then this book will give you the tools and techniques you need to help it flourish. We will also provide you with easy-to-use ways of measuring and reporting its effectiveness. If your community has got a bit ‘stuck’ we will provide you with an easy-to-use diagnostic approach, and pragmatic corrective interventions.

Workplace communities are not the ‘holy grail’ of organization – that is something we will all be searching for, for the rest of our lives! But this book will provide you with the opportunity to shift your own thinking and that of your organization and it will provide you with the opportunity take a new and fresh look at how you think about work and what outcomes really matter.

chapter 2

Ways of Working

Introduction

In this chapter we will explore the different ways of working that exist and help you determine if and when a particular way of working is most appropriate to what you are trying to accomplish. Through this exploration we hope that you will begin to see that how we execute work is a choice rather than simply a given, or as we prefer to call it, a ‘default position’. That is, we always choose one way over another regardless of whether it will work or not.

At the end of this chapter we will introduce you to a tool we have co-developed, the ‘Ways of Working Diagnostic Tool’. This tool will help you explore the choices that are available to you in relation to the task you wish to undertake.

There is nothing inherently right or wrong with any of the ways of working described in this chapter. None is better than the other. We hope to encourage you to make a conscious choice and in doing so to pick the way of working that is most likely to lead to success, in terms of the task in hand and also for those who you are asking to engage with it.

Finally, we hope this chapter will help you when talking with stakeholders about setting up a workplace community. By understanding and being familiar with different ways of working, their benefits and drawbacks, you can help people think through why your idea of initiating a workplace community is the best way of achieving a successful outcome.

SCENARIO

Imagine you have been called in to see your boss. Your organization is doing very well and has ambitious plans to expand into new markets. There is an ever-growing demand for its products and services outside of the home territory. However this expansion has not been without its problems. The dreams and passion that headquarters has for developing organizational excellence, and at the same time generating ethical profits, has not been fully realised. No one seems to know why. Demand is now rising in SE Asia and the organization’s senior leaders are very keen to open offices across the region. It wants to build a strong and successful presence. In addition to market opportunities, HR have identified that SE Asia could provide the organization with a rich source of much-needed talent. Given the bumpy entry the organization has had into other new markets, the CEO commissioned a couple of quick and dirty studies to find out what has worked and what has not worked. But having read through these and talked to a few people, you are still not much clearer on what the organization is missing and not getting right. Your boss has asked you to lead this market entry and to make sure that it happens quickly, smoothly and becomes a model that the company to use for future such initiatives. So what do you do?

Do you go and find the ‘usual suspects’ and set up a short-life project team to work with you?

Do you work through the hierarchy, as a sole contributor, trying to influence and direct things. Using your natural enthusiasm and any expert power you have? If needs be, drawing on the authority of your boss to get things done?

Do you tell your boss that, given the growing importance of the new market entry and that there are many other new markets that the organization will want to enter in the next couple of years or so, you need to set up a new department called ‘Market Entry’, get HR to produce job descriptions, have them evaluated and then recruit to them from inside and outside the organization looking for the best in the field. To get the best you will also need to pay the best and will need to develop an attractive bonus scheme to ensur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Ways of Working
• 3 What Is a Community?
• 4 Getting Started – Elements of Effective Community
• 5 Stages of Community Development
• 6 What Can Go Wrong?
• 7 Putting It Right!
• 8 Rewards and Benefits
• 9 Measurement and Meaning
• 10 Transformation
• Bibliography and Additional Resources
• About the authors
• Index