Is it any wonder that employee engagement is reported to be at an all time global low while business continues to become increasingly complex? In an earlier article, Work is Broken; Let’s Hack it, one of us described the trends and our understanding of how the future of work is shifting. Yet, most organizations are continuing down the same path of how they work.
[Note: This article is a collaboration with Ayelet Baron. Please see the attribution at the end of the article. - Rawn]
They may create an open space environment or allow work from home but these are minor changes that do not change the overall machine of business. It most often takes a major crisis, an industry-wide shift, or an act of desperation for large organizations to move away from 20th century management models and enter the 21st century. Most are still kicking and screaming all the way there.
An example of a 20th century practice is highlighted in a recent PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) study which estimated in 2012, there were 1.83 million corporate and business meetings, trade shows, incentive events and meetings, defined as “a gathering of 10 or more participants for a minimum of 4-hours in a contracted venue.” Unfortunately, they do not report any uniform measure of what outcomes these meetings produced. That is part of the business problem we are facing; we are using old world metrics that report only on activity, not value.
Often we hear people talk about how much time they spend at work and everyone seems increasingly busy running from meeting to meeting. Then, they are further challenged to find time to manage the influx of email that came in while they were busy at a meeting. Does any of the following sound familiar:
- How many change initiatives are happening simultaneously across your organization today? Do you need to hire someone to manage or change all the change initiatives?
- Does your organization value results or activity? Do people spend their days checking items off their to-do lists, or is there a clear line of sight between what they are working on and the business?
- Should your employee communication department honestly be rebranded as the “One-way-Communication-only” department? Who is listening to your people and having conversations with them?
- Do people in your organization spend more time booking meetings or attending meetings? Do they know what the outcome of the meetings will be?
- How do people follow up on agreements made in their meetings? Do the commitments get left behind on a PowerPoint slide, or in the Parking Lot?
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