The leadership of any business cannot possibly know the ins and outs of every task, every job, every process in the organization. Yet, when it comes time to change, reinvent or restructure even part of the organization, leaders often take a top-down approach replete with flawed hidden assumptions. And you willhave to reinvent your business.
Figure 1. Source: https://www.techrepublic.com
Ten years from now, 70% of the Fortune 1000will be gone. And although the average lifecycle of a business in the 20th century peaked at 70 years, that number is now down to 7 years. On average, businesses need to reinvent themselves every 7 years or they will likely disappear. For reinvention, there must be invention. And usually not just the small, incremental stuff but large, transformative stuff. It’s part of what makes transformation tough to do.
Employee engagement has a pivotal role to play in driving transformational change for organizations looking to remain relevant into a more digital and connected future. People building digitally enabled relationships with a range of stakeholder, effective collaboration, amplifying the behaviors of digital catalysts and rewarding contribution to business improvement all play key roles in future talent acquisition and activation.
Status
Unionized blue-collar workers doing highly repetitive tasks in a manufacturing facility in southern Illinois. Average education: less than a high school diploma, some couldn’t read. Their work had been meticulously studied by highly trained, college-educated industrial engineers. Time and motion studies had tracked and optimized every movement. Piece count standards were set to achieve production requirements as efficiently as deemed possible by a host of bright white collar management employees.
Goal
The governing union contract paid a bonus on every piece beyond the work standards set by the industrial engineers. The workers’ objective was to beat the standard so they could choose: a) to make some bonus income by surpassing the standard piece count production requirements, or b) step off the line and and spend the remainder of their shift in the employee cafeteria sipping coffee and shooting the breeze.
How
Come up with an innovative way to perform the work, meet the quality standards, and achieve a bonus or relax in the cafeteria. Somewhere in their practical strategyprocess, employees had an insight. Despite their lack of formal education, training or mandate, employees came up with significantly better ways to do the work than the highly skilled, trained job “experts”.
Sources
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