The future of work is evolving, and the tools that helped companies win using a command and control model won’t work in a business landscape characterised by innovation and collaboration.
Of the top 100 US-based industrial companies listed in Fortune magazine in 1965, only 19 remained in the top 100 by 2005; 66 had been acquired or disbanded, and 15 had fallen outside the list. Now start-up companies such as Groupon and Priceline.com have in 36 months achieved what some businesses spent 100 years trying to achieve – $1 billion in revenue. How do they do it?
At a breakfast seminar on ‘The Future of Work’, business leader and Harvard Business School alumnus Garry Lloyd and Silfen sales operations manager Sarah Cunningham explained how we can leverage this evolution of company culture – and the results it delivers in terms of productivity and competitive advantage.
Many of these older, established companies, were operated with a traditional hierarchical ‘command and control’ business model. It is, in fact, a typical path for companies as they mature; while they might begin with more organic ‘chaos’, this changes.
“Over time, a successful organisation evolves into an enterprise that is structured as a hierarchy and is driven by well-known managerial processes: planning, budgeting, job defining, staff, measuring and problem-solving. With a well-structured hierarchy and managerial processes that are driven with good skill, this more mature organisation can produce incredibly reliable results – it may, however, not be able to create sustainable innovation,” Lloyd says.
Organisational innovation is critical to be competitive in today’s globalised business environment.
“Increasingly coming to favour are those organisations which can mobilise knowledge, technological skills and experience. These are the organisations that create new products, processes and services, and maintain a competitive advantage for the longer term. How does a business operate in an interconnected world where people are the source of sustainable competitive advantage?”
Winning in the new economy
In addition to the traditional model of management changing, there are other trends reshaping how organisations operate and use technology.
Described by Gartner as the ‘Nexus of Forces’, this is the convergence of a need to use big data, to make everything mobile, to collaborate using social tools and media, and to use the cloud to access all our information and applications, any time, anywhere.
Other trends are the much talked-about consumerisation of IT – with consumers expecting an enterprise IT experience as good as you get it at home; and the reshaping of how workforces operate – through bring your own device (BYOD), flexible hours, split roles, and working from alternative locations.
In this environment, companies that wish to leverage interactions and connections between parts of their organisation will need “emergent leadership, cognitive skills and emotional intelligence to manage paradox and tension, flexible organisational design, flexible reward, and recognition systems that foster innovation, collaboration and adaptability”.
Having a truly engaged workforce is also crucial to this success. Lloyd contends that at any given time, out of 10 employees, three would be engaged, five are disengaged, and two are actively trying to sabotage the organisation.
Organisations should also look for ‘unofficial hierarchies’ – these are the people who may not be in obvious positions of power, but who know everything about the company and how things get done.
“These are the people who have the ability to accelerate change,” Lloyd says.
Considering these trends together, Lloyd says, it becomes clear that the old tools that served companies in the command and control model (and employees with lower expectations of enterprise IT) will no longer cut it in the new economy, and new tools will be need to enable different types of organisational models, and most importantly, provide a platform for engagement and collaboration.
Engagement through technology
The right technology within an organisation not only engages employees more effectively, but also makes engagement an embedded management practice throughout the employee’s ‘hire to retire’ relationship with the company.
“Bringing to the business those same tools that are used every day at home provides workers with more freedom and choice for collaborating or accessing data anywhere, any time,” Lloyd says.
Meeting these desires and at the same time safeguarding the enterprise’s needs, good tool sets can bring benefits in performance, productivity, employee satisfaction, information management and capital costs.
Cunningham pointed to the SuccessFactors tool set as an enabler of employee engagement – specifically through corporate and personal goal-setting, and more collaborative performance management using the Performance and Goals module. She said these and many other rich Human Capital Management and analytics functions are delivered in a package that has the attributes consumers want: a great user experience, accessibility via mobile and in the cloud, and social collaboration components.
For the future of work, companies can mix the structure and predictability of maturity with the spark of collaboration and innovation – but they need to equip themselves with the right tools to get there.
This article first appeared in the Inside SAP Yearbook 2015.
