When ‘Work’ is no longer work

Enablers and Inhibitors: Culture & Organizational Design

Enabler / Inhibitor — Culture & Organizational Design

Definition

For an organization to leverage a Transparent and Adaptive Talent Marketplace, it will need to evolve its business models to keep pace with its external markets and deploy talent from a mix of internal employees and agile talent to keep up with that pace. It will foster respect for all needed capabilities and the people who have them, whether they are internal or external workers. It will develop an environment of transparency in order to cultivate trust and collaboration among all players.

It will treat all individuals as if engaged in a long-term relationship, even if they end up together only for brief episodes, because the reputation of how they treat those individuals will endure long past the engagement. All will experience the challenges of frequently changing roles and relationships, training and rewards. Therefore, all should have access to the benefits from this adaptive environment — such as a higher likelihood of finding or maintaining one’s ideal working conditions and opportunities to contribute from one’s strengths. Which is in stark contrast to how most organizations differentiate today between internal and external talent.

Dimensions

The cultural and organizational attributes of a talent marketplace are characterized by a set of dimensions. The three dimensions listed below do not claim completeness, but they are supposed to kick off an initial thought process and analysis:

• An attribute which probably comes first to mind when thinking about culture and organization is structure: we are used to define organizations with some sort of hierarchy, whether it comes along as a matrix or a more traditional top-down pyramid. From a functional point of view, it is supposed to provide orientation, clarity and stability. The marketplace model is much more about dynamics, diversity and flexibility and the organizational model it enforces is what Jon Husband called a “wirearchy”. In his words “a dynamic flow of power and authority, based on information, trust, credibility, and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected technology and people”.
• A second attribute are the relationships within the marketplace and between the market-players. Hierarchical structures give a preference for more unilateral relations: like an employer telling an employee what to do, how to do it and when. The marketplace, however, is only going to work on the basis of mutual transparency and trust. Ultimately it creates (and requires) a relationship on an equal basis — which does not mean that decision making becomes ‘democratic’. It rather means that decision making power itself is becoming more relational — depending on the relative state of the market demand and supply situation.
• A third attribute relates to temporality. What do we mean by that? A structured and one-directional world builds on the idea that the future can be planned, that career growth will be steady, in a single word: that there is stable progress. The marketplace environment is to a large degree characterized by experiments, risk, fast trial and error, re-starts, ad-hoc collaboration, meaning: a culture which is embracing change, uncertainty and dynamism. This requires different mind- and skillsets for those who live and embrace this culture to address better their personal needs and preferences.

Culture and Organizational Design Attributes in an Agile Environment

Agile environments drive (and presuppose) cultural and organizational attributes in very different ways than stable ones, in order for marketplaces to function in a self-sustained way.

To enable a free and fast flow of assignment and talent brokerage,

• the organizational prerequisites are all about the design and provision of a self-sustainable platform whereas
• the cultural prerequisites are all about the mindset that embraces an environment of transparency and honesty, collaboration and feedback.

The benefits for individual include

• Increased employability through increased opportunity and more frequent feedback on fit (or lack thereof and hence, development needs)
• More flexibility in and ownership of their personal needs, preferences, and professional pathways
• Greater chances that personal strengths, aspirations and preferences will come into play

The benefits for the organization include

• Improved chances to find the individuals that fit best current and future assignments
• Greater flexibility and agility when it comes to serving short-term customer needs or exploring new market opportunities
• Increased ability to source, form, adjust and dissolve teams for innovation and disruption

What will it take to transition your organization?

It is important for an organization to understand where it currently stands and desires to be on a number of levers that impact its transformation journey to a marketplace environment. Below are listed a few areas to consider regarding the evolution from a stable to an agile future state. The future state will always depend on the given business model, business strategy and the market context of the organization.

The Intertwined Nature of Enablers and Inhibitors

Cultural and organizational attributes by themselves, however, do not make an agile environment. Interdependencies with other enables and inhibitors need to be taken into account. Below is an example of the relative importance and interdependency of both, internal and external enablers/ inhibitors. Depending on a company’s current context and strategy, it might have different areas of focus to become more agile in its cultural and organizational attributes.

Starting at 9 o’clock, the interdependencies with other the enablers/ inhibitors is as follows:

• A project-based organization design will make reward and recognition more dependent on the outcome and complexity of the various assignments during a period under review, i.e. reward will become less comparable across people and therefore, more personalized.
• Assignment attributes need to be specific enough to differentiate between people interested in the job, and if they are, they will drive transparency and honesty in the organization.
• People attributes define the requirements for an engagement with this organization/ ecosystem, and specifically with a given assignment in order to make meaningful selection decisions and automating long listing.
• When it comes to training and learning, an individual talent will get in an agile environment many more data points regarding required competencies and skills, in order to identify learning needs on a personal level and be self-driven in his or her desire to learn new skills.
• The Employee Life Cycle has in a stable organizational context a strong culture-building effect, at certain stages of the ELC certain events take place. This effect will diminish on the way to becoming agile, as ELCs will become ever more personalized and at the end lose their meaning.
• Whereas in a stable context, the manager allocated work to people within his area of responsibility, this is now performed by a marketplace. The manager still has to define the assignments and make selection decisions, and he/ she is still in charge of the outcomes. However, his/ her role during the assignment is much more that of a coach, requiring new capabilities and responsibilities.
• An organization’s culture and its brand will become the two sides of the same coin (it always has been, but now it will be much more visible), an internal and an external face of workplace realities that reinforce each other. Reputation gaps will accelerate and enforce culture change.

The bottom of the illustration shows four external drivers strongly influencing assignment based environments:

• Culture will be strongly reflected and made visible in social media, which again drive transparency inside and outside an organization.
• Policies, law, and regulation were established in times of stability in the industrial age; with the transition to agile organizations, there is an increasing pressure to refresh the national and international legal and regulatory environment (labor law, social security, role of unions etc.).
• The network of an individual constitutes the source of his/ her reputation and the access to other organizations; the collective networks of individuals in an organization define the external reach and internal connectivity, for information and expertise to flow and trust to percolate.
• Rapid team formation will become a key performance indicator within agile environments, given the formation of many new teams around assignments and the need to get quickly operational in such a new team.

Potential Hazards to Guard Against

It is equally important to assess hazards and hinge factors that could disrupt a re-imagined approach to assignment-based environments. Here are some key areas for consideration:

The potential risks are dependent on the business environment (for the organization) and the talent market environment (for the individual). The more volatile and unpredictable these environments become — the higher will be the risk of not being able to respond to those changes and becoming vulnerable to competitive threats.

From an organizational point of view — especially when looking at larger and geographically diverse organizations — it is about awareness and conscious change of the cultural and organizational attributes. By listening frequently to the voice of the organization and the individuals belonging to it — and by inserting systemic interventions, the mindset of all stakeholders will be aligned with a marketplace direction.

Transparency

A talent marketplace requires full transparency of supply and demand (and rewards attached to assignments), in order for search costs to be minimal and trust to develop in the functioning and fairness of the marketplace, i.e. all relevant information being available. If the level of transparency, especially regarding people decisions, is low in an organization, then raising this level is an urgent requirement, but needs to be done carefully and stepwise.

The Role of the Manager

The role of the manager is critical in such a path to more transparency, as the level of discretion in decision making will be reduced in an agile context. If management behaves rather autocratically, then this will be in stark contrast of the future role of managers and again, management behavior needs to change.

Reputation

Is the organization already broadly using 360 ° feedback and other feedback and social media tools to provide evidence of someone’s performance and behavior, or is reputation of individuals still very much defined by management judgement?

Transformational Trajectory

How could the journey from a stable world into an agile one unfold?

The key states and the related activities are:

Environment

• Business environment
• External Talent Marketplace
• Internal Talent Marketplace
• External driving forces (demographics, social, technological, geopolitical context, …)

Diagnosis

• Where do we stand today, how ready are we to succeed in an agile-agile environment?
• What is our agile-agile vision in view of the environmental forces?
• Where are our biggest gaps?
• What can we learn from others?

Incubation

• Which of our talent segments and/ or enablers/ inhibitors would lend themselves best as pilots for experimentation?
• What is our transition plan for the next 2 years, what do we hope to have achieved by then?

Transformation

• What has worked and what not? What can we learn from pilots?
• How to scale up the changes within pilot segments?

2020+

• How can we intelligently track our agility?
• How can we continue experimenting and learning?

Questions to Get Started

In an environment where many factors are changing at once, here are a few simple questions to help assess whether organization design and culture is a primary area for an organization to focus on or if other enablers and inhibitors must be addressed first…

Customer / Business Strategy

What level of agility and flexibility does your business model / your business strategy require from your workforce? Are you facing an increased number of short-term high-priority customer requests? What level of cross-functional / cross-geographic collaboration and innovation does your business model / your business strategy require?

Organization

Are you looking up LinkedIn when you try to find out more about the professional background of someone in your own organization? Are you struggling to describe — in an aggregated form — the strengths (expertise, skills) of your organization? Are you able to identify the best person in your organization to work on a specific business challenge?

Employee Experience

Was your organization facing mass-layoffs in the near past — and if so: were you made aware early so you could prepare? Does your organization provide you with a relevant and current map of development / career opportunities? Does your organization provide a transparent single-place-to-go showing all open jobs / assignments? Is such a job board just an alibi internal mobility tool, or is it really offering a fair opportunity for a next job?

There are 7 other fundamental factors that will enable or inhibit the transformation… View the entire article here