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| Spring 2000 | Vol. 10 No. 1 |
Click here if you want to see Past Issues of the AXIS Advisory .
Copyright 1999 AXIS Performance Advisors. If you use this in any way, please cite the source.
by Marsha Willard
Much has been said about the dawning of the new millennium, probably too much. Still it gives us pause, arbitrary though this man-made milestone is. We can't help but wonder what this new millennium will bring and what we should be ready to deliver. Our musings have focused on four particular trends that we think will impact lots of organizations beyond just our own. This issue of the Advisory describes what we see happening around each of these trends, what we think they imply for most organizations, as well as what we are doing at AXIS to be ready for them.
Nothing got organizations scrambling faster in the last few years of the 1900's than the Internet revolution. To enter the new millennium without a web page of your own is like showing up at the neighborhood ball park without your glove. No one is going to let you play.
But web pages are only the beginning. Many pundits predict that more and more business transactions will occur over the Internet. Data shows that the Internet attracts seven new users every second! We've already seen an explosive growth in the number of purchases made electronically. 60% of all stock trading occurs on line as does 36% of all bill paying. Sites like ExpertCentral.com are also delivering consulting advice on everything from home repair to personal financial. (As consultants, this got our attention.) Government is even jumping into the fray. The IRS is promoting electronic filing and some jurisdictions are considering voting via the Internet.
Looking at our times through this new digital lens makes some of our ways of doing things look very odd and archaic. For example, why is my teenage daughter lugging 40+ pounds of expensive, quickly outdated, resource consuming text books to and from school everyday? We could dramatically reduce school expenses and save the spines of a whole generation by enabling students to access homework on-line. Shifting our thinking from atoms to electrons will enable us to radically rethink the way we do business.
AXIS debuted its web site in 1998. For us it's been an elegantly simple way to share our store of articles, learnings and announcements for free. We like the unobstrusiveness of a web site. Anyone can come check us out; no obligation to buy; no annoying sales calls. We're also dabbling in on-line consulting. The Internet provides our clients a convenient and efficient way to stay connected, get answers to quick questions or privately share ideas and thoughts. Our most dramatic electronic move yet will occur this spring when we offer a web based course on facilitation through Oregon State University.
See anything different when you look around you at work these days? Perhaps you've noticed some of the trends described in the newly released Workforce 2020. The earlier edition of this book (Workforce 2000) accurately predicted the increase in the number of women and minorities in the work place. Tomorrow's workers are likely to add further diversity as more and more workers will be hired from developing nations. The US is in a global war for talent and employers are finding the need to look beyond our borders to fill the pool. 60% of all new jobs now require skills that only 20% of American workers possess.
This statistic makes business nervous because they realize that in this millennium business success will be based more on brains and less on capital. The challenge is you can't "own" brains the way you can own machines and technology. Competition to attract, retain and engage people with good ideas and the skills to implement them will make or break many organizations.
Add to this the change in attitudes among today's workers; they are less easily manipulated by money, more motivated by opportunities for personal success, and more demanding of a balanced work/home life. (See the insert in this issue for the results of our Natural Work survey.)
Organizations will have to engage people in a different way. We've been talking for years about shifting from a management paradigm based on "parenting" to one in which all people are treated as business "partners." According to Peter Drucker, this shift is increasingly important in a competitive labor market.
We know our clients "get" this and want very much to create organizations that enlist the full talents and energies of their people. Believing it and doing it, however, seem to be two different things. We've taken a new tact in our service offerings to help managers live out their ideals. We've created a new product we call Team Boosters which is a subscription to a series of team meeting "packages" that help managers elicit meaningful participation from their staffs in the process of getting real work done.
If so, subscribe to Team Boosters!
Most managers can facilitate a good meeting but don't have the time to design effective and engaging interactive processes. Team Boosters solve that problem. For around $25 a piece, all your managers and team leaders will get a new Team Booster kit in the mail every other month. The kit provides the instructions and materials for achieving particular meeting outcomes like building skills, generating ideas to improve performance, or stimulating innovation . Click on Services for more information.
Just in case you hit the snooze button, the November World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle and the accompanying protests provided a ringing wake up call for businesses all over the world. The concern among most protesters was not about free or open trade. It was about the loss of local control over issues like jobs, the environment, ethics and equity. It was inspired by the fear that "business" will rule without local accountability. Americans pride themselves in keeping tyranny out of government. What the WTO protesters believe is that today's power resides not in our country's capital, but in corporate headquarters all over the world. For their part, businesses are beginning to recognize that along with the rights to earn profits from around the globe comes the responsibility to manage the welfare of that globe and its inhabitants.
Investors are expressing similar sentiments through their checkbooks. The Green Money Journal reports that for the first time assets under management in socially responsible portfolios exceeded $2 trillion. That amounts to $1 in every $8 of managed investments. The same journal predicts that by 2010 that ratio will increase to $1 in every $2.
Fortunately some of the country's leading organizations have figured out that doing well and doing good are not mutually exclusive; in fact in many cases doing right by communities and the environment has increased the benefits for shareholders, owners and employees. The Social Investment Forum reports that socially responsible investments grew at twice the rate of all other assets under management. At a recent gathering of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland participants agreed that corporate social responsibility was an idea whose time has come. Their agenda included such topics as corporate transparency, the human impact of globalization, and closing the economic divide between the "haves" and the "have nots."
Locally AXIS has been very involved in Portland's own chapter of Business for Social Responsibility. Darcy is on the board and has facilitated a post-lecture learning circle for the Millennium Speaker Series sponsored by Nike, PGE and the Oregon Natural Step Network. She has also helped plan a series of radio spots for KMHD featuring local businesses promoting social responsibility. We try to model what we espouse by publishing an annual corporate report that details our activities related to our business, our community involvement and our environmental impact. We also "adopt" a non-profit agency each year to provide pro bono consulting services. This year we are looking for a non-profit interested in implementing The Natural Step or other sustainability plans.
The trend that seems the hardest for everyone to get a handle on is the paradigm shift from organization as machine to organization as living organism. We see the new paradigm applying at several levels.
At the team level we see a need to shift the way projects are staffed and managed. Traditional project management strategies are very lock step and linear and seem to have little to do with the way work really gets done. What we recognize as naturally occurring evolution of ideas, most project management tools see as disruptive change orders. On a larger scale we see the paradigm shift changing management style and structure away from hierarchy, control, silos, and task specific job duties toward more networked, self-organizing, flexible, organizations with broader spans of influence and job duties. At an even higher level we see organizations beginning to acknowledge our symbiotic relationship with the earth and our need to care for it so it will continue to provide for us.
Though many organizations are yet to fully acknowledge this shift, we are confident that it will present the biggest challenge of the century (See our past newsletters on Natural Work and The Natural Step for more perspective). We continue to educate ourselves about what we think will be important to our clients.
On the team level we are researching different strategies for managing projects that allow for real time decision making and take into account the "human" aspect of collaborative work. (Notice our session on project management in the upcoming Symposium on Self-Direction)
We are also building competence in the area of supply chain management to help organizations discover and leverage "eco-efficiencies" in their purchase and consumption of raw materials. And we are continuing our involvement with The Natural Step (a science based framework for achieving sustainability). We did twelve introductory presentations on The Natural Step for private businesses, government agencies, schools and professional associations last year and already have several scheduled for this quarter of 2000. We cant' help but notice that interest is on the rise. (Call us to schedule a free introductory presentation for your organization)We're not fortune tellers by any means, but the indicators behind these four trends are too compelling to ignore. If you'd like to learn more about any of these trends, we'd be happy to talk with you about them, or check out the resources we've listed below.
Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, and Amory and Hunter Lovins
When Corporations Rule the World by David Korten
The Living Company by Arie de Geus
Workforce 2020 by Richard Judy and Carol D'Amico
"Beyond the Information Revolution" by Peter Drucker in Oct 99 Atlantic Monthly
"Information: As If Understanding Mattered" by Jill Rosenfield in March 00 Fast Company
"Learning for a Change" an interview with Peter Senge by Alan Weber in May 99 Fast Company
"Getting Real About Virtual Commerce" by Philip Evans and Thomas Wurster in Nov-Dec 99 Harvard Business Review
September 28 & 29, 2000
Portland, Oregon
Whether you're just beginning to consider creating a high-performance organization or well on your way, there is something for you to learn at this conference and the pre-conference workshops.
New this year! Two pre-conference workshops on teams. If you need a good overview so you can put the conference into perspective, check out the introductory workshop, Everything You Need to Know About High-Performance Teams. If you have had teams for a while or want to learn about long-term challenges, sign up for Advanced Teaming: Lessons from the Field so you can avoid common pitfalls.
The conference day following the optional workshops is full of highly interactive sessions presented by consultants and practitioners from all sectors and business types.
Come for either or both days and energize your team efforts!
Click on Events for more information.
New this year! Two pre-conference workshops on teams!
At AXIS we consider the trend towards empowerment and interdependent work teams not as a new discovery of the twentieth century, but as a return to a more natural, age-old way of working. Having "grown through" our early mechanistic view of how organizations operate, we are recognizing that nature provides better models for structuring our organizations and designing our management systems. Evidence suggests that organizations that align with the tenets of both nature as well as human nature find success the "natural" outcome.
Designing natural workplaces involves aligning your businesses practices and systems along three lines:
· Operating within the limits of the natural environment
· Honoring the nature of human beings
· Accommodating the nature of individuals
The Survey
We were curious how many "natural work" practices organizations were using so last fall we designed and administered a survey which asked respondents to consider each of the elements of natural work described on the following page. We asked participants in the survey to first rate their organizations on a scale of 1-5 to indicate how well they felt each issue was currently being addressed and then to pick up to five items that they felt their organization should adopt or expand.
We used the participants at last year's Symposium on Self-Direction as our sample. Admittedly, since these were organizations that had an interest in empowerment and teams, they could be considered biased toward issues of employee well being. Also the audience was made up predominantly of government and service organizations. Manufacturing and heavy industries were not well represented in our sample. About half of the 130 people who attended the conference completed the survey.
The Findings
When we examined the items related to the inner two circles of our model (individual differences and human nature), we see satisfaction is highest on three issues (as evidenced by a higher than average rating and a low number of "should do" responses). #3 and #13 deal with giving people a chance to flex their work schedules and balance home/work life. Other research studies identified flex time as the number one reason people select and stay at their jobs. The third item, #8, deals with working in a "human-sized" work unit. This satisfaction can be accounted for by the bias in our sample; these were, after all, all people from team based organizations.
There were three areas respondents wanted to see change in their organization. They all relate to basic organizational design and management systems: #7 has to do with designing jobs around a whole process or product so that people are able to derive a sense of meaning from their work. #14 deals with fair and equitable rewards & compensation, while #15 addresses assigning leadership responsibilities based on skill rather than on position.
When we looked at items related to our outer circle, we find that Nature is still not on the radar screen for most organizations. In our experience this is true in general for service and government organizations which made up most of our sample. Since we administered the survey, however, the Governor of Oregon has announced his intention to issue an executive order requiring all state agencies to operate in a "sustainable" manner. We wonder if we weren't just a little ahead of the times and if people would respond differently were we to ask them to consider environmental issues again next year.
Aspect of Natural Work Average rating(5 = max score) Number of people who checked this as "should do"
Accommodating the diverse nature of individuals 1. People are encouraged to follow a career path which takes full advantage of their gifts, talents, and interests. 2. People have choice over what tasks they take on. 3. People are allowed to work flexible hours to accommodate differences in work style and home life. 4. Job descriptions and responsibilities are loosely defined so that people can trade off tasks based on their interests and skills. 5. The organization or team employs a diverse group of people, respecting the unique gifts each brings. |
3.04 2.85 3.21 2.48 3.27 |
18 11 13 14 |
Accommodating the characteristics of human nature 6. People have significant control over how and when they do their tasks. 7. Work is designed so that people derive meaning, satisfaction and a sense of pride for having achieved a goal or completed a whole project or product. 8. People are associated with a "human-sized" work unit (i.e., teams of <12 or autonomous business unit <200). 9. Work areas give people exposure to sunlight, vegetation and fresh air. 10. All work offers a balanced mix of physical and mental tasks. 11. The organization has built in time for play or other social activities. 12. The organization creates opportunities to learn and assures learning gets shared across groups. 13. The workplace allows for a satisfying work/life balance. 14. There is fair and/or equitable distribution of rewards and resources among members of the organization. 15. Who assumes leadership depends many times on the situation and the skills or abilities required of it rather than a fixed hierarchy. 16. Competition in the organization is contained to discrete events that are bounded, safe and public. 17. People are strongly committed to the organization's mission and find meaning in their work. |
3.07 2.84 3.67 2.58 2.48 3.07 3.29 2.81 2.89 2.88 3.10 |
8 25 9 13 13 19 8 23 20 5 16 |
Accommodating the requirements of nature (Based on the system conditions of The Natural Step) 18. The organization does not rely on materials from beneath the earth's crust (e.g. fossil fuels, heavy metals) 19. The organization does not rely on artificial chemicals, especially ones that are persistent in nature (e.g. plastics, pesticides, etc.) 20. The organization does not contribute to the degradation or depletion of nature (e.g. pollution, habitat destruction, urban sprawl, etc.) 21. The organization invests time and money in pursuing socially responsible practices (i.e., does what's good for workers, customers and community.) |
3.28 3.09 3.94 3.98 |
1 1 3 3 |
© Copyright 1999 AXIS Performance Advisors, Inc. All rights reserved.