By Kieron Shaw
The following article was originally published back in September 2007.
WAKE-UP, CEO: Your employees expect to tell you how to run the business
"A financial analyst once asked me if I was afraid of losing control of our organisation. I told him I've never had control and I never wanted it. If you create an environment where the people truly participate, you don't need control. They know what needs to be done, and they do it." Herb Kelleher, Chairman & former CEO, Southwest Airlines [1]
Involvement – an unreachable utopia?
In 1771, Glasgow shipbuilder William Denny hit upon an idea. He launched an awards programme, encouraging his workers to suggest process improvements around the company's shipyard – the business world's first ever employee suggestion scheme.
Over 200 years later, many organisations seem to have evolved little beyond this limited model of employee involvement. Yet almost every major study on workforce commitment in the last 20 years has come to one conclusion: Bring your employees into the process of business growth, involving and empowering them, and you create an organisation that is more driven, more willing to go the extra mile, more customer-focused – and more successful too.
So why does it not happen?
"It's a wonderful aim," explains Mark Darby, head of internal communication at Visa Europe. "But the reality is that we don't live in a Quaker society, where everyone is hugely committed to the success of the common cause. Yes, you can make definite improvements on employee involvement – and one or two steps forward would be a huge leap for most. But the idea that you're going to have every single employee all-singing, all-dancing and feeling involved is just not reasonable."
Such doubts come thick and fast from sceptics: Some believe a model of business founded on widescale involvement is unrealistic. It's not the way actual business works. It takes too long, costs too much, and would make the business too bureaucratic. What's more, it would require a fundamental culture change that would take years to bring about.
Why, therefore, would the idea of an involved business be so compelling in the first place?
For a start, there is a large body of evidence that proves its value.
The numbers speak better than any words
Jim Collins and Jerry Porras (Built to Last, 1994) pointed to the phenomenal gains made when employees had a strong affiliation with their businesses – a massive 16-to-1 long-term differential on the stock market compared to companies with less involved workforces.
Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman's First, Break All the Rules (1996) went further. Surveying one million employees worldwide, the researchers uncovered a dozen questions on which positive scores universally pointed to units with higher levels of productivity, employee retention and customer satisfaction – no matter what the company, its size or sector. Those 12 questions all centred on employees' own self-management and involvement, and eight of them (including "I know what is expected of me at work," "I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day," and "At work, my opinions seem to count") correlated directly with the profitability of the business.
The perils of involving everyone in everything
There are still many who doubt, however, that one can truly achieve such involvement given practical issues of scale, scope and cost: It's one thing in a firm of 100 people; it's quite another to actively involve 100,000 globally dispersed employees in a major multinational.
"I think it's feasible to aim to get every employee involved in some areas of the business that can have an impact on business performance," concedes Darby. "But you can't have a culture of involvement in everything. You can't have a 50,000-person management team."
And even if you could, it would surely potentially "open a can of worms" – leading to employee dissent whenever they couldn't have a say in absolutely everything.
Jeremy Starling, director of involvement agency Involve (formerly The Eventworks), dismisses that idea completely. "I've never in my career heard of an organisation that was 'too involved’," he says. "I've never heard a leader say, 'What are we going to do? Our employees are just too involved and committed to the business, and I can't control it. It's just anarchy.'
"Involvement is simply an underlying philosophy that aims to encourage ownership, commitment, belief and action throughout the business. That's a recipe for easing management's burden, not for mob rule.”
Keep it small. Keep it rational
"It's a matter of degree," says Monika Stafford, head of group internal communication for LloydsTSB. "In terms of shaping the company strategy, there have to be clear limits and specific focus around who gets involved on what. But, equally, if you're involving everyone in what goes on the canteen menu, it would be a waste of everybody's time. So structure and limitations are essential."
And, says Viv Miles, head of performance development at GCap Media, an involvement culture can thrive even with such limitations. "Most people in the business like to think they're strategic," he explains. "But most also accept that the corporate strategy is decided by a few and delivered by the many. Strategy has to have meaning for everyone, but be seeded by the top leadership."
Starling of Involve simplifies it further. “It’s the job of the leaders to sell ‘What' the business needs to achieve and 'Why,'" he says. "Involvement is when you ask your people ‘How?’ They’ll come up with great answers and, more importantly, they’ll take ownership. For us, it’s all about helping businesses get that balance right – between the ‘Why,’ the ‘What’ and the ‘How.’”
The practical arguments against an involvement-led approach are therefore perhaps easy to overstate. Keep the solution scalable – small, directed, individually targeted in key areas – and the end result is potentially neither unwieldy nor an empty charade.
The GE "Work-Out"
Of course, when the time is right and leadership is behind it, the 'How' can also be scaled up – and to fantastic effect.
Jack Welch's time as CEO of General Electric is a prime example. Increasing its market value from just $14 billion to over $410 billion in his two decades there, he frequently cited his employee action plan "Work-Out" as a key catalyst in the turnaround [2]. Overnight, thousands of ailing processes at GE changed – with solutions entirely proposed, scoped out and driven through by the 290,000 employees themselves after a series of non-stop pitches to senior management, who gave the green light on the spot.
The process has unsurprisingly been adopted by numerous organisations over recent years and on smaller, more manageable scales.
After its merger with Compaq in 2002, HP's consultancy arm in the UK faced critically low levels of engagement in the change. All 800 employees were mobilised in teams at a two-day "action event" to brainstorm solutions to each of 16 major challenges, with facilitators on hand. Phones and laptops provided access to key personnel, and the whole organisation was put on call so that decisions could be made on the spot. One year after the event, further research showed that all but two of the 16 major challenges were now considered "solved".
Can involvement work outside of process improvement?
Such process improvement brainstorms are a clear place to look for success. But can the same involvement principles apply to day-to-day changes in knowledge or service organisations, where intellectual capital and information management are the key target areas?
"Absolutely, because the only differentiator many of those businesses now have is how well they can deliver a better customer experience," argues Starling. "Involved staff are connected to the main purpose of the business, and they actively attempt to give the customer experience the company is trying to create."
Viv Miles adds a further level: "The higher the level of involvement, the better chance you have of keeping your most talented employees," he explains. "And that's a double-whammy – because people who are top talent and also involved with the business give of themselves to the customer on a whole new level."
Sky Broadcasting, for example, recently launched an external campaign to raise awareness of its "carbon footprint". Rather than simply circulate the news internally, they challenged employees to calculate their own carbon footprint, using a specially built intranet site. This then informed face-to-face sessions, discussing the environmental impact of the company and its employees, and stimulating suggestions for improving both. "They were taking a core part of their external identity and involving employees in it internally," explains Mark Darby, a keen fan of the programme. "Every employee felt involved in helping Sky reduce their carbon footprint because of that."
The crucial challenge for involvement: Culture change
However, such individual programmes, roadshows and "action events" can't operate in isolation. The real challenge is creating an entire corporate culture of active involvement.
"And there are so many issues involved in changing your business culture that it's no simple undertaking," says Monika Stafford. "First, everyone has to want to do it and for a very good reason. Second, everyone in management has to act concertedly in the same way and with full agreement. Third, there must be commitment to the long-term if, as research suggests, it takes at least six years to change the culture of a company."
And with business decisions increasingly focused little beyond the current financial quarter, many would argue that a long-term goal like this can't ever be a feasible proposition.
"But if you don't start to take that change," argues Starling, "you will never unleash employee talent to anything like its potential. So it's not how you get past those barriers, it's how you can't afford not to. Knowing that, you simply have to commit to developing long term and getting help from wherever you can to drive that desire through every layer of leadership."
A changing working culture
Even with that commitment, there is one final, crucial barrier to such culture change – culture itself.
Headlines on executive fraud, sweatshop labour, offshoring, environmental damage and mass corporate corruption are now almost daily events, leading to an ever-increasing cynicism towards employers – buoyed by the end of a "jobs for life" culture in most businesses, and the rise of the global corporation (thereby placing further huge barriers of size and scale between employee and employer).
Further complicating matters is the arrival of Generations X and Y – naturally sceptical of authority anyway. “Although they are better educated, more techno-savvy, and quicker to adapt than those who have come before them," says Eric Chester in his book, Employing Generation 'Why', "they refuse to blindly conform to traditional standards and time-honored institutions. Instead, they boldly ask, ‘Why?’”
Not naturally affiliative towards institutions, cynical of those in power – and then raised in this atmosphere of general declining corporate trust. This is the future of the workforce.
"Y" involvement will soon be unavoidable
Yet there is a silver lining. While, in this climate, the opportunities for getting true involvement have never seemed so bleak, it's therefore equally true that they have never been more important for business to address. The more trust in employers slips, the less wedded people are to "jobs for life," and the more a millennial generation enters the workforce, a concerted drive towards involvement must surely now become the critical focus of workforce productivity.
What's more, the time is ripe. They may be cynical, but studies show that Generations X & Y are equally not willing to be told what to do and think: This is a generation that actively demands to be involved and empowered.
"Its time for a new Generation X-Y way of thinking," agrees Monika Stafford. "It's not about top-down or bottom-up; it's all about side-to-side communication and sharing ideas across the organisation now, because that's what they expect. The new social media is built on the very principles of involvement and collaboration. And side-to-side is where you really get the brains in the room – it's what drives dynamism and innovation. Business is missing a trick if its not already harnessing it."
Google exemplifies how productively a young workforce can be involved to reshape collaboration. All Google engineers are expected to spend 20% of their office time working on personal projects unrelated to their job description. A recipe for an unproductive workforce? Far from it. The "20% time" process releases employees to work on pet technology projects, unleashing their drive to innovate in areas of personal passion. The result? Vice-president Melissa Mayer estimates that more than half of Google's new product launches have come from "20% time" projects (including GMail, Google News and AdSense).[3]
The future is now
The millennial generation are not passive learners. They don't believe in endlessly and needlessly "paying their dues." (Why should they? They're unlikely still to be in the job in 10 years time to see the payoff.) And they don't honour "implicit" authority. They believe their opinions and efforts count, and they are keen to exercise autonomy.
In other words, they are just naturally involved – and, like it or not, that spells a completely changing power dynamic in businesses that will soon be impossible to ignore.
CASE STUDY: Visa Europe
Involvement is the ethos at the heart of good business. But to ingrain that concept over many years also requires the careful use of precise tactics, built around specific circumstances.
At Visa Europe, 'product innovation' is one such area that has proven to be an especially potent stimulant for employee involvement. The company has lately been working on a 'contactless card' to replace traditional cash machines with keyboards and PIN codes. It will be a debit card that, like the London Underground's Oyster card, will require little more than a swipe on an electronic reader to dispense small amounts of cash.
To date, 150 employees have been involved in a live trial of the card over several weeks, with online discussion forums supplementing face-to-face dialogues to stimulate participation, to encourage suggestions to aid ongoing development, and to close the loop on two-way feedback.
"The crucial thing for us is that it leads to action," says Mark Darby, head of internal communication at Visa Europe. "For me, that's the big stepping stone of an involved approach to business: It's not just dialogue. It leads to real change. And we've already got 1,000 advocates for this card and it's not even been launched yet."
An involvement-centred approach to change
Some of the biggest strides towards involvement at Visa centre on a extensive organisational change programme. "We're changing the structure of how we work with colleagues around the world, at the same time as managing increasingly tough competition and maintaining our market position," he explains.
And, he says, the company's typically very involved philosophy has already taken a hit. "One of the biggest lessons we've learned, and are still learning, is that there is so much to communicate around the change, it has too often become just 'show and tell,'" he concedes. Employees have been gathered face to face or via video link once a month for a 90-minute presentation. "Because we've done that, we thought we'd made employees clear about where we are," he says. "But because we've not had dialogue with them, it's been ineffective."
The solution? The company is now bringing together its line management for regular briefing sessions on the change, which they then take out to discuss with their teams. "It's separate to the team briefing process, and less formal," he says. "But it's just making sure that people throughout the organisation are able to have crucial discussions, back and forth in small, interactive groups, about the nature of the changes."
But more than this, the company is taking what Darby describes as the "real leap forward" to becoming an involved business around the change: A personal, bottom-up view of the new company vision.
The company is asking its employees to share across the whole organisation their own, personal journeys – where they each individually have come from with Visa and where they think it should be going. Through their regular meetings with managers – in a process that will eventually become the team briefing process itself – they are being asked to feed back up the organisation their contributions every quarter around a dedicated part of the company's goals.
"And we’re using those stories to actually put together the Visa vision," he explains. "So our vision is almost going to be a story that updates itself every quarter from the inside, by getting our peoples' own journeys. We have some employees who have been here for donkey's years, others who've been here only 6 months. And we strongly believe that if we put all their stories together, that really is who the company is and where it's going. The company itself is not the management team or our products and services – it's the personal experiences and visions of every one of us. That is Visa Europe."
CASE STUDY: ITV
At ITV, the old Jack Welch "Work-Out" model of quality management and process improvement is beginning to be used in a less industrial way than the pure GE approach, to create a new way of allowing employees to have a say in their own destinies at the company, and to stimulate a living culture of involvement.
A recent "Away Day" for the Broadcast Operations team was structured from an oblique angle. Most events like this have a simple aim: to talk about where the business is going, albeit perhaps with a sop to employee concerns through end-of-day discussions around "what they think" or "what this will mean to them." But the core structure, intent and key outcomes of the day are almost always solely (and very clearly) the business.
ITV's Away Day took the same thematic baseline – how can we build a better future? but instead flipped it to take the point of view of employees themselves. Not "how will you fit in with the business's future?" but "what kind of future do you want as an employee here?"
"We still started with the big organisational items – what we want to achieve in the next 12 months, what our priorities are, and then helping employees think about their own, personal roles in those", explains Helen Stevens, Director of Broadcast Operations for ITV. "But we also took a major amount of time in the day to ask people 'what's important to you and what do you want out of your future at ITV?'"
This was no idle request. It was part of a designated process both to institute the "Work Out" philosophy at the level of personal development and also to drive up levels of autonomous self-management.
Once core issues had been identified, mostly, to the organisers' surprise, these centred on personal development and training, rather than salary, benefits and bonuses. Those who wanted the changes they'd raised were given the authority to pursue them, so we said “If mentoring programmes or training is what you want, great, so now go off and work out how we'd achieve that and bring back to me, as the manager of the department, some proposals with costs attached and feasibilities for any challenging areas, such as how you will backfill positions if you go off on secondments."
Stevens and a fellow director then scheduled a full day to hear proposals and team after team came in to pitch the ideas, lured by the promise of an instant green light if their proposals were soundly worked out or, at the very least, a request for more feasibilities if not.
“It is so loaded with benefits that it amazes me that more businesses and managers don't apply it” says Stevens. It's really interesting, people who previously would just grumble and say 'Oh, we want this, but of course nobody ever does it for us' are now being asked to roll their sleeves up and make it happen for themselves and they jump at the chance! And not only that, they are having to think through some of the difficulties attached to it."
She estimates that about 40 percent of employees, were enthusiastic about being involved and got right on the case. The rest decided to ’sit on the fence’. "They were a bit sceptical and they just wanted to see if anything would actually come of it” says Stevens
But the key to turning the sceptics around is in the virtual circle and this format will become an annual part of the away day activity. So we will then come back next year and say, ”Here’s what you said you wanted to do, here's what you guys have achieved, we didn't do it for you, you did it yourselves. Now, what do we want to do next?’ So it's not just a 'once a year' involvement event. It's a continuous programme of empowering people to fulfil their own destinies. So we hope that, next year, we'll push that involvement level up another 10% and keep growing and, at the very least, if they don't get involved, they'll know that they could do and something will happen as a result."
And in terms of tangible outcomes, Stevens is a paid-up advocate. "The quality of the work they pitched to us really surprised us, I suddenly realised just how very talented the people in my group are and mostly they're quite pragmatic as well, that was another thing that stunned me. They didn't come up with outrageous, completely ‘undoable’ ideas, they were all very realistic about the organisation's capabilities and they built in optional workarounds thinking about ways to keep costs low."
In fact, three of the proposals were so good that Stevens and her colleague took them higher, with the developing teams pitching the ideas at larger corporate events, for organisation-wide take-up.
Ultimately, however, the benefit for Stevens is in a more rational distribution of power, a devolution that works for everyone. "It's brilliant. It's basically the things that you as a manager would be doing, but instead you're passing it down into the organisation to the people who feel most passionately about it and want to work on it, and saying: 'Give it some thought.' You take the time and development pressure off yourself, and you give the people who want it most the chance to bring it to fruition."
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[1] Leader to Leader, No. 4 Spring 1997
[2] The Welch Way, 2002
[3] http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/msande472/060517-msande472-300.asx
Kieron Shaw is an independent writer and researcher in employee communication. He was previously the editor of The Business Communicator journal and Melcrum Publishing's Head of Research.
September 2007
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