Bosses who make the planning are dinosaurs of the industrial age. They made sense when bosses knew everything and labourers didn’t. With the Internet, all that has changed. It’s okay to admit it’s the 21^st century (not the 19^th) and to get everybody involved. Stop deciding, discuss!

There are plenty of tools to involve your co-workers in planning. A popular one is the Agile method that started in software development.

In Agile, you pin all the tasks on the left side of a board. Every day, you pick a new task and move it to the middle of the board. When you’re done, that task moves to the right side.

One disadvantage of Agile is that there is still a Master who prepares the tasks for the board. Instead, make this into a task like any other. Anybody who feels like it can then prepare the tasks.

Agile is a great method for homogenous teams where everybody has similar skills. Sometimes, this isn’t the case. It soon becomes clear who is the best match for a task. At Eonic, I wrote the documentation. Others were better at helping sales or answering technical questions. When a new task came up, it was pretty easy to decide who would do it. But even then, we always allowed anybody to take up any task: no better way to learn than by doing it. If the task was critical, an expert would assist or review it.

While the system we used at Eonic was simple and informal, it had all the seeds of postmodern team management. Instead of function profiles, we used competences. Instead of centralised planning, we discussed. Instead of being lived, the team members lived their own jobs.

This post is part of the 8 Tips To Get Your Co-Workers Engaged. Click the link to see the other tips.

When discussing how to grow or improve a company, the culture is usually not an item that is high on the agenda. Business development, marketing, product development, efficiency improvements… I call these the body of the company. While important, it’s sterile to improve only these. Compare it to an alcoholic: getting him sober may heal his liver, but it won’t rid him of his core problem. Similarly, the company culture touches the heart of the company. How do you treat your co-workers? How involved are they? Do they have the opportunity to help you raise your organisation to a higher level?

When you involve your people in the organisation, they help you develop and grow your business

Aside from philanthropic reasons to get your people involved in decision making, there are tangible benefits for your organisation as well. Hay Group, a management consulting group, has published research into this matter. It points out three advantages of motivated and engaged personnel:

• They stay in the organisation longer
• Their performance is up to 50% higher (though this can be much higher depending on the situation)
• They offer great customer service.

I would add a fourth one: when you involve your people in the organisation, they help you develop and grow your business. Not just in the sense that a business developer does it, but by bringing a much larger expertise and many more ideas to the table. The world is moving so fast nowadays that you cannot follow all the business trends on your own. Get your people to think along and your organisation can act quicker on changes in your business context.

For the coming week or so, I am preparing a number of practical tips to get your co-workers engaged in your organisation. Start now to outpace your competition. But don’t forget to have fun along the way!

In the coming weeks, I will be blogging on how we work. Quite a number of posts will point out defects in our current way of working. Other will indicate how we can improve. In our current economic worldview, an improvement is only real when it can be measured. That’s why I will first talk about some of the benefits that an organisation gets when working in non-traditional ways.

4 times your productivity in 3 years’ time, without extra costs

In 2012, Eric Van Zele was voted Manager of the Year by Trends. When he started leading Barco, he told management that they had failed:

“Onze mensen geloven niet in ons verhaal. Ze zien het echt niet meer zitten”.

His approach was to get large parts of the company involved in the transformation. He decentralised the decisions away from traditional management, to a broader range of people. Key areas of improvement were, amongst other, “cultural, commitment and  engagement”. The success was spectacular:

“Je zoekt mensen met passie en dan is het vallen en opstaan en corrigeren tot je er bent. (…) Met dezelfde ploeg en dezelfde kosten kunnen we in Kuurne nu drie of vier keer meer omzet maken.”

Multiply your turnover by 3 or 4 with the same costs? That’s impossible if you just tweak your processes or implement a number of best practices. Improve your company culture, though, and you can get spectacular results just like these.

After the launch of the new Society 3.0 book yesterday in Eindhoven, I had the chance to chat about a software product that Seats2Meet uses for their co-working space: The Serendipity Machine. In short, it turns their co-working space into a social network and lifts the whole concept up to a completely new level.

The Serendipity Machine is about finding people who can help you. If you are building your product and need a website, you can see if there’s somebody with that skill in the room or at another Seats2Meet site. This fits perfectly into the Society 3.0 mindset: do things for others and they’ll do things for you. Together, you can build what you want without having to pay corporations to do it for you.

All the other aspects of the Seats2Meet co-working space are enablers. You can pick a place for free, use the free Wi-Fi and drink a few cups of the free coffee. Everything to attract crowds is free. The more people join in, the higher the chances that you can find somebody who can help you. Only when you rent a meeting room, you pay per person.

The software of the Serendipity Machine is simple, which has advantages and disadvantages. Skills are tags that you attach to your profile. I think tags are great because they are so easy to use and they fit the purpose of Seats2Meet just right. For business purposes, though, they might not be sufficient. Jef Staes proposes a Competence Playlist and I’m helping him work out how that might be implemented. Validation of your competences by others is crucial in the playlist. At the same time, the competence playlist must evolve quickly: what you did yesterday may not be what you want to do tomorrow. There’s some work to be done to get it right, but it’s nice to see others are thinking in the same direction.