We are living in an age of information overflow. In less than 3 years, the amount of available information doubles. Even if you try, you just cannot stay up-to-date. There’s too much going on.

You can try to work harder, not smarter. But there is a limit to how much you can capture alone. Instead, try it the smart way: engage your co-workers. Together, you just know more.

The first step is to get as much input as you possibly can. Keep your organisation open. Attend events and trade shows. Follow the industry news. Talk to press, customers and competitors. All this is well-known. But is it part of your company’s culture? Or are you just going through the moves?

Don’t just say you want input. Build a system to get input. Create an internal community to discuss new trends. And create an external one, too! Worst case, you know what customers complain about and you can improve on that. You can only win.

At the same time, build a vision. Where do you want to be in 10 years? What does your company stand for? What makes you better?

When you’re up to date, you need to make decisions. Involve as many stakeholders as possible:

• Sales and business development know the competition. They know what customers expect and where your offering is lacking. This improves your market positioning.
• R&D knows the technical areas of improvement. A better product stands out.
• Technical support knows the common problems. Solve these and your customers are happier.
• At any stage, check with your vision. Your customers may want buggy whips, but you may want to build cars.

Finally, a roadmap is a living project. Don’t update it every year. Gather ideas continuously and keep the discussion going.

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

Aeon magazine frequently publishes articles that makes me stop and think, but in a good way. The best articles make me reflect on what is relevant and what is just distracting. In a way, that in itself is distracting, but I digress.

Dougald Hine discusses a very relevant topic in his recent article on Aeon. Many people expected boredom to be solved with the advent of the Internet. If everything you ever want to read or see is at your fingertips, how can you still be bored?

“(Meaning) requires, among other things, space for reflection – allowing what we have already absorbed to settle, waiting to see what patterns emerge.”

Not only are we still bored, we started trolling. Hine points out that it’s not just a few antisocial elements who become aggressively bored. He recognises the tendency in all of us. It turns out that more raw information wasn’t the answer to boredom. Meaning is.

Meaning can be found when connecting the dots. You don’t just get meaning by filtering out the noise. You get meaning when you take a break from more information and reflect. When you finally get the time to do some processing, you can transform information into meaning: “It is an alchemical transformation, always surprising. It takes skill, time and effort, practice and patience. No matter how experienced we become, success cannot be guaranteed.”

I see a similar tendency in organisations today. Most organisations keep themselves well occupied. HR, like most other departments, spends quite some time fighting fires. Whatever the problem is, more mails and meetings seem to be the answer. I’ve been in companies where thousands of mails were sent every day. But the most common complaint was that “we should communicate more.” In such a rat race, you either try to keep up, or you drop out with a bore-out.

The solution is to put some meaning back into your organisation. Take a look at what you are achieving. What is the impact of how you work? How is the quality of projects, the contacts between colleagues, and of your time spent inside your offices? Is this what you want for your organisation? If it’s not, you should spend some serious time to reflect. Don’t just do it with your management team, but make it an organisation wide exercise. The result is unknown. But it may be one of the most important journeys you can take with your organisation and your co-workers

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.

OuiShare is a community that works on a new economic model of sharing. As one can expect, it’s a very diverse selection of people that works on many different projects. One of the articles in the OuiShare magazine caught my eye as it seems to pinpoint the core of human interactions. Whether it’s about sharing or about collaborating in an organisation, trust is the one building block that’s required before you can even get started.

Helena Palha‘s short article deals specifically with the trust required to work in a digital environment. I would argue that trust in “conventional” environments is actually underestimated. As a member of BNI, I know how trust helps me get more business. But trust is also the foundation of any work in any organisation. A large part of the problems that companies face, for example, can be reduced to lack of trust. Either the manager doesn’t trust the team members and starts micromanaging them. Or the team members don’t trust the manager and start freewheeling. Or the team doesn’t trust other teams, which results in mutual suspicion that destroys the the performance of the whole company.

Building up trust is a matter of being open. Explain what your goals are and how you plan to get there. Make it clear how you can help others and how they can help you. Ask questions until you understand the same from the others. Build up a culture of transparency and you build up trust. When it works, your organisation is far more efficient than competitors who are not working on their company culture: you will have better ideas for products, your customer service will be better and your bottom line will reflect this.

I’ve just updated the home page with some new visuals.

Bankei analyses your situation and proposes concrete steps to get your people involved, engaged and enthusiastic about your company.

Bankei is about the soul of your company. Most companies work out a good remuneration package for their employees. (Some companies don’t even do that.) While a good salary, a car and other advantages are welcome and necessary, they are not sufficient. Even in a company with competitive salaries, it’s not uncommon to find demotivated people, burn-outs and bore-outs, as well as energy wasted on battling each other. Clearly, something is missing.

Research shows that it’s not the tangible benefits that matter. Intangibles are what makes your company great. 95% of the companies is aware of this, but only 5% actually work on it.

Bankei helps you improve the intangibles in your organisation. We analyse your situation and propose concrete steps to get your people involved, engaged and enthusiastic about your company. We clarify objectives, missions, goals, tasks and collaboration. By making the organisation more transparant, an atmosphere of respect for internal diversity and the work of others arisea. As a result, your company becomes resilient to the fast changing world, agile to react to change and effective in its actions.

Contact us now for a free introduction.

In this Co.Exist article, Seth Godin points out a few things to keep in mind while working. As usual, they cover ideas that are well known (focus on “What’ s in it for them”), but with his own unique twist. Teaser: his first point is to do things with a sense of purpose and to remind you of that purpose frequently. Enjoy !

A study by Stepstone, a Belgian recruitment website, indicates the following three top reasons:

• Lack of professional challenges
• Dissatisfaction with responsibilities
• Lack of personal development options

The fact that the salary and conditions are below these three, indicates a well-known fact: money isn’t a motivator for action (either at work or to leave work), but it’s a base condition that should be met.

If you have a problem with personnel turnover and the resulting attrition, the reason is usually not personal. It’s not the employee, his colleagues or his manager that cause him to leave. Take a look at how people interact when decisions are made. Are there hotspots of decision making ?  Can you make people more autonomous by delegating ?  Organisations that involve people in governance and decision making are taking away the three top motivators to leave a company.