Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom

How to Prevent Organizational Drag

In their new book, TIME | TALENT | ENERGY: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power, Bain & Company partner Michael Mankins and his co-author Eric Garton identify the specific causes of organizational drag – otherwise known as the collection of institutional factors that slow things down, decrease output and performance, and drain people’s energy.

The book claims that the average company loses more than 25 percent of its productive power to organizational drag. This is often an inevitable complication of companies getting larger and instituting more processes and procedures. According to Harvard Business Review, organizational drag costs the economy more than $3 trillion each year in lost output.

As Mankins told writer Stephanie Vozza at Fast Company, the most common processes relate to expense management. “At most companies, there are spending limits and audits, and employees are tracked,” he says. “At Netflix, however, there is no expense policy. The only policy is, ‘Act in the best interest of Netflix.’ The company is telling employees, ‘We assume you are not here to rip off the company, and we’re not going to put in place processes that consume human capital, waste time, and zap energy.’ They tell employees to assume their best judgment, and they can be more productive if they’re not held back.”

This, Mankins claims, is why companies like Netflix are 40 percent more productive and have profit margins that are 30 to 50 percent higher than industry averages. Apparently, most organizations start off with roughly the same number of high performers, but organizations with less drag produce far more every day – and the difference compounds every year.

One secret of companies with less organizational drag involves putting a majority of star performers on mission-critical projects that are essential to the business. Another relates to the development of inspiring leaders. As Mankins says in the Fast Company piece, Dell recognized the productivity difference between inspired and average teams. “Sales teams led by an inspiring leader are 6 percent more productive than those that have an average leader. If you extrapolate that 6 percent it accounts for an extra $1 billion in annual revenue.”

For more on organizational drag, check out the full post on the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Agility Means Different Things to Different People

According to Forrester analyst Craig Le Clair, business agility is the quality that allows an enterprise to embrace market and operational changes as a matter of routine. This is the attribute that enables companies to thrive amidst uncertainty. Unfortunately, most companies have apparently not accepted this broad view. When Forrester reviewed the elements of agility with its CIO and CMO clients, the firm found that while the issue of agile performance was critical, CIOs and CMOs did not agree on what it meant in practice.

To clear up some of the confusion, over the last several years, Le Clair has refined his 10 dimensions of agility and divided them into three major categories: market (channel integration, market responsiveness), organization (knowledge dissemination, digital psychology, and change management, and process (business intelligence, infrastructure elasticity, process architecture, and sourcing and supply chain). Let’s look at each dimension a bit more closely.

Market

• Channel Integration: Information sharing and cross-channel experiences
• Market Responsiveness: Customer knowledge and rapid access to resources

Organization

• Knowledge Dissemination: Broader sharing, flatter organizations
• Digital Psychology: Trend awareness and digital skillsets
• Change Management: Embracing change and embedded change management

Process

• Business Intelligence: Information management and distributed analytics
• Infrastructure Elasticity: Cloud awareness and embrace of cloud options
• Process Architecture: Process skills and core systems independence
• Software Innovation: Real-time experience and incremental development
• Sourcing and Supply Chain: Agile sourcing process and supply chain flexing skills

For more of Le Clair's ideas, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Making a Good Decision with Limited Information

Leaders do not always have the luxury of time when making a critical business decision, yet research shows that quick decisions are often remarkably solid despite time pressures. Here are six strategies for coming to the best conclusion in a non-ideal situation.

Strategy 1: Define Your Result

Consider why you must make a prompt decision now. What is the most pressing problem, and what do you need to have happen as a result of the decision? If everything worked out the way you hope, what would be the outcome? Don’t get too caught up in a detailed list of pros and cons, because inevitably, some listed won’t be as important as others. Recognize that every option will likely have a downside as there is rarely a 100 percent perfect decision. You simply have to do the best you can with the data you have available at the time.

Strategy 2: Look Both Short and Long-Term

Envision how your decision will play out immediately, and how it will play out down the road. Understand your organization’s short and long-term goals and evaluate your decision in relation to both of those. Suzy Welch’s 10-10-10 method is one way to employ this strategy: think about the implications of your decision 10 minutes from now, 10 months from now, and 10 years from now!

Strategy 3: Reduce Your Risk with a Trial

If you are uncertain about the best path forward, can you test the impact of a particular decision on a small scale? For instance, can you implement a new process in a single department, or company-wide for only one month? Trials give you an out if a decision isn’t working, and also provide opportunities to modify your approach based on feedback.

Strategy 4: Talk to People Who Have Been There

Seek out those (either inside or outside your company) who have been in a similar situation and probe them about their learnings. You might also ask the opinions of those who will be directly affected by the decision, and those who are truly impartial. The more perspectives you can get, the better informed your decision will be. However, in order to protect yourself from analysis paralysis, don’t leave your inquiry open-ended. Instead, commit to a concrete decision after collecting points of view for a specified period of time.

For more strategies, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.

Are You Wondering What Employees Are Really Thinking?

Gallup asked nearly 200,000 US employees their opinions on a variety of topics current transforming our workforces, including flextime, agile performance management, and matrixed teaming. Exactly how critical are these developments to weave into our cultures and establish concrete policies around today? The statistics speak for themselves.

Flextime

Gallup defined differentiating benefits and perks as those that a segment of organizations offer, those that most employees say they would change jobs to get, and those that correlate most highly with employee engagement and well-being. The survey respondents cited flextime, which allows employees to have some choice in the time of day they work, as the sole differentiating benefit. Fifty-one percent of employees say they would change jobs for this benefit, while 44 percent say their company offers it.

In conjunction with flextime, remote working is on the rise. In 2012, Gallup data showed that 39 percent of employees worked remotely in some capacity. In 2016, that number grew four percentage points to 43 percent.

Employees whose organization allows them to change their hours, schedules, and location of work as needed have higher levels of engagement and well-being than other employees. They are more likely to strongly agree that a manager who lets them set their own schedule cares about them as a person.

Agile Performance Management

According to the survey, the majority of US employees show up at their job every day without the guidance, incentives and support needed to perform at their best. Only a mere 21 percent strongly agrees that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.

Much of the criticism aimed at performance management focuses on the frequency and quality of performance feedback. Gallup found that only 20 percent of employees strongly agree they have had a conversation with their manager in the last six months about the steps they can take to reach their goals. Only 23 percent of employees strongly agree their manager provides meaningful feedback to them, and 26 percent of employees strongly agree the feedback they receive helps them do better work. Furthermore, only 21 percent of employees strongly agree they have performance metrics that are within their control.

Obviously, upping feedback frequency is an important component of making performance management more effective. But as these results indicate, employees also want to be fairly measured and evaluated and to have a say in their future.

For more from the Gallup survey, head over to the QuickBase Fast Track blog.