A New Order
When revamping your corporate culture, the first rule is to have fewer rules.
By Alison Maitland
Alison Maitland is co-author of Future Work and Why Women Mean Business. A former longtime writer and editor for the Financial Times, she is a senior fellow in human capital at The Conference Board and a senior visiting fellow at Cass Business School, London. She can be reached via alisonmaitland.com.
Rules often stop businesses from becoming more flexible and efficient, as the following story illustrates.
Drivers for Abel & Cole, a U.K. organic-food company, used to have to make deliveries in the order set out by a logistics expert, even though there was a better way. The drivers knew where the traffic bottlenecks were, but if they wanted to avoid them, they had to make a formal request subject to approval by planners.
Then the company decided to put control into the drivers’ hands. It reprogrammed the logistics software so the drivers could decide the routes and the hours they worked to ensure that they meet delivery targets.
Deliveries sped up. Some drivers got up as early as 3 a.m. to avoid the snarl-ups. Some swapped customers to create more efficient routes. Eventually, the delivery system was completely reorganized. Thanks to their newfound autonomy, the drivers were able to cover for each other, and they were more satisfied with their jobs. The company saved money and provided a more reliable service to customers.
This story is told in a refreshing new book, The Happy Manifesto by Henry Stewart, founder and CEO of Happy Ltd., a London-based training company that has won a string of awards for customer service, positive impact on society, and being one of the United Kingdom’s best places to work. Great management, Stewart writes, is about getting out of the way. A manager should be there to provide support, coaching, and advice, not to check up on people and second-guess them. He advocates “pre-approval”—giving workers clear objectives, training them, presenting them with all the information they need, and then letting them get on with it, secure in the knowledge that what they decide is best for the business will have management backing.
Stewart admits this is “scary,” especially at first. But he is adamant that it’s worth it. “Pre-approval has a very positive effect on a company culture,” he says. “It encourages people to take more ownership and responsibility for their work. It also encourages innovation and creates a culture of looking for solutions.”
Trust is at the heart of this relationship between manager and employee. It’s based on the belief that most people, given freedom to act, will be self-motivated and will take responsibility for their decisions. Managers have often resisted this approach, while rules and processes have reinforced organizational inertia, yet this democratic view of management is more important than ever in the new world of work, with teams increasingly dispersed across locations and time zones. To remain competitive, companies need to make the shift from “manager knows best” to “manager provides the tools and objectives and leaves people to achieve the results.”
In researching our new book, Future Work, Peter Thomson and I asked managers twenty-five questions to rate their current and ideal organizations on a scale between two opposite cultures: “Type A,” a top-down, command-and-control ethos, and “Type B,” which trusts and empowers people. We found that strong Type B cultures are significantly likelier to be flexible about how and where work gets done. This type of culture also values creativity and questioning the rules, trusts people to “do the right thing,” and rewards outcomes rather than time and presence.
If people are given freedom to act and to challenge the rules, then this raises some interesting questions: Do we need rules at all in the new world of work, and if so, what kind? If people are to be truly empowered to do the job, won’t rules just stand in the way?
Some companies we interviewed have drawn up quite strict rules for new behavior. Vodafone in the United Kingdom and Microsoft in the Netherlands have both moved to new buildings that exemplify the way of working that they want to encourage. Most employees are able to work anywhere, so most people see the office as a place to meet and collaborate. There is a lot of open space and glass, rather than solid fixed walls and individual cubicles.
The senior people at both organizations say they need the new rules to reinforce the changes and prevent workers from slipping back into bad old habits, and that goes for managers as well as frontline staff. At Vodafone, no one, including the CEO, has more than a single drawer in a filing cabinet for possessions; everything that can be must be archived electronically. Because people still need to do some concentrated, individual work in the office, the company has set aside three glass-enclosed, shared “libraries” for quiet work. The rule is that if you talk in the library, you will be subject to a £50 fine. (The company tried providing small booths for concentrated work but abandoned them because some people tried to turn them into private offices, which defeated the goal of openness and collaboration.)
At Microsoft Netherlands, there are signs saying “Camping Forbidden.” People cannot take up residence, leave their stuff on the desk, and wander off to meetings for the rest of the day. “If you don’t use your place for two hours, you have to clean it and leave,” explains Gonnie Been, manager of corporate communications and social innovation.
I can see the need for clear guidelines, especially when you are trying to effect a big change in thinking and behavior. But there’s a danger that a new set of rigid rules could simply replace the old ones. If your people are told they must obey these new rules without question, might the new Type B culture that you have tried so hard to encourage gradually revert to a Type A one? If you truly believe that people are self-motivated and will take responsibility, aren’t these rules treating them like children all over again?
The best approach is probably to have some clear principles and let people work out how to apply them. In Future Work, we set out five principles for making a successful shift to more productive and people-friendly work styles: trust your people, reward output, understand the business case, start at the top, and treat everyone as an individual.
Unilever, which has embarked on an “agile working” program, has its own principles: Employees may work anytime, anywhere, provided business needs are met; leaders must lead by example; performance is determined by results, not time and attendance; travel should be avoided whenever possible; and managers are assessed on how well they support agility.
Another principle could be: Give people freedom within clear guidelines. Stewart asked hundreds of delegates at a conference which of three options they would prefer at work: being told what to do, total freedom, or freedom within clear guidelines. Nearly 90 percent chose the third.
At his training company, Stewart talks about implementing systems, not rules. “A rule has to be obeyed,” he says. “In response to a rule, you are expected to suspend your judgment. A system is the best way we have found so far to do something. But if any member of staff can think of a better way in the situation they are in, they are encouraged and expected to adapt the system.”
So, if you must introduce new rules in order to shift the culture of your organization, here are two more principles to follow: Make sure that the rules are drawn up with employees’ input and agreement, not just imposed. And revisit the rules regularly to check whether they are helping or hindering greater productivity and better customer service.