Opening Insights: A Cultural Challenge
Instant gratification. That is what drives the personal computer / smartphone generation. Technology conditioned them to need to instantly (without cost or effort) find the answers to all their questions. As a result, constructive thinking was eliminated and the ability to leverage a reasoning process based on problem, answer and an implementable solution is lost.
Instant access to information created a generation that is smart, but who never developed the wisdom to connect the dots and the insight to apply those connections to real life. This is the millennial generation: I don't hear or see you - I already know - I don't care.
Culture is the combined: perceptions, attitudes, thinking, feeling and behaviors of a collective group of people. The social and home culture of people make up the corporate culture and vice versa. Today's culture has never been more connected, but alone, more self-centered, more fear-based and more divided in vision, understanding, thinking, generation and capabilities (on an emotional and cognitive level).
The challenge in dealing with the current workforce has many businesses and CEOs scrambling for WHAT TO DO. In many cases, automation (replace the unreliable human with a loyal bot/robot) seems to be the most cost effective, long-term problem solver…
BUT IS IT?
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are wonderful. They consistently/reliably DO THE RIGHT THING – THE THING WE TELL THEM TO DO. However, AI lacks the necessary human elements to effectively create, care and be of service in a way that evokes sentience - human understanding.
Scrambling to find a solution for the cross generational challenges of communication, knowledge transfer and productivity within the divided cultures sees some companies, like Amazon, struggling to apply old models that worked and adapt them to new models that perpetuate the cultural climate. Ponder this; is the current cultural climate one that we want to perpetuate, or one that we need to evolve?
Informational Insights: The New Spin
Last year, Amazon launched a program called "Pivot," designed to help underperforming employees improve their work.
Amazon implemented a solution. They have taken the 360 review process and modernized it to deal with their current challenges. What will be the results of applying this method of reforming their culture? An article from entrepreneur.com explores this question.
It's been 18 months since Pivot was introduced and, as Bloomberg's Spencer Soper and Business Insider's Prachi Bhardwaj reported, some employees are protesting that the hearing process isn't fair.
Under the Pivot program, employees who are put on a performance-improvement plan have three options, Bhardwaj reported:
- Quit and receive severance pay.
- Spend the next couple of months proving their worth by meeting certain performance goals set by the manager.
- Face a panel of peers in a courtroom-style videoconference, in which the employee and his or her boss present arguments about whether the employee should stay in the Pivot program.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the panel is made up of global co-workers who have similar jobs at Amazon.
Seventy percent of employees lose the trials, meaning they must choose between the first and second options above. If the employee wins the trial, they are removed from Pivot and have the choice to return to their current team or be placed on another team.
Business Insider spoke to three workplace experts about the value and potential implications of the Pivot program. All three agreed that the program was "innovative" in the world of people management.
How innovative is Amazon's approach? Examine whether their approach creates an individual and culture of TRUST AND LOVE or one of FEAR AND DIVIDE.
Under the Pivot program, employees choose either one manager or three non-managers as their jury, Bloomberg reported. They're also allowed to dismiss some panelists if they think the panelists will be unsympathetic to their case, according to Bloomberg. But overall, the employee doesn't get to select the jurors.
"Someone's career is such a deeply personal thing," said Jaime Klein, founder and CEO of Inspire Human Resources. "It is such a massive responsibility to determine the fate of someone's career."
Klein added, "You have to be really trained to be able to assess the current performance and the trajectory of whether someone can work through that performance issue."
Jodi Glickman, CEO of GreatontheJob.com, said it was "bizarre" to have three jurors who may have no previous experience interacting with you. The case might easily become a "popularity contest," Glickman said, with jurors who owe the employee's boss a favor deciding against the employee.
It would make more sense, she added, to select the jurors from among the employee's (and boss's) team members, so that they know what the employee's work really looks like and whether the boss's complaints are valid.
The peer-jury process gives employees more opportunity to improve than if they were summarily dismissed.
Still, Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert and the author of Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How to Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job, said she thought the Pivot program could be beneficial for employees.
Taylor cited the 30 percent of employees who win their cases, which is more than the 0 percent of employees who would get to stay if no one had the opportunity to defend themselves.
Taylor said it's also important to keep in mind that the manager of the employee being evaluated is also under review. If the jury decides the manager's complaints were unsubstantiated, that doesn't make the manager look very good, she said.
One confusing part of the Pivot program, according to Klein, is the option for employees to quit and receive severance pay. Severance pay is typically offered, Klein said, when it's "not your fault."
"It's odd to offer severance as an option if the individual does not want to pursue a performance program."
Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/316077
Amazon's approach from a practical, transformational and change management perspective is lacking. Their seemingly tough love addition to the 360 model appears to be an expansion of a proven model – BUT is it? WILL IT WORK EFFECTIVELY LONG-TERM? If we examine how well, or how not well, the tough love approach has worked in other areas, the answer seems pretty obvious. IT DOESN'T.
Possibilities for Consideration: A Co-Lab™ Approach
In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity
SUN-TZU
How do we bring about cultural transformation in the corporate culture? How do we bring about transformational change in a culture of people who are NOT doing the right thing?
Instead of a tough love approach, what if we took the approach of ubuntu?
What would this collaborative approach look like?
A motivational value-driven approach would allow us to focus on the value of what has to be done, not just the specifics of what needs to be done, this supports the certainty of what has to be done and the certainty of what will be done. So what do we need to do:
- Provide people with all the missing pieces of information - information that they missed, don't know and/ or seek
- Provide the tools and experience to demonstrate how to apply the new information
- Provide the research and measurement tools to support people in assessing the importance/priority of implementing new information (because that determines the value of it)
DR. RICHARD JORGENSEN
These are the 3 elements that allow for cultural change. They are essential to understanding and measuring true transformational change / sentience on an individual and culture.
This works when we are able to provide the:
- Tools to fill the missing pieces
- What a person knows or doesn't know, tells them the sentience of what their beliefs are
- Tools to apply the new information
- What a person discovers is the gate way into the sentience of their beliefs and values
- Tools to research and measure progress
- What a person does or doesn't do that reflects the value/importance of the sentience
Following the approach above we can improve the relationship between beliefs and values. Such a collaborative approach supports the development of whole brain, balanced brain thinking for more effective communication through a blend of technology, methodology, human understanding, street smarts and data science. It is an experiential learning approach that provides a mature, supportive and principle-based environment to ensure learning, application and measurement are both supportive and effective.
The power of Collaboration Laboratories™ (Co-Labs™) is that they have the HOW to do WHAT we all logically and intuitively know needs to be done, as defined above. Our motivational value-driven system converts models to:
Values in this process, which- Changes the belief, which
- Reflects one's decisions, actions and accountability, which then through
- Powerful Business Intelligence (BI) feedback amplifies the value to the individual
Values in this process, whichThus, Co-Labs provide a backbone environment containing the energy of believable, achievable, transferable and repeatable – thus scalable.
Co-Labs precede the learning process with an experience. They create the foundation of experience so that:
- The need to learn becomes undeniable,
- The process of learning becomes unstoppable, and
- The pressure is placed upon the value of applying what is learned
... which constitutes the priority (controls both when and how much is applied and implemented).
This process allows us to deal with the dynamics of human intelligence – how we create intelligent humans, teaching them what to think, not how to think.
Add Your Insight: Be the Change...
Love should be treated like a business deal,
but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency.
And in love, the currency is virtue.
You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you.
You love them for the values, the virtues,
which they have achieved in their own character.
AYN RAND