Never in history has business played such a central role and been such a globally competitive endeavor. It’s very likely that what we are experiencing today is an easier time for business with what is projected to occur in future. Staying competitive isn’t just about hiring and developing the very best people you can. It’s much more than that; it’s about building the workplace that allows these talented individuals to create a sustainable organization that has the capacity to learn and stay a step ahead. And today that requirement to stay competitive has just been moved up several levels. Currently, we see it in manufacturing in particular, but we will see it increasingly in service industries also. Very soon, a whole new landscape of global competition in the knowledge industries will be upon us.
The roadsides of business growth will be littered with the debris of organizations that once enjoyed success, but then couldn’t change. Often the failure would have occurred because in the process of building success the organizations broke their people. In the past this breakage was most often a matter of physical breakdown; now more often the breakdown is in the spirit of the workforce. Sadly, this also creates a disintegration of the workplace community often to an irrevocable degree. How to create flexible and highly competitive workplaces is challenging the best minds in business and the applied behavioral sciences.
What’s New? Maybe Our Ways of Responding
What is the problem? It’s the same problem as always! Competitive organizations depend upon people for everything but short-term successes. Market forces and monopolistic positions can generate success for a quarter or even a year, but a healthy workplace is needed for long-term growth. Simple enough to say. Not easy to do. The challenge is in thinking beyond pressures and building the effective workplace as a community in which empowerment occurs naturally. Also needed is a place in which the soul and spirit of the workplace are nourished as they produce the excellence that is required of them.
All of this carries with it an obligation to recreate the meaning of work and to base this recreation on the wisdom developed from the knowledge and experimentation among some of the world’s most successful organizations. In today’s competitive environment, it is essential to transform the workplace. This will necessarily involve a departure from many previous assumptions. Being creative and taking risks produces the learning needed to help drive the change process.
Settings That Empower Bring Out A Flexible Labor Force
Being competitive requires the full engagement of the workforce. If an organization has to hire and pay management to continually instruct workers, the game is lost; the cost alone will prohibit the successful competition with companies in countries in which the wage scale is a fraction of its own. Efficiencies must be found everywhere, managerial overhead costs that do not add value to the product or service must be reduced.
Companies that become great often have a culture that promotes flexibility. Fad programs are ineffectual; empowerment comes from employees who are able to pursue organizational goals that they are aligned with. In doing this they develop their own work spirit and create a community of others who believe in what everyone-together-is doing. Flexibility comes from people free to do right, with an agreed value base to help guide them. Real settings where this has been created can be found around the world.
The principles in all successful empowerment seem to be the same: there must be sincere respect for the people who work for a company, and management must request that people offer their voices as well as their labor. To create such a flexible workplace is possible; and when it is working well, the stressfulness of each job is balanced by a shared desire of everyone’s part to provide a performance level that guarantees the success of the company overall.
Creating More Effective And Efficient Self-Organizing Systems
Creating a workplace and a workforce that have the capacity to change via flexible self-management requires fundamentally new working principles for a new work environment. The following issues need to be addressed:
- Workforce environment built on command-and-control assumptions yield to the higher performance potential of workplace communities. Research indicates there is no one best model: what’s needed is a commitment to discover the ideal form that fits the unique culture and work performance. Most of these centers are now, by necessity, global, and have workers from every corner of the world.
- Spirit and soul of work are not just interesting phrases but are also necessary conditions for the full investment of the workforce in its work. Work that does not have meaning or cannot give something back to the worker is counterproductive. Work that inspires through meaning and in relationships with others is effective. Inspirational work is a competitive force. Deadening work leads to a broken workforce and layoffs demonstrate how disruptive it can be when a company can’t manage to stay flexible and adapt to new ways of thinking and doing business.
- Work itself is being redefined. As work increasingly depends on knowledge, the place it plays in people’s lives is becoming more complex. The whole person must be considered in order to build effective knowledge work. Balance of work and life is the goal and the knowledge worker appreciates a place to work as much, or more than, any generation of workers. The difference now is that worker can literally find work anywhere in the world. That kind of mobility makes it imperative to create organizations that the best people in a given field want to work in. To keep these special talents takes a flexible learning organization.
- The wisdom to know how to lead a new workforce requires careful study and a great deal of self-awareness. Knowing others first requires insight into self.
- The changing global economy demands transformational thinking and outside-the-box ways of creating new work environments. These are best created as partnerships in which both workers and managers are expected to change. These partnerships are also often cross-continental and being multinational is a given.
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