How to Capture the Benefits of Connection: A Dual Agenda


To capture the benefits of connection, managers need to develop a dual agenda: Identify and change work practices that have unintended negative consequences both for employees' personal lives and for the business. The approach has three major phases: viewing work through the lens of personal life, identifying leverage points for change, and designing and implementing work-practice interventions that meet the dual agenda of productivity benefits to the business and personal benefits to employees.

Viewing Work through the Lens of Personal Life

People tend to see their work and personal lives as separate spheres. While they recognize the conflicts between these spheres, they usually see them as their private responsibility to manage and contain. The purpose of the first phase is to challenge this tendency by making an explicit connection between work and personal life. We accomplish this by asking people to consider the impact of their work and how it is performed on their personal lives. One useful question is, "What is it about how work is done in your area that makes it difficult for you to integrate your work and personal life?" The question applies to individuals and to work groups from the lowest to highest levels of the organization.

Starting from the perspective of personal life generates a different kind of response from asking the same question with only a work redesign perspective. Typically, people focus on work practices they personally find unnecessary or inefficient—constant interruptions, rigid and inflexible rules, competitive approaches that lead to duplicated efforts, emergency meetings called late in the day, and so on. In probing deeper, people begin to discuss why they think the work continues to get done this way, despite the inefficiencies. At this point, some of the cultural assumptions that drive the work begin to surface, and people start to talk about how emergencies are glorified and the people who respond to them are seen as heroes, how staying late is a way to show you care about the work, how solving crises is rewarded while preventing them is not, or how a willingness to sacrifice personal time signals commitment.

As people explore how work interferes with personal life, the strategic benefits of changing these practices become obvious. As the group probes for underlying causes, it becomes apparent that the very same assumptions and work practices that make integrating work and personal life difficult are also a problem in meeting business goals.

People begin to see these issues as systemic. They realize that what they are experiencing—stress, overcommitment, family conflict—is not an individual problem that they can solve by themselves. Instead, they begin to appreciate how the structure of work contributes to those dilemmas. The frustrations they feel at being unable to deal with their own problems now are seen in a different context. People also realize that their issues are not unique; others in the work group or management team experience similar problems. Recognizing that identifiable features of the work contribute to these personal concerns increases the team's commitment to move to the next step and consider the leverage points for change.

Identifying Leverage Points

In the second phase, the group considers ways of changing work practices to meet the dual agenda of improving effectiveness and enhancing the integration of work and personal life. The kinds of connections that a group makes depends on many factors—the type of work the team does; the team's size, composition, and level; and the specific pressures, opportunities, and resource constraints that the team is experiencing. Whatever leverage points the team considers, it is important that the members evaluate them in terms of the dual agenda. If a certain change is made, how will it improve the group's ability to meet a key strategic challenge? How will it enhance the group's ability to integrate work and personal lives?

Identifying leverage points for change is not easy. It requires looking at unexamined practices and assumptions about how work is done, where it is done, when it is done, and who does it. The first step is to think expansively about how changing particular work practices would help the business and help employees. The purpose at this stage is to brainstorm and, for the moment, not let questions about feasibility overwhelm the discussion. Thinking out of the box on work issues is difficult because we tend to accept that there is no other way to do things. It is important to let ideas flow.

For example, in a purchasing organization, when the members looked at their work through the lens of personal life, they realized that they were operating in a continual state of crisis, leading to extremely long hours and unpredictability. With the business goal to cut costs, delays in getting supplies to the line organization were a big problem. Crises exacerbated the problem. Probing deeper, they began to understand the underlying causes of the crises. They saw that how they worked with suppliers contributed to the very crises that created business and personal life problems. Some of the negative practices included giving bonuses to managers who solved crises and ignoring suppliers who warned about problems because the group feared the suppliers would routinely ask for extensions. New understanding allowed the group to design a process to distinguish among suppliers, detect and respond to early warning signals, and map out a reward system based on the absence of crises.

Considering the possibility that there are other ways of working leads naturally to thinking about experiments. We found some critical factors to think about when designing experiments that will achieve the benefits we've described:

  1. The experiments must focus on organizational, not individual, issues. It is not enough to hold the work as a constant and find a way to give certain individuals more time or flexibility to meet current demands. The work itself—and the organizational assumptions driving the way the work gets done—must be the focus.

  2. The experiments must meet the dual agenda of business and personal life. It is not enough to find obvious solutions that favor one over the other. An on-site day care facility might help some people meet work demands. A reduction in head count might meet a cost-cutting goal. But an experiment that meets the dual agenda must move to nonobvious solutions that affect both personal and business goals.

  3. The experiments must be connected to the deeper issues they are addressing. It is not enough to say, "Let's reduce the number of meetings", without understanding how norms governing meetings are connected to broader issues such as reward systems, idealized behavior, promotion policies, or other organizational norms.

  4. The group needs to define evaluation criteria for both parts of the agenda. If the change is implemented, what business measures should be affected? What personal life issues?

Implementing Work-Practice Interventions

In the third phase, the group tries to implement different ways of working. Invariably, some kinks need to be ironed out as the intervention runs into obstacles. While many interventions can seem simple and straightforward, in fact, they are by definition violating some basic assumptions and taken-for-granted norms. Had they been truly simple, they probably would have been implemented already! While this approach unleashes energy, creativity, and innovation, it can seem risky to those involved. It is important to deal with these risks to protect the intervention and enhance its chances for success.

Some team members may fear they will seem less committed or dependable if they suggest a change that would make it easier to integrate their work and personal life. They may have been unable to discuss problems in this area, so sharing them is difficult. At the same time, managers may fear that any suggested change is likely to incur productivity losses. Therefore, senior management must indicate that it is willing to suspend, if only temporarily, some of the operating procedures that were identified as barriers to the dual agenda.

For example, at one manufacturing site, a work group identified an inflexible operations review procedure as one factor that made it difficult for them to meet business and personal goals. The vice president's willingness to suspend some of the procedure's requirements for the duration of the experiment was important for many reasons. Not only did it help people see that management was serious about giving them authority to control significant conditions that affected their productivity, but it also helped them realize that change was possible and worth the effort. In addition, it protected the work group manager from bearing all the risks of innovation. In another organization, senior managers, who had previously insisted on unreachable stretch goals to motivate researchers, allowed them to establish and work toward "realistic" targets. At still another site, management agreed to modify some aspects of a short-term productivity measure. Senior management's willingness to create the conditions for success is important to this approach. Without support, even the best ideas that come from the dual agenda are unlikely to succeed.

As the group implements work-practice improvements and the benefits to the business become evident, a company may be tempted to keep the benefits for itself by increasing workloads or reducing head count. For example, one unit proposed realigning work responsibilities between on-site and remote personnel to reduce excessive travel demands on scientists. However, as the proposal moved forward, the company was tempted to increase the number of projects assigned to each scientist, thereby replicating both the business problem (missed opportunities from lack of time for reflection and analysis) and the personal issue (no time for nonwork activities). Only by evaluating the proposed change against the dual criteria did the company re-examine the indiscriminate increase in workload and preserve the dual goals. All experiments are fragile; without tangible benefits to employees and the visible support of key decision makers, they are likely to be only transitory.




Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century
Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century
ISBN: 026263273X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 214

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