The Future of Work

On Hierarchy
"In the old way of thinking, organizations were shaped like pyramids with all of the power and communication flowing from the top to the bottom. That meant that executives controlled everything about the company and the smaller workers at the bottom were simply powerless cogs in the machine. The system may have worked well in the olden days of agriculture and manufacturing, but it is completely outdated today. Hierarchy breeds bureaucracy and red tape and makes it difficult for anyone to have a voice. Instead, organizations are looking to flatten out and to give power to employees at all levels."

On Work Hours
"A continuing concern for employees in 2016 is the increased need for flexibility. [...] With the availability of technology, remote offices and telecommunications, there is no reason why employees cannot be offered flexibility by employers."

"Employees are much more productive when they can choose a work schedule and location that fits their lifestyle, whether that's working early mornings from home or evenings from a shared work space. The workplace is increasingly global, which means employers needs to be flexible to make sure they employees can work and connect with whoever they need to."

On Annual Performance Reviews
"HR managers don't find the reviews effective, and they can often be incredibly stressful to employees. After all, can a single once-yearly meeting really dictate your workplace success and pay? Instead, forward-thinking organizations are moving to more frequent conversations that are less formal. These real-time check-ins allow employees and managers to touch base to discuss projects and get feedback in a way that is more accessible and useful to implementing change right away."

Morgan, Jacob. (2017). 5 Workplace Practices That Are on Their Way Out. Inc.. Retrieved on March 30, 2017 from https://www.inc.com/jacob-morgan/5-work-practices-that-are-on-their-way-out.html

Young Entrepreneur Council. (2015). 10 Workplace Trends That Will Change the Way You Manage. Inc.. Retrieved on March 30, 2017 from https://www.inc.com/young-entrepreneur-council/10-workplace-trends-that-will-change-the-way-you-manage.html

Lessons from the Gig Economy

"The most impactful lesson that traditional companies can learn from the gig economy is to judge all workers, including employees, on their results, not on when and where they do their work."

"Not one study suggests that working in an office eight hours a day, five days a week maximizes employee productivity, satisfaction, or performance. In fact, any data that exists on work in an office reveals that most employees aren’t engaged, waste a lot of time in the office not working, and that employee underperformance persists despite the omnipresence of management. Even worse, the direct costs of maintaining the traditional office-based workplace are high. CBRE estimates that the typical company in the U.S. spends upward of $12,000 per employee per year for office space. It’s hard to find a return-on-investment case for office space, and much harder still to find any company that makes a compelling one."

"Study after study after study demonstrate that independent, remote workers are more productive, satisfied, and engaged than their office-bound colleagues. Recent surveys of 8,000 workers by McKinsey’s Global Institute and nearly 900 independent workers by Future Workplace and Field Nation find that those workers, freed from the constraints of office life, report higher levels of satisfaction and greater productivity. These results aren’t surprising since remote work eliminates the wasted time of commuting, the stress of constant exposure to office politics, and the death of the workday by a thousand paper cuts of interruptions and meetings."

"[M]ost managers enjoy working at a company in which employees are managed by time and place. After all, it’s pretty easy to see who is at their desk between 9 and 5. It’s much harder to develop, measure, and evaluate the specific value and results that each employee produces. Managers will have to work a lot harder under a system that focuses on tracking performance, instead of time in an office chair."

"Labor is the most expensive and valuable resource at most firms. Managing this resource by time and place is a crude, empirically unproven, inefficient, and costly approach. The biggest lessons that companies can learn from the gig economy are to separate work from the office, and to measure employees based on what they produce, deliver and solve, not the hours they spend in the office. Put simply, companies need to stop measuring what doesn’t matter, and start measuring what does."

Mulcahy, Diane. (2017). Will the Gig Economy Make the Office Obsolete?.  Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on March 28, 2017 from https://hbr.org/2017/03/will-the-gig-economy-make-the-office-obsolete

Steve Jobs On Leadership, Management and Hiring

"The greatest people are self-managing. They don't need to be managed. Once they know that to do, they will go, figure out how to do it. They don't need to be managed at all. What they need is a common vision. That is what leadership is. Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so the people around you can understand it and getting consensus on the common vision."

Cognitive Assessments More Reliable Than Interviews At Predicting Employee Success

"Tricia Prickett and Neha Gada-Jain, two psychology students at the University of Toledo, collaborated with their professor Frank Bernieri and reported in a 2000 study that judgments made in the first 10 seconds of an interview could predict the outcome of the interview.

The problem is, these predictions from the first 10 seconds are useless.

They create a situation where an interview is spent trying to confirm what we think of someone, rather than truly assessing them. Psychologists call this confirmation bias, “the tendency to search for, interpret, or prioritize information in a way that confirms one’s beliefs or hypotheses.” Based on the slightest interaction, we make a snap, unconscious judgment heavily influenced by our existing biases and beliefs. Without realizing it, we then shift from assessing a candidate to hunting for evidence that confirms our initial impression."

"In other words, most interviews are a waste of time because 99.4 percent of the time is spent trying to confirm whatever impression the interviewer formed in the first ten seconds."

"In 1998, Frank Schmidt and John Hunter published a meta-analysis of 85 years of research on how well assessments predict performance. They looked at 19 different assessment techniques and found that typical, unstructured job interviews were pretty bad at predicting how someone would perform once hired.

Unstructured interviews have an r2 of 0.14, meaning that they can explain only 14 percent of an employee’s performance. This is somewhat ahead of reference checks (explaining 7 percent of performance), ahead of the number of years of work experience (3 percent)."

"The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it."

"The second-best predictors of performance are tests of general cognitive ability (26 percent). In contrast to case interviews and brainteasers, these are actual tests with defined right and wrong answers, similar to what you might find on an IQ test. They are predictive because general cognitive ability includes the capacity to learn, and the combination of raw intelligence and learning ability will make most people successful in most jobs."

"Last year’s Wall Street Journal story on the legal implications of personality testing received substantial circulation. And it shed light on some of the limitations of personality testing: an employee’s personality does not predict whether the person can learn the job tasks quickly or think critically.

With the average length of an employee’s job tenure at three (3) years for employees between the ages of 25-34, it’s increasingly important to identify job applicants who can be effective on the job, quickly.

Hiring managers will turn to objective pre-employment tests that can evaluate whether a candidate can do the job or learn the job quickly, such as Cognitive Tests and Work Sample (Simulation) tests.

Personnel Testing Council presenter Dr. Scott Highhouse reminded a group of practitioners in November that cognitive assessments are even more reliable than structured interviews at predicting employee success."

Bock, Lazlo. (2015). Here's Google's Secret to Hiring the Best People. Wired Business, Retrieved on March 21, 2017 from https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hire-like-google/

Appelman, Shoa. (2015). 5 Pre-Employment Test Trends You Need To Know About. TLNT Talent Management and HR, Retrieved on March 21, 2017 from https://www.eremedia.com/tlnt/5-pre-employment-test-trends-you-need-to-know-about/

Empowering Knowledge Workers

"ROWE (results only work environment) is a fantastic framework that needs to be adopted in places employing knowledge workers. You should be measuring the output of your workers, not the amount of time you can see them sitting in your office. [...] If you really think your employees will not be working if you cannot look over their shoulder to check, you have the wrong way of looking at the relationship with your employees... You should be hiring people who are engaged by their work and believe in the company’s mission. If people slack off when you aren’t watching them, your company has a disease, and you have discovered a symptom. You cannot treat this symptom and expect the disease to be cured."

"In the case of working from home/remote work, some employees do not do their best work from home, or simply don’t like it. That is fine—but you should trust your employees and treat them like adults. Let them make the call for themselves. Remove the training wheels and let them fail. If they cannot succeed in a hands off environment, do you really think babysitting them is going to work?"

"In 'Introduce Process Only As A Last Resort,' we look at how process often times helps the bad and hurts the good. Bad actors in an organization will figure out what the rules and the process are and follow them to a letter. Then they’ll find a way to slack off within these boundaries."

"Before introducing new process, ask yourself and those in your organization, what is the problem we’re trying to solve? Is there any way we can solve this problem without creating a new system? Even something as simple as a basic rule can subvert a team member’s intrinsic motivation. Think of it this way: if you hand fed someone everyday of their life, this individual would be reliant on you feeding them to survive. They would not have discovered that they need to find a food source 3+ times a day in order to survive. They might eventually figure it out, but it would be a challenging transition. It would require a much more conscious effort to stay satiated and able to focus on other goals."

"Without process everywhere, it makes the lives of management harder. This is one of the reasons middle managers love process. However, the goal of an organization should not to be to provide cushy jobs for middle managers. This job should be hard, and it is not for everyone. It requires people skills, leadership, and an almost super human ability to stay in tune with a team. It is very hard to find good leaders who can do this job well. [...] Bad middle managers can utilize the burdensome process to their advantage just as easily as bad actors on the front lines. Great leaders do not need rules or process. Those who follow them do so willingly, and do amazing things with their autonomy. They relay the right information back from the front lines, good or bad, and make key suggestions which often make or break the outcome of battles."

"Fight the introduction of process at all costs. Empower your employees and your fellow team members by avoiding it. Believe in the people around you, and if they fail, keep the safety net just harsh enough that a lesson will be learned. Counter intuitively, less process will help your organization run smoother, and ensure it is filled with the right kind of people."

Lhert, Yan. (2017). If you don’t trust your employees to work remotely, you shouldn’t have hired them in the first place. Quartz. Retrieved on March 17, 2016 from https://qz.com/891537/if-you-dont-trust-your-employees-to-work-remotely-you-shouldnt-have-hired-them-in-the-first-place/ 

Lhert, Yan. (2016). Introduce Process Only As A Last Resort. Medium. Retrieved on March 17, 2017 from https://medium.com/@yanismydj/introduce-process-only-as-a-last-resort-21bd25e53eb#.s9ze5kgv6

A Culture of Learning and Innovation

"A 'learning culture' is an organization-wide belief that the company’s strategy, mission, and operations can continuously be improved through an ongoing process of individual and organizational learning. It includes a set of investments, programs, and processes to study areas of weakness, explore causes, and exploit opportunities to improve and learn at all times and at all levels."

"A sustainable culture of innovation requires organisation-wide commitment. It must be driven from the top-down. Executives, managers and people leaders all have a role to play to endorse creativity, idea-sharing and collaboration. Although most organisations encouraged creativity and innovation as a corporate value, for many it wasn’t underpinned by other aspects required to create a thriving culture of innovation. Absent for many was a culture that promoted risk-taking and entrepreneurial behaviour, and an environment of trust in which employees could challenge existing assumptions, try new ideas, and fail."

"Recognizing and rewarding innovation is key to establishing a culture of innovation. There was a mismatch between the number of organisations that say they recognise and reward innovation, and those with established performance management practices for doing so. This suggests that companies are willing to adopt innovative processes without the support of HR. Innovation cannot be truly optimised without ongoing, iterative feedback. Despite a market shift in emphasis from annual performance reviews to continuous feedback, the majority of companies aren’t there yet."

Skilbeck, Rebecca. (2017). Driving a Culture of Innovation. PageUp Talent Lab. Retrieved on March 13, 2017 from https://www.pageuptalentlab.com/driving-culture-innovation/

Learning Culture. (n.d.). Bersin by Deloitte. Retrieved on March 13, 2017 from http://www.bersin.com/lexicon/Details.aspx?id=13116

Time to Ditch Annual Performance Reviews?

"When it comes to workplace events that produce resentment and anxiety, few score higher than the big annual performance review. Calls to end this time-consuming and often unproductive practice have gone unheeded — until now. Recently, Adobe, Kelly Services, GE, Deloitte and PwC have ended them, and the rippling out to smaller firms and other sectors appears to be underway. To which many say: good riddance."

"Other companies are rethinking their practices, too. Accenture’s 330,000 employees are undergoing what CEO Pierre Nanterme has called a “massive revolution” in which timely, personalized employee feedback is replacing annual evaluations and rankings. Whether you agree or disagree with UCLA researcher Samuel Culbert’s assessment that performance reviews are “a curse on corporate America,” it’s nonetheless clear that they’re falling out of favor."

"Companies such as Juniper and Adobe stopped giving people a one-to-five rating or evaluating employees on a “performance curve,” also known as the “forced ranking” approach. They were still differentiating performance in various ways, and still using a pay-for-performance approach, just not through a simple rating system. 

By early 2015, around 30 large companies, representing over 1.5 million employees, were following a similar path. No longer defining performance by a single number, these companies were emphasizing ongoing, quality conversations between managers and their teams."

"To my way of thinking, a one-side-accountable, boss-administered review is little more than a dysfunctional pretense. It's a negative to corporate performance, an obstacle to straight-talk relationships, and a prime cause of low morale at work. Even the mere knowledge that such an event will take place damages daily communications and teamwork."

"Once-a-year goals are too “batched” for a real-time world, and conversations about year-end ratings are generally less valuable than conversations conducted in the moment about actual performance. 

But the need for change didn’t crystallize until we decided to count things. Specifically, we tallied the number of hours the organization was spending on performance management—and found that completing the forms, holding the meetings, and creating the ratings consumed close to 2 million hours a year. As we studied how those hours were spent, we realized that many of them were eaten up by leaders’ discussions behind closed doors about the outcomes of the process. We wondered if we could somehow shift our investment of time from talking to ourselves about ratings to talking to our people about their performance and careers—from a focus on the past to a focus on the future."

Buckingham, Marcus and Goodall, Ashley. (2015). Reinventing Performance Management. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on March 8, 2017 from https://hbr.org/2015/04/reinventing-performance-management

Duggan, Kris. (2015). Why The Annual Performance Review Is Going Extinct. The Future of Work. Retrieved on March 8. 2017 from  https://www.fastcompany.com/3052135/the-future-of-work/why-the-annual-performance-review-is-going-extinct

Rock, David and Jones, Beth. (2015). Why More and More Companies Are Ditching Performance Ratings. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on March 8, 2017 from https://hbr.org/2015/09/why-more-and-more-companies-are-ditching-performance-ratings

The End of Annual Performance Reviews: Are the Alternatives Any Better?. (2016). Knowledge@Wharton. Retrieved on March 8. 2017 from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-end-of-annual-performance-reviews/

Want to Raise Productivity? Let Employees Work From Home

"The results we saw at Ctrip blew me away. Ctrip was thinking that it could save money on space and furniture if people worked from home and that the savings would outweigh the productivity hit it would take when employees left the discipline of the office environment. Instead, we found that people working from home completed 13.5% more calls than the staff in the office did—meaning that Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them. They also quit at half the rate of people in the office—way beyond what we anticipated. And predictably, at-home workers reported much higher job satisfaction."

"One-third of the productivity increase, we think, was due to having a quieter environment, which makes it easier to process calls. At home people don’t experience what we call the “cake in the break room” effect. Offices are actually incredibly distracting places. The other two-thirds can be attributed to the fact that the people at home worked more hours. They started earlier, took shorter breaks, and worked until the end of the day. They had no commute. They didn’t run errands at lunch. Sick days for employees working from home plummeted. Search “working remotely” on the web, and everything that comes up will be supernegative and say that telecommuters don’t work as hard as people in the office. But actually, it’s quite the opposite."

Bloom, Nicholas. (2014). To Raise Productivity, Let More Employees Work from Home. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on March 2, 2017 from https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-employees-work-from-home