We live in a roller coaster world. One day you’re up and the next day you’re down ¹

• Countries destinies are determined by social media crowding-sourcing and opinionating of the moment, devoid of plans for ‘now-what’ let alone the future.
• Company stocks are traded by computer super algorithms that disregard a company’s performance and just bet the odds, yet distinctly affect a company’s profits.
• CEO longevity is now an average of three years, hence the ballooning of compensation as hazard-pay reward for being the corporate shooting-gallery duck.

With this constant flux, every company needs an Elasticity strategy. They must be able to expand and contract, be flexible, agile and mobile – on a day-to-day basis. There probably isn’t anything more static and unmoving than the bricks and mortar part of the business – the physical work environment. The workplace facility and its equipment, fixed assets that are the second to third highest consumer of company monetary and other resources, is in dire need of more than a face lift.

Looking for a plug-n-play formula for Elasticity? There isn’t one. Nor are the answers found solely in more or new CRE/Facility investments. Elasticity is a mix and balance of components that span all operational and enterprise entities, intrinsically determined by the uniqueness of each company. And that mix, in and of its self, needs to be changeable on a dime. Hence the need for variable movement – elasticity at all levels and categories of the organization.

Is there a bit of the Ouija Board or witch craft in this? Maybe. More accurately, elastic strategies and plans are proactive maneuvers based on intuition and trending – moving on the aggregation of multiple data points available at the moment. For the workplace, the foundation is no longer made of concrete, rather a quicksand mixture of risk and experimentation, micro-markets desires, niches and a plethora of options. (See Pluralism)

If the ups and downs of the world are constantly volatile and ever-changing, then the solutions aren’t perfectly pre-determinable or static. They breathe, like a workplace diaphragm that expands and contracts and pumps oxygen equal to the extent of the corporate exertion and the varied, proportional and variable needs of its organs and limbs, at any moment in time.

¹ As so now famously expressed by Heidi Klum on the Project Runway TV show.

QOTD: What attributes make a workplace FANTASTIC instead of just “average”?

My thanks to Rachel Permuth-Levine, PhD, MSPH  for posing this question on our LinkedIn Work Experience Group and to
Thanks go Tim Springer for moderating the on-going discussion. This question has been live for over two months with much good input. It also led me to look at the workplace dialogue from a different point of view. And to pursue one of the key ingredients I feel is mandatory for making workplaces as success.

Also a great thanks to Tim and Pauline for showing their support (see below).

Here is my contribution to the discussion.

Catherine Adams Lee • I applaud the thread developed around what message the workplace sends. I call this congruence – when the message and the actions are in sync. Does the workplace delivered follow through on the business’ value message? Does it walk the corporate talk and put its money where its mouth is? Too many don’t.

Unfortunately, examples of negative congruence and mixed messaging abound. Companies that espouse diversity but present a workplace that is bland, banal and same; ones that manufacture technology but either bar employees or internal investment in successful usage; ones that say they value their people but, as mentioned keep a messy, even filthy, facility. Too long the workplace industry has opted out of its responsibility in acknowledging its strategic role and ensuring that what it designs and delivers is truly affecting the appropriate culture and is in alignment with the messages from other parts of the business.

For positive congruence to occur, hard discussions need to be had around what is the real culture and what is actually being delivered. Workplace’s part is to understand, acknowledge and translate what it builds and what that truthfully represents. Additionally it needs to engage in delivering more than just a passive environment or corporate image – to accomplish not just the sizzle but also the steak.

A congruent workplace where all of its business parts, including the key player of the physical environment, work in concert to achieve, support and sustain a culture of diversity, respect, health, trust, choice, accomplishment and profit. Now that would be a FANTASTIC workplace!

Comments:

Tim Springer • Catherine
Brava!

Pauline Mok • well said, catherine! and great to see you here!

Change is hard enough for the average person, CEO or company. But for Oprah and her Harpo Productions it has to be monumental. But she is doing it anyway – changing her life by dropping her talk show, the mainstay of her company and reinventing her company with her OWN television network. Pretty amazing. Just think how many people are invested in having Oprah stay exactly as she was.

• There is the audience who has watched her every weekday for 25 years of their lives. They will experience a loss, missing the comfort of this steady relationship and a repeated life pattern.  

• There are the ABC network, affiliates and the advertisers that make so much money from her audience’s attention. They will most certainly experience a large loss of revenue as she changes to Cable with a currently smaller outreach. 

• There all the employees who rely on her for employment to feed themselves and their family.
  She has said they will all come with her on the new venture. Hopefully that’s true. 

• There are the friends, especially Gayle, who have so much invested in their relationships staying just the way they were, good or bad. Gayle has a new role. Will it keep her satisfied and supportive? 

• Then there is Oprah herself and all the personal things Oprah has garnered from her success – all the trappings (the home, clothes, and celebrity), the pride of accomplishment, the ego gratification and the power. She has said these are secondary to her good works and influencing of her fans’ lives.

Human beings rely on others for a sense of self. Take away those relationships and we feel great loss. Oprah and everyone connected with her has been spoon fed love, comfort and empowerment in abundance over the years. Will everyone survive the loss, bridge the gap or will they fall into the chasm?

The Oprah Way – Something for Everyone
Oprah’s management of this transition is perhaps the best example of corporate change management to come down the pipe, ever. In this case, Oprah, the CEO, chose the change. Everyone else had the change thrust upon them.  Her strategy to ease the pain – create a very public, year-long process, providing something for everyone.

Audience: First of all she didn’t just announce, then do. During the final year, the bulk of the process was devoted to a celebration of the past and all things wonderful contained within. Episode after episode was a last hurrah enabling her audience to relive, then applaud and laud, all of the good, albeit a carefully selected and scripted, past. .

Advertisers: I am sure, though not certain, that each one will be given the opportunity to accompany her. Whatever their choice, she has made great effort to offer them final opportunities to promote themselves. Through her free giveaways and ever-growing final audiences, she gave them their own last hurrah. It is rumored that the cost of ad spots for her final shows rivaled that of the Super Bowl’s.

Employees: By not quitting, retiring or taking a break and continuing to work in a similar but different aspect of her industry, she keeps opportunity of employment for her employees. They don’t all suddenly lose their jobs. And if some do, she has given them a longer, softer, certainly less painful transition. Complete with a huge thanks for past work, instead of the typical ‘too-bad, that’s life’ boot on the backside as they go out the door.

Friends: Gayle is perhaps the best example. With her own show on the new OWN, she continues with a role, perhaps even a better one, in Oprah’s life. She has been given a new opportunity and her own set of risks and challenges to accomplish or fail.

Corporate Translation
Companies going through transformative change should adopt Oprah’s process. Examples of botched corporate reinventions laden with lead balloons of bad press, failed spin PR, golden parachutes and legions of never fading ill-will abound. Hers is a framework that translates into a positive strategy and plan for any company.

Customers and clients = her audience: If you make any large scale change – tell them, explain, be open and honest and give them a long time to transition. Oprah’s was a full year. Your customers are not your enemy. They are your biggest fans. They fill the stands that are the coffers of your revenues. They, like Oprah’s millions of followers, are number one. It’s not about what you make. It’s about who makes you. They know if you are lying and spinning and will jump ship to the competition, fast.

Vendors, outside service providers = her advertisers: Think up and give them other opportunities to come along on the new wave. They are your biggest cheer leaders.

Employees = her employees: Don’t cut your costs here. Get creative instead. Invent a vehicle, any vehicle, to take them along and keep them. The vehicle that saves them may just become your best, new business product or service.

Share holders, investors = friends: Ensure they come along by giving them a role to play in the next phase.

This isn’t really a change management (CM) plan. It is a business plan involving change, devised at the highest level of the company. Most CM plans are low-level, one-off initiatives designed to spin, keep employees contented and control fall out in order to make the change “easier” on management. Oprah’s plan, whether conscious or instinctive, is not a reactive, add-on, change management plan. It is a proactive business plan with integrated business priorities. This is what really has made Oprah so successful. She knows how to run a business well.

Bottom Line
A change management of this type is not a keep everyone ‘happy’ HR retention plan. Rather as an integrated business plan, every level of the organization is engaged to drive the business reinvention and next success. Oprah dug deep and invented a new business to grow in a new area and in new ways. Reaching beyond the short-term and the easy obvious, the new business retains its most valuable assets – its people – the customers, product and service providers, employees, investors.  An intentional mandate of full retention and inclusion strategy drives of the new business type. Collateral damage is not an option

Just as People made Oprah’s past success, it makes all companies’. People want their company to succeed again. The business’ success is their success. It has a value to them too whether spiritually, monetarily or otherwise. If change is planned and executed with taking everyone along on the journey as the number one, the right next thing will be invented. They will actively and voluntarily make the next success again, no matter what it is.

The bottom line business strategy:
Celebrate the past. All in it was relevant, useful and valuable.
Now let’s all move on and make the next succes

————————————————————————————————-

Coda and Kudos

Dear Oprah,

At first I thought this new venture was more of the same and thus easier for you. That after 25 years you were really just afraid to take a break or retire, a common fear for hyper-accomplished people. Upon fuller examination, I now understand it would have been easier to just walk away, or stay exactly the same while watching your audience and success dwindle.

Instead you chose to work really hard at re-invention. No golden parachute, no mass layoffs, no blaming others, no quitting at the ‘top of your game’. You choose to climb the next mountain; to continue to innovate, create and develop something more and larger, not for just yourself, but for all others. This way is the hard way, and yes the nobler way. This way takes real guts. This is real corporate leadership. You continue to break new ground. I am in awe.

Best wishes and may you continue to reap rewards,
Catherine Adams Lee

Copyright © 2011. Catherine Adams Lee Consulting. All rights reserved.

A tug of war is occurring in the workplace between face-to-face interpersonal relationships and those that occur at a distance over technology. As the old saying goes, if I had a dollar for every time someone said to me “Fact-to face is important”, I’d be rich. And I‘d agree. But the proverbial barn doors for work and interactions over technology have been open for over fifty years. To stay firmly planted and safe in the barn when the larger world is changing so rapidly is hard for everyone.

People of all ages and genders find themselves heavily guarding their comfort position, most often driven by the fear they won’t find a place in the new world outside the barn. This new world may not be better, or worse. It just is. And it’s different. Besides, face-to-face (f2f) is not the win-all answer. Face-to-face has always been a multi-edged sword. There is the good, the bad and the ugly of it.

The good – humans need to be around other people. The new, seemingly daily, discoveries in cognitive neuroscience appear to reinforce this as true. Proximity dynamics of the transfer of energy, brain waves, and pheromones enable accomplishment and exchange of ideas that don’t happen over technology – for most people. There is a qualifier. The jury is still out for future generations as to whether nature or nurture will overcome the f2f ‘deficiency’. Or if, like a blind person compensating with increased hearing abilities, people will develop a new normal – other skills to fill the void and accomplish the same thing in different ways. Not better, or worse, just different.

The bad – those who abuse and misuse f2f to influence. Not the charismatic speaker (good, hopefully), but the boss or other authority figure who demands compliance and obedience reinforced by the threatening, intimidating or bullying use of his or her physical presence (the bad). According to Wikipedia, research by The Workplace Bullying Institute suggests the #2 highest tactic used by workplace bullies is “stared, glared, was nonverbally intimidating and was clearly showing hostility (68%).”

This is bad f2f. Included are the team members who dominate to control the outcomes their way versus team agreement, consensus or thought-out business intent. And the people who get included or excluded, rewarded or punished, promoted or passed over, liked or shunned, based on physical attributes – biases of gender, race, size, age, good looks, et al, not capability or value of accomplishment. All stereotype characteristics, the knowledge of which is gleaned mostly through visible, face-to-face interaction.

The ugly – the extreme verbal and physical abusers. People who overtly intimidate, scream, threaten, even physically hit and accost to get you to perform as they want or keep you “in line”. Yes, I have experienced pretty much every one of them. I even had a client who experienced a workplace shooting. So traumatic was the incident they disbanded the company. An extreme example of how f2f can be bad for business. OSHA statistics state that homicide is the second highest cause of death on the job, after motor vehicle accidents.

Distance and distancing can be a tool to ameliorate these bad and ugly situations. That’s not to say that you can’t be screamed at over the phone. But the verbal threat may be diffused with greater ease with a sort of distance-enabled ‘time out’, than a threat accompanied by physical presence. The physical gap allowing for a cooling off or cooling down period and faster reengagement when calmer heads prevail.

Finding success in this new world of work is about finding the right combination of f2f and non f2f. To do so, you need to:

• Learn to look at each with eyes wide open.
• Understand the role and the possibilities contained within each as a tool for the future and healthy growth both monetarily and psychologically of the business.
• Recognize and employ their attributes and avoid their faults.
• Open up room for positive opportunities brought by non f2f – like a more level playing field, increased productivity for both on-site and off-site or distributed employees.
• Develop a combination of all forms of relationship interactions that works for each individual, team or group performed at the micro-level.
• Reap the rewards of greater full-immersion diversity and accessibility brought by good ideas and innovations that come bubbling forth in a safer environment.

Work over technology at a distance is not a panacea for all corporate relationship ills. But neither is it the devil it is so often made out to be. I have been on global teams that functioned very well for extended periods of time. We invented new processes like global, round-robin brainstorming and time-zone IMing to deal with the asynchrony. When achieving consensus was needed or we felt alignment was slipping, we then came f2f, usually about once a quarter.

Conversations and work over computers may not be your preferred world, but this is the way of the new world. You just may not be living in it yet. You can choose to accept this as true, reject it or escape it. Just remember, the new world of relationships over technology may not be better, or even worse, but it is different. And it’s here.

Catherine Adams Lee is a workplace business strategist and organizational innovation coach helping businesses build their bridge between old and new work places. Catherine encourages businesses to engage in distance in order to make NewWorkPlaces work and become a 21st century business success story. To find out more about Catherine and NewWorkPlaces go to http://www.newworkplaces.com/.

Copyright © 2011. Catherine Adams Lee Consulting. All rights reserved.