Is it really possible to create an organization where employees can truly decide?

As employers and business owners, we want our team members to be committed and responsible. When is a person most committed and responsible? When he is taking decisions on things which belong to him, a true feeling of ownership is what brings about the best in people. Just look at the care with which people spend their own personal money and make purchase decisions, can the same care happen when it comes to the company's money and resources. Do team members care enough to be careful about company resources? Under what conditions will it not be necessary to have access cards to monitor time spent on the job or have reviews to see if the team member has performed and have supervisors to make sure that people are doing their jobs? Under what conditions can an employee get to fix his own salary?

The most compelling example of a company where employees get to decide so much and more is Semco, The book Maverick written by its owner Richardo Semler had a profound impact on me personally. At Semco Employees decide not only their own salary and work times but get involved with every other aspect of the work. My curiosity about Open Organisations has grown since, and have wondered, what are the conditions that make something like this possible?

To me it seems that an expectation of trust generates the same value, trust. Management Literature is full of examples of the Pygmalion Effect, where the expectation that a person can give a good performance leads to the person actually giving good results. The same holds true for trust, an expectation of trust leads to more trust. An expectation of suspicion leads to acts which reciprocate this expectation. But can people really be trusted? Emperor Akbar was posed this question, and Birbal his minister suggested that this be put to test. It was suggested that all Citizens pour a jug of milk into an empty tank at night, if the tank was filled with milk it will mean that the citizens were honest even when no one was watching. In the morning, Akbar and Birbal went to the tank and it was full of not milk but water. So how does this fit in with this cause of trusting your team members? A relevant question is would people have acted differently if they had a stake in the tank, and second what if they were told to put the milk in broad daylight while others were watching. At Semco also two aspects come across clearly, Transparency and Small Teams. All information, including finances of the company is known to everyone, and special effort is put to ensure that everyone understands the financial position of the company. The teams are such that everyone knows one another, work is also allocated in such a way that people have a sense of how their work fits in with the big picture. Creating a trusting environment then actually brings out trust in others.

The Akbar Birbal story however, draws a fundamental conclusion that people cannot be trusted, a recent experiment conducted by Readers Digest, however confirms otherwise. Mobile phones were dropped in public places, across several cities including Mumbai, and reporters secretly kept tab of what the finders of the mobile phones would do. In Mumbai 24 out of 30 phones were returned to the owner, not a bad testament to peoples honesty, the results were positive in most parts of the world. Perhaps changing the paradigm of ownership from a monarchy focused on its own welfare, to one which cares about citizens changes the way people behave as well. Will people not be honest about Taxes if they believe that their money will be well spent?

"Decide Your Own Salary" has a lot of beliefs underlying it apart from transparency and small teams. The organisation needs to believe that its team members are by nature "responsible". Richardo Semler makes a very simple case for making this assumption, if people can be so responsible with personal property why can they not be so with the organisation's, and if they have been given positions of responsibility in the organisations, does it not follow that they have to be responsible in the first place? If they are not responsible why have they been given these jobs in the first place? So it follows that employees can decide their own salaries, since they are responsible individuals. The enabling conditions I believe are, that the employee has three pieces of information, he knows his market value, he knows his contribution to the team, and knows the financial position of his company.

Ownership is really about having the freedom to choose, having a say in what is happening, and knowing intimately how what one is doing fits in with the bigger picture. Once a person really gets a sense of ownership, commitment and responsibility follows, just as two sides of the same coin.

The author is the Chief Catalyst of businessgyan, his areas of interest are business strategy and innovation. For feedback & more information send mail to thespark@ businessgyan.com

Related Items:

---

Be first to comment this article

Only registered users can write comments.
Please login or register.