Internal business process is dependent on the thoughts, beliefs, norms, and behaviors of those tasked with adhering to it. On the other hand, company culture is woven into many aspects of an organization, including its systems and processes. Companies and teams with misaligned cultures can expect to experience more deviant behavior from their employees for a host of different reasons. This can include deviation from the norms surrounding internal business processes, where employees tend to complete tasks in their own way or build their own “way of doing things” altogether. If the culture is misaligned across the organization, shared accountability suffers and can perpetuate more variance in the way people accomplish their tasks.

Also, culture and process have a direct impact on one another. MXOtech points out how efficient internal business processes can reduce the amount of time an employee spends on menial tasks and can improve their efficiency, confidence, and willingness to put forth a concerted effort. Employees are generally happier and more fulfilled when the processes in place empower them to achieve their goals. However, poor processes that are bogged down, inefficient, or overly redundant can serve to frustrate and demotivate employees. This can result in employees deviating from the established procedure to quickly accomplish their task with the least amount of resistance.

Alarmingly, research has shown that people who deviate from established norms (aka “bad apples”) tend to have a stronger negative influence on their conformist teammates than the positive influence their teammates have on the bad apples. This means that it doesn’t take many frustrated, demotivated employees disregarding internal processes to get the good ones onboard. This problem of ineffective processes contributing to a poor company culture is particularly dangerous since it’s difficult for leaders to identify outside of a concerted effort on behalf of an outside party.

If you’re overly concerned right now, it’s okay! There are ways to leverage the interconnected nature of culture and process to improve these aspects of your business. Even better, improving and aligning your culture and processes can have significant positive second and third order effects in the long run! It can result in decreased expenses, lower turnover, and higher employee retention rates. One great way to develop a plan to improve these two aspects is through the “Idealized Design” method.

Gherajedaghi and Ackoff developed the Idealized Design method to address problems holistically, systemically, and through design thinking. This method begins with the end in mind by crafting the ideal state of whatever an organization is facing (in this case, a productive process and culture dynamic). Then, the group iterates to identify which aspects of the design are feasible by carefully considering each obstruction to determine its severity. The goal is to be left with the most ideal design for the specific context in question. Then, the team works to build the system and make it a reality. In order for this process to holistically take all variables into account, leaders must assemble the right team of stakeholders.

The most important people to include when crafting any process and culture improvement are the rank and file employees who have to live with the final product. These people are important because they can help control for unseen variables that could hamper the effort to improve. These employees have an opportunity to become agents of change and to feel motivated to adhere to the improved processes and ways of working if they feel their leadership took their advice and designed a system with their best interest at heart.

It’s also important to involve those members of the company who rely on the team’s outputs in some way. For example, if we were focusing on improving process and culture for an accounting team, we would want to invite a member from the budget office, legal team, etc. to participate in the Idealized Design project. Finally, an unbiased third-party facilitator is important to guide the process to ensure internal biases and interpersonal dynamics don’t hinder the end product any more than necessary.

Once you’ve created your idealized design for improving process and culture, you can begin implementing steps to make it a reality. Ensure you’re involving the rank and file employees during implementation, keep a close eye on how team members are interacting with each other and the new system, and seek constant feedback. You’ll soon breed ownership of the new system throughout the team, a stronger in-group culture, and your employees will feel a sense of pride for having a hand in helping the organization improve their internal culture and processes. Some second and third order effects that can result from a culture improvement effort are increased retention, employee engagement, and having better talent seek to become a part of your team. The effects of improved process can be increased productivity, revenue, meeting company goals, and time efficiency.

There are so many benefits to approaching culture and process as interconnected aspects of an organization. It allows you to design improvements with both in mind, which reduces the chance for an unexpected phenomenon to derail your efforts. Improving process benefits cultural alignment and clarity. Improving your company culture by aligning around effective ways of doing things (i.e. aligning processes) can help to ensure that people are consistently behaving in ways that drive strategic performance. Pairing these aspects and designing an improvement effort for both is a great way to grow as an organization and ensure you’re improving people’s lives in the process.

The post The Interdependent Nature of Culture and Process appeared first on gothamCulture.

How do organizations not only survive, but thrive in today’s new operating environment? By developing resilience and agility. Knowledge transfer is critical to this, and talent development practitioners are positioned to help companies prepare. In “Knowledge Transfer: The Key to Organizational Resilience and Agility,” Chris Cancialosi details:

• what knowledge transfer is and why it is critical to organizations’ resilience and agility
• the role of effective knowledge transfer in the future of work
• ways to develop and strengthen an organization’s ability to effectively transfer and manage knowledge.

The post Knowledge Transfer: The Key to Organizational Resilience and Agility appeared first on gothamCulture.

As companies scale, more processes are required to coordinate the growing workforce. And the additional management layers that come with them can slow an organization down.

It’s often the reason why large organizations become weighed down with bureaucracy while small companies remain quick and agile.

Consider this recent story from Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes:

“Earlier this year, an employee wanted to send a customer a T-shirt with our logo as a gift. There was nothing special about this particular shirt. It was an ordinary, 100% cotton crew neck. But by the time this employee got approval—factoring in his own time and everyone else’s up the org chart who had to weigh in before signing off on the request—the cost of this t-shirt had ballooned to at least $200.”

Many organizations today are trying to hedge against inflated processes like these by changing their organizational structures. Hootsuite, for example, appointed a “Czar of Bad Systems” to help improve internal processes.

In today’s rapidly-evolving business environment, growing organizations need to remain fast and efficient. And some large, geographically dispersed and complex organizations seem to be able to maintain a level of agility despite their size.

How do they do it?

Nurse Next Door is one organization taking a radically different approach to solving this challenge by embracing a culture of self-leadership. They are one of North America’s fastest growing home care providers, with 150 franchise locations delivering high-quality home care services to seniors.

I recently spoke with Nurse Next Door’s President and CEO, Cathy Thorpe, to learn more about what they’re doing, and why.

Rethinking the Value of Middle Management

Cathy took over operations for Nurse Next Door in 2014 and by the beginning of 2016, she was already questioning the efficiency of their organizational structure.

“I wasn’t seeing the results that justified a structure of middle management, and I started to question the role of management in general. For example, whenever there was an issue in our Care Services call center, such as a scheduling interruption between a Care Service Specialist and a caregiver, the specialist would have to email the management team. Then the management team would review, assess and investigate it, and hours later act on it after reviewing 50 -100 more of these requests. Management, to me, was proving ineffective.”

Thorpe’s epiphany came several months later. “I saw a post on LinkedIn titled, ‘10 Things That Require Zero Talent’ (source unknown). I read it and thought, these are basic adult skills people struggle with, and managers deal with on a daily basis. But these skills require personal accountability and professionalism; not management.”

Middle managers would often deal with people arriving late or unprepared to meetings, for example, and thinking it was ok. These behaviors added unnecessary delays. Key pieces of information were missing from these meetings, thus requiring another meeting.

“Our leadership team also realized we were too involved in operational things,” Cathy shared. “We had our hands too deep in the water when it wasn’t necessary. It was starting to affect our team’s performance because they were complacent with waiting for direction from us instead of being proactive.”

Cathy and her team quickly realized that management can’t teach people work ethic or motivation. “We don’t need middle managers to manage people. We need everyone in our organization to hone these skills and take personal and professional accountability. We need people who show up with these skills every day, without excuses.”

Part of this thought was driven by the fact that Nurse Next Door is rapidly growing, and they didn’t want to lose momentum or slow down. “We need to make the best decisions for the company and at a timely pace. To do so, people need to be 100 percent present, accountable, and results driven. It’s hard to support and drive a culture of hypergrowth when your team can’t manage themselves.”

So, over the next few months, Cathy’s team took the “10 Things That Require Zero Talent,” and started distributing it around the office as a cultural artifact. Thus, the journey to self-leadership began.

Shaping A Culture of Self-Leadership

Thorpe and her team eliminated most middle manager roles across the company to create a mostly flat organizational structure. The Team Lead role was eliminated in the call center, for example, and they transitioned Care Specialists to specialized Account Manager roles, giving them more direct control and empowerment over customer-facing decisions.

They also began figuring out how to attract, recruit, and retain self-motivated team members, and find ways to best support them to be successful in this new, autonomous work environment.

By adopting Daniel Pink’s concept of Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose, team members are encouraged to develop and explore their personal and professional goals and take initiative to proactively identify and improve inefficient processes in their daily work lives.

Nurse Next Door also eliminated annual performance reviews in favor of guidance and feedback in the moment. “We embraced and integrated Kim Scott’s concept of Radical Candor with both our HeartQuarters (headquarters) team and with our Franchise Partners,” Cathy shared. “It takes time to figure out your style of giving feedback. People are conditioned to take feedback as criticism, rather than a gift. It takes time to shift this mindset, but we are getting to a point where giving feedback is taking less energy and becoming more natural.”

The Benefits Of Self-Leadership

Thorpe’s efforts to embrace a culture of self-leadership has shown some significant performance gains in a rather short timeframe:

Increased productivity: Employees are more productive as they manage themselves and their results. They proactively solve problems and develop new ideas to find a better way, rather than wait for direction.

Increased satisfaction: People take ownership of their role, and are engaged and connected to the brand. They are brand ambassadors who are committed to the organization and have a strong sense of purpose. Results from a Nurse Next Door engagement survey (Fall 2016) noted that 94 percent of employees agree that they are inspired to do their best work with the company.

Created a team of leaders: Thorpe believes everyone on the team can be a leader regardless of their title. People report to their peers and hold each other accountable. They are decision makers, and in turn, are advancing their skills at a much faster pace.

Improved business performance: Nurse Next Door has experienced 20 percent growth year-over-year. By encouraging team members to be bold and disruptive, they drive innovation and create significant competitive advantages for the organization in the home care industry.

Given these accomplishments, how can you create a faster, leaner culture of accountability and encourage autonomy in your organization?

Five Things You Must Know About A Culture Of Self-Leadership

Cathy shared five tips to help your team embrace a culture of self-leadership.

1. Self-leadership doesn’t mean your team makes decisions in a vacuum. Formalize how you want your team to give you updates and when they should seek your advice. Expect some collateral damage if you don’t, because people might make decisions and you have no idea what is going on. Perhaps they didn’t inform you of what they were doing, didn’t seek advice, or didn’t make the best decision. Clear up any communication gaps.
2. Work together on the ‘what’ and let your team figure out the ‘how.’ But, don’t just jump ship immediately. You need to establish guidelines and create alignment in order for this to be successful. To implement a culture of self-leadership, your team needs to understand your strategy. If your team doesn’t know why they are doing something, regardless of their effort, the purpose is lost because they don’t have a clear picture of the goal.
3. Create a culture of feedback. Have the necessary and hard conversations with your team. Establish your culture of care and trust. Whether you build trust through weekly updates, one-on-ones or a systemized process, it is important to develop an authentic relationship with your team. By establishing trust with your people, you are building the foundation for success.
4. Have high expectations of your staff. If you don’t, they won’t. Expectations hold people accountable. Come up with your own customized “Ten Skills That Require Zero Talent List” to set the basic expectations of your self-led players. This will be incredibly helpful in creating stepping stones to a culture of self-leadership. If you expect mediocrity you will get mediocre results. Expect excellence.
5. Allow the personal and professional to blend. Welcome authenticity and respect. You must establish respect and trust with your people and genuinely care about them, otherwise a culture of self-leadership will not thrive. “I believe one of the reasons that self-leadership works so well at Nurse Next Door is because people come to work with the same respect they carry in their personal life,” says Thorpe. Imagine how exhausting it is for people to show up to work every day having to be someone else. How can you expect them to give it their best and connect with your culture if they are constantly pretending?

“As a medium-sized organization, a culture of self-leadership works exceptionally well,” says Thorpe. “I believe a culture of self-leadership can be effective in any organization, but this model is not for everyone. Some people feel comfortable being told what to do and some leaders don’t feel comfortable leading less. From our experience, we find this model works best for self-led players who can accept feedback.”

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

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Agile Working has become the buzzword for how to turn your business into a thriving, creative and productive hub while attracting and retaining the best talent. It’s moving from flexible working to smarter working. And it does what it says if you follow the recipe.

Agile Working was originally created by Toyota to get production lines moving faster. It gives people the ability to work in various locations to complete the tasks necessary to do their jobs. Specific desks do not exist – you can work from a collaborative space, a breakout area, home, a café, or wherever benefits the task at hand. And employees are supported with practices and processes that allow them to be agile. Agile Working makes work seem less gray and more technicolor. It’s enticing, exciting and human. And it works.

Innovative technology plays a vital part in allowing people to be more flexible and mobile.

COO of Engage Works, Joe Binnion, explains the importance of the link to an agile working policy, “The key to designing purposeful working environments fit for a digitally disrupted world is to be design-led, not just in spatial design but in the technology and the relevant working processes. It is about creating flexible environments and technology that support the work being done, with agility to respond to different modes of working at different times. Agile working environments enable creativity, innovation, collaboration and acceleration in a range of contexts – sales, organizational change and technology development to mention just a few. A physical workplace is fast becoming the location to congregate and collaborate – there is now a generally accepted design principle that creativity is much less likely when people are sitting at hotdesks.”

An office space that promotes flexibility, collaboration, wellness and convenience for employees to focus on their work combined with a well executed agile working policy will help your people bring more of their unique talents to play every day. It will help them live happier, more creative and productive lives and it will free up huge amounts of senior leadership time. What’s not to like?

The challenge. Most companies aren’t prepared to behave differently long-term to support the shift. They start with good intentions but they rapidly fall by the wayside as old habits come back into play.

Command and control are a thing of the past, they do not suit the modern working landscape. Nearly all senior executives will agree, yet few can let go. It is all about embracing trust. “If you really trust people and really rely on them, they are more reliable and trustworthy,” says Syd Nadim, CEO of Clock, a UK digital marketing agency “Let go and watch how well other people can deliver and perform.”

Your people aren’t a scarce resource that needs to be optimized, they are unique sources of genius that need to be released. Create the conditions of brilliance for them and they will fly.

Lead by Example. To make sure the policy works there are criteria that need to be adhered to across the board. By everyone. After all, you are changing the heart and soul of your business. It is not just an environmental spruce up. “The first and most important step is leadership support and accountability,” says Marcee Harris Schwartz, of accounting firm BDO USA. “A key differentiator for us is that our chief executive, Jack Weisbaum, feels ownership of the strategy and speaks eloquently about the benefits. He speaks about how he will try and wrap-up part of the day, go for a swim, have dinner with his wife, then log back on in the evening to interact with our west coast leaders.”

Don’t measure inputs but savor outputs. Spend more time collecting evidence of success through metrics and stories which will inspire teams and help everyone understand where things could be better. Success examples can help you adjust your course as you learn. We recently worked with global drinks manufacturer, Britvic, who developed their hugely successful internal Way of Working for Marketing Excellence Awards; WoWme.

“We launched the WoWme awards with the objective of embedding our capability program and at the same time rewarding creative behaviors and outputs. People can nominate whomever they like so the feeling is one of sharing and caring rather than simply competition. The awards also act as a portal for showcasing inspiring creative work through our internal site. WoWme has definitely established a condition for brilliance, which combined with promoting an environment that allows creativity to thrive, has seen our teams deliver a range of innovative and dynamic campaigns which have directly impacted sales growth” says Britvic’s CMO Matthew Barwell.

Constantly experiment. What works for one culture will not work for another so you have to try things out to see what fits. It’s like buying clothes, they may look good on a rack and feel good to touch but until you try them on, you don’t know. Albert Einstein once said “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong”. Try stuff out and you will learn fast.

Invest in your people’s skills. They then gain the confidence to answer the question, “What’s needed here?” Teaching people new ways of working will stop them overworking while away from the office, prompted by feeling like they still have to prove their worth by sending emails and reports – the main reason many purely flexible working policies fail to increase productivity. Research by the International Labour Office found that the average worker who has the freedom to set their own hours to work 17 extra working hours a week. Even worse, our per-hour productivity during an increase in working time always falls. A recent study reported that individuals working 55 hours or more per week had a 33% greater risk of stroke and a 13% increased risk of developing coronary heart disease.

Take a note from the Danes who have a totally different mindset to work and the best work-life balance in the world, working only 33 hours per week on average. Consequently, they are one of the happiest countries in the world and the second most productive country in the EU. A Danish worker quotes “We are trusted to do a good job, then leave”.

Support structures. Don’t leave people on their own. Work them in pods, pairs, and have coaches on the floor so they can bounce ideas off each other and grow. Agility is all about teamwork. “Toyota put its workers in pairs, often a novice with an expert because the former learns from the latter and might occasionally come up with a new way of doing something,” says Martin McNulty, of digital agency Forward3D and an advocate of agile working. “They also checked each other’s work, saving the need for quality-control departments.”

Celebrate uniqueness and celebrate life. When we are being true to ourselves we do better work, so encourage employees to turn up as they are and celebrate that. Enjoy agile working in its delivery of living a better life not just better work. Help people live better every day and they will work better every day. Unilever’s agile working policy does just that and includes job sharing, flexible or reduced hours and working from home. “Our new way of working measures performance on results, not time and attendance. It reinforces diversity by helping people, particularly women, balance their personal and professional lives.” Career breaks are seen as a postponement not a cancellation of progression.

Make it fun. No point having lots of freedom if the office isn’t a honeypot of joy. Don’t put structures in like ‘Everyone in the Office on Mondays’. Make it attractive for them to be there so they come by choice. The office should be a reward not a pain in the butt. Take note of Richard Branson’s ethic, “More than any other element, fun is the secret to Virgin’s success”.

Get an Agile workplace happening and you may have just done the most important bit of leadership of your career.

Chris Baréz-Brown, author, speaker and founder of Upping Your Elvis, specialists in creative leadership. This article originally appeared on bulldogdrummond.com.

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Unfortunately, our problem-solving abilities are limited by individual knowledge and experience. When problems are large and complex, we might not have the right data available to have any hope of finding a solution if we go it alone. And when we get stuck, collaboration can be a powerful way to find the best solution.

By sharing knowledge and experience amongst a diverse group, we can often tackle complex problems that cannot be solved alone.

In a previous article, I explored how dialogue and diversity within a group can ignite this innovative thinking. And with the right environment, talent, and process, organizational innovation can flourish.

This got me thinking: What if you simply don’t have the internal resources to support a culture of innovation? How would organizations effectively look outside of their walls for new ideas that they can potentially bring to market?

Digital and industrial giant General Electric seems to have found a solution with their crowd-powered open innovation platform, GE Fuse. Fuse harnesses the knowledge and experience of a global community of engineers to help GE customers solve major product challenges.

“The ultimate goal is to accelerate product and technology development,” says Amelia Gandara, Community Leader at Fuse. “This is truly a community of curious minds eager to apply their technical skills to a project that challenges them as engineers, scientists, and problem solvers. For example, one of our community members is a stay-at-home father with an advanced technical degree. The platform gives him a place to continue to work his skills while also taking care of his children at home.”

Engaging a diverse, global community doesn’t come without its challenges. Amelia shared several lessons for organizations looking to adopt a similar model for crowdsourcing innovation:

Understand The Experiment

“Innovation is a word that gets thrown around often, but it’s important to lay out what your company means by innovation,” says Gandara. Is it internal, or will you engage external participants? Is the goal to make product development faster, or less expensive, or both? Will the focus be on new products or enhancements to existing ones? Answering these questions can help bring clarity and alignment around your initiatives.

Learn From Each Experiment

Doing the same thing over and over again without improving and iterating is a wasted opportunity, so it’s important to learn from each experiment. For example, Fuse launched with four challenges for the community to solve. After each challenge, Amelia and team examine what was successful and what should be considered for the next challenge. “We frame each challenge structure as an experiment to see what will resonate most with our online community.”

Leadership Must Be An Ambassador

A new initiative, especially on a large-scale, is risky and can take some time to prove itself. So, it’s critical for leaders to remain a steady supporter of the cause. “It can take up to two years to see business-shifting results,” according to Gandara.

Visible support from senior leaders helps maintain the high energy momentum while you’re in the thick of it. “Leadership must be a loud ambassador, acknowledging and leaning in to the associated risk to give the rest of the team the confidence to give their full investment of time and resources.”

Alignment Between Distributed And Internal Participants

“A separate innovation initiative can feel like an assault on your current product development processes, so communicating value and sharing in the risk are crucial,” Amelia shared. Fuse, therefore, exists to enhance internal capabilities, not replace them. The platform achieves this by solving problems and taking risks that are beyond the internal teams’ capabilities.

In fact, some of GE’s more adventurous internal subject matter experts are partners. “For example, our second challenge focused jet engine inspection. A team of subject matter experts from GE Inspection Technologies and GE Aviation partnered to prepare and launch the challenge. The enthusiasm of the team is tangible, and the outcomes will be shared to help continue building excitement about the Fuse model.”

Whether or not your company can adopt a similar model largely depends on your available resources, but the benefits are undeniable. By expanding your collective knowledge and experience to stakeholders outside of your organization, you can collect a much broader spectrum of new ideas, potential risks, and feedback. It also provides your internal teams the opportunity to broaden their knowledge, sharpen their skills, and harness the power of the collective to uncover new and innovative solutions to everyday business problems.

Chris Cancialosi, Ph.D., is a Partner and Founder at gothamCulture. This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post How To Unlock Your Potential For Innovation Through Crowdsourcing appeared first on gothamCulture.

International expansions are particularly tricky. With offices dotting the globe, executives lose the ability to have a personal relationship with each team member. This disconnect makes it challenging for leaders to develop credibility and ensure employees understand the reasoning behind corporate decisions and strategic initiatives. Open-door policies are tough to maintain, particularly because you can’t just drop by someone’s desk or office to check in. When employees are out of sight, they’re often out of mind.

Regardless of the reason for the expansion — whether through organic growth, the acquisition of an existing business in a new region, or building out a new team or office to serve a new market — it’s difficult to preserve a strong, consistent company culture. Effective communication is essential to overcoming any hurdles as your company grows.

The Consequences of Poor Communication

A communication breakdown can have detrimental effects on company culture, including disunity and distrust of leadership. These issues are problematic for any organization, but they can be particularly troublesome during an expansion.

Even the best intentions can quickly turn into messages of impending failure. I worked with one CEO whose communication flub ended up costing him dearly. He wanted to communicate a change in the company’s financial strategy to the team, but he decided to share that information via email. As soon as he hit “send,” the rumor mill began to churn.

The company was shifting resources to increase cash flow and become less reliant on credit, with the ultimate goal of ensuring the company’s financial stability and putting it in a better position for merging or acquiring other businesses. The short-term strategy required, however, that the company freeze budgets and hiring activity and embrace more conservative performance bonuses.

Naturally, the rumors were a lot juicier than reality. People questioned the company’s financial stability, speculating it was preparing for a hostile takeover. Others felt so anxious about the situation that they left the company. The entire organization was clouded in doubt, and the culture spiraled out of control — all because of one email.

The CEO tried to remedy the situation by traveling across the country to deliver his message in person — showing body language, emotion, compassion, and passion — at town hall meetings and through one-on-one conversations with staff in the field. Unfortunately, a lot of damage was already done, and insecurity was planted in the back of people’s minds. This was before the company had even expanded, but it was in the early stages of preparing for incredible growth.

The message could have been disseminated much more quickly and cheaply with quite a bit less heartache. Email might be a great tool for reaching people, but the one-way nature of the medium isn’t the most engaging format. To avoid spreading panic across the company, he could have used email coupled with other types of technology to speak directly with each employee about his strategy.

Tools to Preserve and Enhance Your Culture

With employees spread across multiple cities, countries, or continents, it can be a challenge to keep everyone on the same page. Beyond a unified company handbook, it’s critical to ingrain the company’s values, goals, and culture in every employee through regular communication and modeling: onboarding, newsletters, video updates, internal blog posts, team-building programs, and training.

Much of company culture is relational and based on good communication. It’s tricky to maintain any sense of solidarity among employees who rarely or never interact in person. It’s even more of a challenge if team members hail from different parts of the globe, as you have to account for different regional cultures and communication norms. Thankfully, modern technology can safeguard the way your team works together as you expand. If you think that you might struggle to expand by yourself then you could consider using Champions of Change to help you out. Every business relies on smooth running IT systems and this company is one that could help you with that.

1. Videoconferencing

Some messages are better delivered in person (like my example above). When face-to-face can’t happen, the next best thing is video conferencing. It allows people to put a face and personality to a name, pick up on nonverbal cues, and create personal connections. My company uses Zoom, but you could also try GoToMeeting, Skype, or Google Hangouts, among others. If one employee works remotely, everyone should call into a meeting virtually. Culture is about creating shared experiences.

2. Social Networking

Instead of only providing top-down communication, encourage employees to start a dialogue. Social networking and chat tools provide a great way for employees to interact with one another despite geographical differences. They allow workers to celebrate successes, create shared memories, and unify.

My company uses a tool called WeVue to post weekly updates, publicize birthdays across the company, and celebrate big wins for our teams. WeVue promotes culture through sharing pictures and videos of employees’ cultural experiences inside and outside of the office. You might also try Slack or creating internal Facebook pages for your organization.

3. Collaborative Tools

Workplace culture is partially a result of how work gets done. If you can find a way to work together — ideally in real time — you’ll inspire a culture of collaboration, patience, partnership, and coaching.

One tool we use is Google Docs, a service that stores and synchronizes files, allowing team members to collaboratively edit documents, forms, presentations, and more. We also use MindMeister, an online tool that allows multiple users to simultaneously capture, develop, and share ideas visually, enabling colleagues to brainstorm and plan projects regardless of location.

There’s one caveat: None of these tools is a panacea. You’ve probably already used some of these tools or at least heard of a couple. To be truly effective, they require leaders to encourage and reinforce their use — and to use the tools themselves.

So turn on your camera, drop your frequently used files into the cloud, and celebrate one another on social networks. Don’t rely on dated mediums such as email or the phone when another format would be more effective. The best tools in the world are useless if you avoid them. By successfully integrating collaborative technologies into your organization, your company culture can flourish — even across the world.

This article originally appeared on Business2Community.com.

The post How Technology Can Save Your Company Culture During an Expansion appeared first on gothamCulture.

Think about the Internet. Most of us weren’t even aware of it until the mid 90’s, but where would we be today without it? Although I type here from the comfort of my office chair, my office is at home and I rarely need to venture into NYC thanks to technology. My office material comes from Amazon.com and my calls are handled over a VOIP platform. All driven by the web.

Knowledge management is a similar area you’ve probably never paid attention to. Maybe you haven’t heard about it yet, but knowledge management is already affecting how you live and work.

At home, no one owns an Encyclopedia Britannica anymore. We find that information elsewhere, like Wikipedia. When we’re on the go, as long as we have our smartphones, apps like Yelp, Waze, Groupon, Instagram, and YouTube are allowing us to contribute to and draw from knowledge management.

Can you see the commonality?

• Providing information to a group expressing interest in the topic
• Harnessing feedback from that group to further refine the content
• Further educating the group, turning them into subject matter experts
• Creating a “center of gravity” for experts and information alike

What is Knowledge Management?

The definition of knowledge management is how an organization creates, shares, uses, and manages information. It refers to improving the organization organically by making the best use of the knowledge at its disposal.

Imagine being able to extract the lessons learned from every piece of work in the company portfolio. Or finding what you’re looking for without rifling through folders or needing to ask dozens of coworkers. Wouldn’t that make your daily work life easier?

In the simplest variant, a Knowledge Management system consists of the following:

• A simple internal process to capture company knowledge
• A Community of Practice (internal experts) to review information that comes in
• Technology to support this process and the Community of Practice

The good news is this: Your company is probably already halfway there and you didn’t even know it! At work, are you using a Microsoft SharePoint server, cloud storage, or a shared drive for people to store documents instead of on individual desktops? Maybe you use Adobe EchoSign to quickly sign documents electronically? And it’s not just technology and software. Simple changes to staffing and process workflow can have equally large impacts (and should be considered prior to software purchases anyway).

The Benefits of Knowledge Management Systems

Now for the bad news. Knowledge management may provide large benefits, but you’re not going to get there overnight. You’re going to have to approach this step-by-step. To implement knowledge management the very first time, adhere to the following process:

1. Develop your problem statement / define the problem you’re trying to solve
2. Isolate a portion of your organization that you think is either interested in or is competent to brainstorm solutions to this problem. This becomes your initial network
3. Create a call to action and brand your campaign / get your entire organization on board and get them interested!
4. Develop a simple process to capture ideas (suggestion box/feedback card/website)
5. Solicit ideas/review ideas with your initial network
6. Implement quick wins & offer praise to the problem contributors

Organizational learning and development becomes more difficult to manage as your company grows. Without managing critical information, team members may take important pieces of tribal knowledge with them when they leave, new employees are forced to learn their roles without any guidance, and a tremendous amount of time is wasted learning and relearning the same processes in inconsistent ways.

But as an organization matures, it forms stronger linkages between leadership, culture, and strategy to allow for longer-term operations planning and enhanced daily operational performance. So why not start considering knowledge management to help support this?

Knowledge management helps gather the power from your entire organization and use it to incrementally improve your daily operations. It enables organizations to learn more intuitively, allowing companies to innovate better through knowledge-sharing organizational structures, processes, and tools. By making their jobs easier and providing a platform to learn new skills, you can engage your workforce by making their work more interesting and relevant. That effort ultimately leads to a series of advantages which, day by day, helps your company stack up better than your competition.

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“I wrote the entire review with no input from my manager who simply submitted it to HR after I sent it to him.”

“We set goals in January and didn’t look at them again for a year. By then, my job had changed so much that the goals didn’t make any sense.”

“I thought I was doing a great job and I’d be rated highly. My manager thought my work was sub-par. He told me for the first time at the annual review.”

“My manager indicated I’d be promoted if I accomplished specific goals. At the annual review, she agreed I had met or exceeded all of them. Then she told me that she had received feedback that my interpersonal skills were poor, so my promotion would be delayed. I have worked for this manager for two years. This was the first time she raised this issue.”

“My manager won’t talk to me about career development goals. He knows if I leave, he will have a hard time finding a replacement, so, he avoids the discussion.”

Do you recognize any of these stories? I suspect you or someone you know has experienced at least one of these scenarios.

A study by TinyPulse highlighted the primary reasons why managers and employees dislike the performance management process: it takes too much time, focuses on the negative, and doesn’t address issues in a timely manner.

However, it’s not just employees and their managers who dislike the process. A 2015 Deloitte study found that only 8 percent of HR respondents believed their performance management process drove business value. An HCI research study reported that only 39 percent agreed appraisals were effective at improving performance.

Those are stunning statistics. Clearly, a process that a) employees and managers dislike, b) doesn’t improve performance or c) doesn’t drive business value is ripe for change.

In 2011, Kelly Services replaced the annual review with real-time feedback and a focus on outcomes over process. Adobe quickly followed suit. These firms and the hundreds who followed implemented agile goal setting and ongoing feedback from multiple sources to align with their fast-paced collaborative environments. Moreover, these firms recognized the importance of retaining and growing talent and guided managers to shift the conversations from evaluating to enhancing the performance of their employees.

Performance Management Cautions

Amidst the excitement about these “agile” or “dynamic” performance management approaches, numerous voices have cautioned companies about doing their due diligence before jumping on the performance management bandwagon.

These individuals appropriately remind us that an improved performance management approach requires not simply a new process, but also a suite of changes to ensure the new process is both successful short-term and sustainable long-term.

Based on the multitude of articles I’ve read on the topic, their recommendations fall into six areas:

Role modeling by leaders who continuously communicate the benefits of the new process and demonstrate how it works in practice;

Aligned and cascaded goals from the CEO to each business unit to ensure employees can connect their role to strategic business objectives;

Role clarity to ensure each actor in the process understands his/her accountabilities for successful performance management;

Skills for all employees on giving and receiving feedback, setting meaningful goals, and conducting challenging conversations;

Technology that enables managers and employees to record performance conversations and aid ongoing development and accountability for progress and outcomes;

If your organization is considering a move towards new performance management practices, pay heed to this excellent advice. However, also recognize that these suggestions largely gloss over the importance of workplace culture as the foundation of performance management. As noted in a blog post by David Hassell, “There have now been numerous studies showing the correlation between great culture and high performance, with one example showing that since 1998, Fortune’s 100 Best Companies To Work For (a decent proxy for companies with a strong culture) have outperformed the S&P 500 by 2to 1.”

Even with the best planning and project management, if the culture does not support the new performance management ecosystem, your organization will have a tough time making it work and stick.

Is your culture ready? Read on.

The Culture Factor

Over the past 12 years, I have worked with nearly 100 firms of varying sizes and levels of HR maturity. Of the firms that implemented new performance management approaches, all had the same high-level goal: to grow their talent to meet current and future business needs.

Through my work with these firms, I have observed six cultural factors I believe are foundational to successful implementation and sustainability of a new performance management approach. As you read each description below, ask yourself if your organization exhibits these cultural attributes.

1. Agile business practices: The organization seamlessly and appropriately adjusts and adapts to shifting markets, customer needs, employee requirements and business demands.

2. Engenders Trust: Leaders provide resources enabling employees to develop and grow their capabilities. They guide managers to ‘catch their people doing something right’ instead of ‘something wrong’. Feedback is timely and constructive. Managers make it safe for employees to admit mistakes or development gaps.

3. Constructive: The organization promotes and rewards collaboration, sharing knowledge and building strong teams. Managers use feedback as mechanisms for growth and strengthening capabilities. Leaders promote and recognize adaptability and effectiveness.

4. Reflective: The organization encourages reflective behavior as a vehicle to learn from experiences and use failure as an opportunity to improve. Managers regularly allocate time at the conclusion of major projects to record lessons learned and identify improvement opportunities.

5. Diverse viewpoints: The organization encourages and embraces diverse points of view within and across teams. Leaders encourage open and honest dialogue among employees.

6. Growth Mindset: Leaders believe that employees can advance their abilities through dedication and hard work. Managers coach their employees to be lifelong and resilient learners who individually and collectively seek opportunities to grow.

Final Thoughts

Organizational culture is hard to change. It is the organization’s DNA and it affects how the workforce behaves, reacts and adjusts. If you are considering a change to your performance management practices, do it with your eyes open. Evaluate your culture critically and adapt your implementation so it will succeed. Look for subcultures that are more amenable to agile and dynamic approaches to pilot the new processes. Observe where the organization embraces the new methods and where it does not. Then, course correct and plan accordingly.

What takes one organization one year to adopt may take your organization several years. Watch, tweak, and improve as you go. Who knows; you may find that the new practices themselves help create a more robust and healthy culture that improves employee performance and your performance management process.

The post Is Your Organization Ready for a New Performance Management Process? appeared first on gothamCulture.

Many times we forget that the new year is a good marker to go back and re-visit our existing policies and procedures. What worked and what didn’t? What could work better?

For instance, at gothamCulture we try to use our budgeting process as a means to re-examine how we do business and how our use of resources supports our overall strategy. We re-visit our employee handbook and procedure manual to make sure we are doing things the way they are outlined, helping to avoid the ‘because we’ve always done it that way’ excuse that leads to process for process’ sake.

In addition to constant touchpoints with our team, we also try to get the big ideas on the table from the field staff and make sure the operational team is seeing things from their perspective. This helps keep the entire team aligned and ensures our field team is getting the support they need to focus on their work.

A good tool some organizations use is a ‘sandbox’ concept, where they actively try out new processes before setting them in stone. Again, your operational team may think it’s the best idea in the world until it gets out to the field team and falls flat, or worse; distracts the team from what’s important.

Regardless of the tools that you choose, use this opportunity to:

Confirm that your marketing materials are all updated (don’t forget your website and online presence).

Update all the dates in your manuals, policies and other employee-facing materials.

Re-align where you are going to devote your resources in the coming year. Stress-test past practices to make sure that they are the best practices for your team.

Re-think (or confirm) your internal processes and policies are effective (great communication touchpoint with your team and shows that they have a say in how your organization functions)

We invite you to use the new year as an opportunity to review how you work, what tools you need and what new things you might try. Take the time to keep your policies fresh, relevant and support the operational and strategic goals of the organization.

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Last month, IBM hosted the World of Watson conference in Las Vegas aimed at raising awareness and educating participants about advances in computing over the last decade. The gathering also showcased a wide variety of real-world use cases from IBM and their wide range of partners, including the likes of office supply retailer Staples, and Grammy-winning music producer Alex Da Kid. But how did we get to this point?

In 2007, when a small group of IBM’s artificial intelligence (AI) experts approached Dr. John Kelly III, SVP of Cognitive Solutions and Research, pitching authorization to build the world’s first cognitive computing system, he had a big decision to make. Some might say a gamble. But the company continued to put chips on the table to support this endeavor as it progressed exponentially over the last decade.

Cognitive technology is used in a variety of use cases across industries, the arts, and music; from winning a popular game show to helping oncologist boards determine cancer-fighting strategies. In a matter of five years, Watson progressed from Jeopardy winner to a technological capability that is available to everyone.

If you still aren’t convinced that cognitive technology is going to impact your life and business, think again. This isn’t a far-off vision of the future. It’s already happening. A few weeks ago I wrote about how Watson is beginning to change life as we know it, and there seems to be no end in sight.

In fact, Thomas Freidman, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of “The World is Flat” and “Thank You for Being Late”, suggests that cognitive technology is one of the three largest non-linear accelerations currently reshaping life and work as we know it (digital globalization and Mother Nature being the other two). Non-linear, meaning the line charts look akin to hockey sticks and they will undoubtedly have a significant impact on all of us.

Dr. Kelly agrees. Within the next five years, he expects every medical professional in the world will be utilizing the power of Watson to support decision-making, as well as enhancing the patient experience.

It’s Not All Rainbows and Unicorns

Artificial intelligence and cognitive computing, as concepts, are not welcomed across the board. Many people view these advancements as encroaching on their livelihoods.

IBM prefers the term ‘augmented intelligence’ over artificial intelligence. They believe that rather than computers taking over for humans, cognitive technology will serve a critical role in augmenting the humans it supports. This augmented intelligence will create unparalleled opportunities to draw out the full capacity and potential of the human spirit by relieving people of transactional and mundane tasks that take up so much time today.

So, What Does This Mean for Business Leaders?

1. From data to insights. Imagine if you had the ability to consolidate and analyze massive amounts of structured data with lightning speed. Your data and insights were never forgotten. And a piece of technology could begin to learn through its interactions and proactively provide you with insights you need without even asking? I’m sure this possibility might intrigue more than a few business leaders.
2. New opportunities and new markets. As the era of cognitive computing dawns and drafts off of the momentum that the cloud era created, a multitude of new business opportunities will emerge. Entrepreneurial thinkers will begin to conjure up new ways to solve problems using cognitive technology. Take, for instance, Local Motors, the startup behind the world’s first cognitive-enabled, autonomous vehicle, Olli.
3. An enhanced way to serve your customers. Greg Spratto, VP of operations at Autodesk, shared with me an example of how his organization is using Watson to improve customer service. “Our agents typically get one of two types of inquiries from customers. The first being those related to accessing the information they need. In these situations, customers often don’t want to talk to a human being; they just want to get what they need so they can move on. By teaching Watson to interact with these customers and provide them with the information they need quickly and accurately, our service agents are now freed up to support the calls where customers truly need or want to talk with a human being.
4. Helping free up your people to focus on work only humans can do. By freeing people from mundane or repeated tasks and augmenting them with technology to support rapid data analysis and insights, the human capital in your organization can spend more of their time creating and innovating; solving problems that computers cannot.
5. The ability to keep pace with the world. The non-linear acceleration of technological advancement is quickly outpacing the ability of humans to adapt to these changes. Cognitive computing presents a way to help people effectively keep pace in a world that is continuously accelerating around them.
6. An entirely new way of working together. Learning how to operate and thrive in this new world will take quite a bit of adaptation and time will tell how augmented intelligence will reshape the dynamics of the workplace.

I will continue to explore the cognitive era, as well as the potential impacts and risks tied to it. Whatever happens, it seems a new era of human existence may be upon us. The question is, how can we take advantage of the opportunity to augment the human experience at work?

Chris Cancialosi, Ph.D., is a Partner and Founder at gothamCulture. This article originally appeared on Forbes.

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