The biggest brands in the world become what they are with the help of one elusive ingredient: customer loyalty. In a world over-saturated with scattershot marketing messages, successful companies take the time to truly get to know their customers — their motivations, fears, ideas, and priorities — and tackle customer service with relentless dedication.

If you’re an entrepreneur, this is good news and bad news.

The bad news? You’re likely competing against established brands that have worked for years — or even decades — to build loyalty among customers.

The good news? You can make customer-service commitment part of your company’s mission early on and be hyper-focused on giving a smaller number of customers the best experiences possible.

If you commit to offering better customer service than your competitors, then your customers are far more likely to tolerate growing pains and stick with you as you scale. This is why developing a customer service culture should be a table stakes commitment for all startups.

Power of the People

Over the past several years, there’s been a constant influx of new technologies designed to make the customer service experience better for both businesses and customers.

Often, bigger companies will invest heavily in sophisticated customer service automation tools, quality call center technology, intelligent customer relationship management systems, and vast knowledge databases, hoping to “solve” customer service.

If you’re at a startup with a limited budget, you may think you can’t compete because you can’t afford the latest tools. But the simple fact is that world-class customer service starts with people.

Maybe you’ve invested time and money into building a custom platform to help you serve customers better. Maybe your customer service technology of choice is your cellphone.

Regardless, you need to be sure that the people on your team who regularly interact with customers can communicate with empathy.

As a founder, you should get comfortable speaking with customers in their language and thinking about your product from their viewpoint.

Set the tone, the rest of your team will follow, and you’ll be on the path to developing a customer service culture that permeates all aspects of your company.

Find a Balance and Keep Learning

Especially in the early days of your startup, you’re going to have to do things that don’t scale. But as you grow, you have to balance quality service with cost.

Despite all your best intentions, having your lead developer or top product manager regularly answering customer calls isn’t a good idea.

As soon as you can, either hire someone or transition a current team member into a full-time customer success role. You’ll want this person to be able to handle a variety of customer touchpoints.

It’s great to have live phone support, but it’s not always enough: Live chat and email, along with automated FAQs and tutorials, are all extremely important today.

You’ll often find that what worked one year may not work the next year because of growth, new product offerings, and the emergence of new communications tools.

Likewise, keep in mind that different customers have different communication preferences. Learn what those preferences are early on and coordinate with your team to make sure you’re always up to speed on how customers are trying to communicate with you.

A True Customer Service Culture is an Investment

I speak from experience when I say that investing in customer service pays off.

At Phone. com, we do everything we can to make using our product as easy as possible — offering tools like a customer control panel and self-guided tutorials.

But when customers do need help, we make sure they’re able to easily get in touch with an experienced, friendly customer service rep.

Every day, we have customers both old and new write us unsolicited thank-you notes describing their experiences.

Quality customer service has always been a key component of business success. But it’s arguably more important today than ever before, simply because it’s easier than ever before — anyone can do it, and customers have come to expect it.

Take advantage of the array of tools and channels available to facilitate customer interactions. Avoid making assumptions. Instead, try to get feedback from customers whenever you can — and not just anonymous surveys.

When you’re talking with a customer, ask them how they think you’re doing. Feedback is a gift!

Finally, remember that you can’t please everyone, so don’t try to. Instead, focus on providing top-notch service to those customers who best fit your business.

Stick to your word, do your best, and try to improve each day. Your customers will reward you.

By Ari Rabban on 12/28/2016. Originally published on Startups. co – The world’s largest startup platform, helping over 1 million startup companies.

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Our ancestors would have trouble recognizing our employee-centered office spaces and working arrangements. Telecommuting has become commonplace for many small and large organizations, and most companies have a global focus — internationally-based employees, vendors, and clients are par for the course. Thankfully, communication is instantaneous with technology such as email, real-time messaging, virtual meetings, and synchronous conference calls.

How accustomed are we to this brave new work world? When children photo-bombed their father’s international interview on the BBC, society laughed it off because of how commonplace that scenario has become. Workers adore this ever-changing environment, but it can be problematic for business leaders.

CEOs, executives, and founders must corral a flock that often isn’t in the same office, city, or country. Although research shows innovative work environments are more productive, companies still have to grapple with the logistics of never-ending change.

Suddenly, heading to Mars seems a lot simpler than navigating the evolving business world.

Shades of Gray Among the Standing Desks

“Exception is the norm” might as well be the motto for the modern work environment. Employee handbooks and departmental budgets are peppered with gray areas instead of yesteryear’s black-and-white situations. Corporate leaders must make decisions on a case-by-case basis, usually with no prior expertise in handling such situations.

When I began telecommuting, there was no established rule book. I worked with my supervisor and our human resources department to create the boundaries of my flexible work arrangement. We established performance metrics and expectations to ensure everyone had the same understanding of the arrangement. For instance, I would be available via instant-messaging platforms during standard working hours, respond to emails within 24 hours, and visit the office at least once a month.

As my telecommuting progressed, my colleagues and I established more mutual trust. This allowed us to eliminate a few of those initial ground rules — I no longer had to provide a weekly account of what I had done and planned to do, for example. We managed to make telecommuting work, but it truly was a team effort.

That collaborative spirit is missing from many employee-driven work cultures. We’ve admitted that certain employees work best when they can choose for themselves how and when they do their best work, but we neglect to create the necessary structure. Without a framework approved by leadership and workers, mass chaos is inevitable. Empowerment is fine, but responsibility goes both ways. Leaders should be ready to provide feedback on a new set of behaviors, and employees must be open to the give-and-take of the modern work environment.

Caring for the Heart of Your Organization

Is your company ready to give more freedom to employees? Do you feel like you’re losing great people to more agile competitors? It’s probably time to become an employee-centered workplace. Here are a few guiding principles as you make the transition.

1. Acknowledge your beliefs and assumptions.

Spend time reflecting on your own beliefs about work. Do you think tasks only get done at a desk (or in a cubicle), or do you feel like it depends on each worker’s role and responsibilities? What problems and benefits does your current structure offer? Get everything out in the open before you move forward. After you’ve addressed your biases, map out your ideal workplace. Whether it involves a shift to more telecommuting or an open floor plan, visualize it with the help of department leaders and frontline employees. This exercise can help you uncover potential issues and opportunities. Compare your dream hierarchy with your current structure. If there isn’t natural overlap, consider how you can steer your company in the desired direction.

2. Scan your environment and ask questions.

Talk with the people who will be most affected by proposed changes: your employees. What would work best for them? How can they bring their best selves to every aspect of their work lives? Listen and learn before you hit the budgets. Consider ways you can spend your money more effectively. Instead of building out cubicles and conference rooms, for example, your team might be happier with tables and chairs, a booth for private calls, a smattering of standing desks, and the ability to work from home (with advance notification and approval, of course).

3. Develop leaders for emerging challenges.

Leaders received education on everything from workplace conflict to motivating employees, but there is no such thing as too much communication-related training. Managers must be able to provide consistent, constructive feedback to the employees they supervise. Your goal should be clear lines of communication — particularly if some workers are not in the office on a daily basis. It’s exceedingly easy to accidentally alienate remote team members. Send messages regularly to ensure they know exactly what’s happening and feel like a valued part of the organization. Moreover, don’t forget that remote employees could be tomorrow’s leaders; give them a chance to enjoy development opportunities that focus on building their analytical, communication, problem-solving, and collaborative abilities.

Piloting a business (or a spaceship) with no real boundaries might seem scary, but it’s also an exhilarating opportunity. Provided you’re on the same page, you and your team members can go anywhere in the universe. If you’re able to successfully adapt to this limitless workplace freedom, there’s nothing to stop you from boldly going where no one has gone before.

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Sadly, we don’t have to look far to find stories of how this unfolds in the workplace.

Consider performance management, for example. Peggy Parskey recently shared several colleagues’ experiences with annual performance reviews:

“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.”

“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.”

Professional development programs provide another example of how expectations are violated. Here are several worker quotes from TINYpulse’s 2017 Employee Engagement Report:

“I’m not quite sure what promotions, if any, are or are not available to me or my colleagues at our level. There seems to be a high rate of turnover that may be, in part, due to a lack of clarity on how to grow within the business.”

“It has never been explained to me what each role entails and what I need to achieve in order to progress.”

“While I feel like there is a lot of future opportunity in the organization, I have no idea how to get promoted. My manager has never discussed development or promotion opportunities with me.”

TINYpulse’s research found that 42% of managers feel that management is transparent, but only 25% of employees agree. Clearly, there’s a disconnect.

Something’s wrong with the way most companies create, manage, and communicate expectations. Although leaders may assume that expectations are clear, there are many other personal beliefs and assumptions at play under the surface, which only muddy the waters.

Psychological Contracts Explained

When an organization hires an employee, they enter into a psychological contract of expectations. The employer expects a certain level of performance from the employee, and the employee expects to be treated with fairness and respect in return.

When workplace expectations aren’t met, this psychological contract is breached, potentially causing significant damage to employee engagement, retention, and the overall level of trust in the workplace.

Researchers Elizabeth Wolfe and Sandra Morrison found two primary causes of psychological contract violations, explained in two separate studies published in 1997 and 2000.

1. Reneging. Reneging happens when a company is either unwilling or unable to fulfill its obligations to an employee. Poor company performance or unforeseen changes may occur, and the company is unable to deliver on its promises to the employee. Or, if the employee is performing poorly, the organization may be unwilling to give performance-based incentives, like bonuses or promotions.

2. Incongruence. Incongruence occurs when an organization believes they have met their obligations, but the employee believes otherwise. Employers may have different assumptions about their expectations than the employee. Or the expectations are too complex, or simply unclear. Implicit promises—conveyed through actions or indirect statements—are also troublesome. Finally, poor or unclear communication about expectations can also lead to incongruence.

Both of these root causes are heavily influenced by an employee’s vigilance and interpretation of the contract. Vigilant employees are more likely to pick up on—and actively look out for—true contract breaches, so they may be more likely to perceive a violation when there’s ambiguity around expectations.

When an employee feels their psychological contract has been breached, they try to understand why. Often, their assessment is heavily influenced by how fairly an employee felt he or she was treated leading up to the breach.

If your communication about an issue is unclear, employees are likely to assume the worst. Transparent communication builds trust. If your employees don’t trust you, they expect you will renege on your promises, and begin to gather data to reinforce that belief.

Now that you understand the causes, how can you avoid damaging the psychological contract with your employees?

Avoid a Breach by Setting Clear Expectations

Sometimes a psychological contract breach is unavoidable, but the subsequent destructive reactions that follow are not. Clear, honest, and transparent communication about expectations and is always ideal if you hope to mitigate the potential damage of a contract breach.

Here are some tips to help you set clear workplace expectations:

• Document and share processes for moving up in the organization. Most employees today want the opportunity to develop and grow professionally. Make sure they understand how to do it. Otherwise, they may begin to look outside of your organization for their next opportunity.
• Be repetitive. Employees may not always hear or understand an expectation the first time. People remember and trust concepts if they’re more frequently exposed to them, so consciously repeating workplace expectations will help eliminate confusion.
• Use targeted questions to ask employees to articulate their own expectations. Don’t ask, “What are your expectations. The question is too broad and people may have trouble articulating them. A better question is, “How do the goals we’ve set together match your current job?” Or, “How do you envision yourself developing at this company?”
• Recruiting and onboarding play critical roles here. The sooner your employees understand your culture and the expectations of your workplace, the better they will be able to objectively assess the reasons behind a breach of their psychological contract.
• Provide regular feedback about an employee’s performance over time. Employees want to know if they’re doing a good job. They want to understand how to improve and grow within your company. But they need all of the available data to understand how they may or may not be meeting your expectations. Often, annual reviews are not enough.

Take stock of how you’re setting expectations for your team. What do they expect when they join? How are you meeting those expectations? And how can you continue to be transparent in your communication to reinforce their trust in you and the organization?

The post Navigating the Murky Waters of Workplace Expectations appeared first on gothamCulture.

We don’t often think about this kind of dedication in business. No one spends their entire life devoted to the mastery of middle management. Yet, to excel as a manager, you will need to spend a considerable amount of time learning about the individual people that make up your team.

This is where the rubber meets the road for you as a manager. It’s easy to do ‘just enough’ to try and keep your team on target. But how do you reach the next level? How do you break the mold of business school best practices and begin to engage and inspire your team to reach high performance?

To help you master the art of effective team management, let’s dig into some of the behavioral science behind effective teams.

Understand the Psychology of your Team Members

Way back in 1921, Carl Gustav Jung, father of analytical psychology, introduced the theory of psychological types in his aptly named book, “Psychological Types”. He theorized that people generally use one of two mental functions: Perceiving, taking in information; or Judging, organizing information and coming to conclusions.

Within these two groups, he noted that people perform that function in one of two ways, called preferences. Perceiving functions are either sensing or intuition. Judging functions are either thinking or feeling. Finally, Jung concluded that these four functions are also influenced by a person’s Introversion or Extraversion.

We celebrate diversity on teams because it contributes to innovation. But with diversity comes a wide range of experience and individual priorities. Trying to lead these diverse personality types with one blanket management style often isn’t enough to satisfy the needs of each individual.

There are many personality assessments available today inspired by Carl Jung’s theory, including the MBTI, Strengthsfinder, and Emergenetics. No matter which method you choose, learning about each psychological type on your team helps you better understand how to help them collaborate. Discussing the results together as a team helps each member gain new perspectives about their peers and learn to appreciate their differences.

Getting to know the individuals on your team is ultimately a practice of empathy — the better we understand others’ points of view and preferences, the better we can work together as a team and collaborate more productively.

Set the Standards for Success

American social psychologist Leon Festinger developed the Social Comparison Theory in 1954, stating, “there exists, in the human organism, a drive to evaluate his opinions and abilities.”

Festinger theorized that without objective measures to compare against, we tend to evaluate ourselves based on the abilities and opinions of other people.

One of the most important facets of a high-performing culture is a set of strong values. Having “values with teeth” as Levi Nieminen put it, provides a set of boundaries that guide the behaviors on your team and in your organization. This guidance helps frame the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way to work in peoples’ minds.

But, when values don’t exist or are weak and ‘toothless,’ employees may begin to compare themselves subjectively to others in potentially damaging ways.

“Sometimes people compare up,” writes Ariel Costa for Quartz, “which leads to feelings of envy and low self-esteem, and sometimes they cast a glance downwards, to those whom they’re ‘beating out,’ which leads to satisfaction with one’s own achievements.”

High performing teams consider all individual members as equals. They hold each other accountable to perform to the best of their abilities without judgment. And a strong set of values can help guide these optimal behaviors by providing your team with objective standards for comparison.

A word of caution: Values won’t help guide behavior if they’re left buried in your desk drawer. They must be communicated boldly at every opportunity. Your employees should know them by heart, and embrace them in all their decisions and conduct.

Values also communicate themselves clearly by what leaders and managers do not do. If you don’t react to certain kinds of behavior, employees assume those behaviors are acceptable. It’s equally as important to react to unwanted behavior as it is to reward the wanted behaviors.

When values succeed, employees are empowered to hold each other accountable to them; to speak up when someone isn’t following the ‘right’ behavior. And through continuous and consistent reinforcement both from leadership and through process, these guideposts will embed themselves into the culture of the organization and help drive higher performance on your team.

Provide Clarity

97% of employees and executives agree that a lack of alignment within a team impacts the outcome of a task or project, according to ClearCompany. Furthermore, the majority cite a lack of collaboration or ineffective communication as the cause for workplace failures.

A lack of clarity creates a real problem in terms of engagement and effectiveness, and can even lead to conflict among team members.

In 1954, a social experiment called the Robbers Cave Experiment demonstrated what is now known as realistic conflict theory, a social psychological model of intergroup conflict. The theory explains how conflict can arise between two groups as a result of competition over limited resources and/or conflicting goals.

In the experiment, 22 teenage boys were randomly split into two groups and taken to a 200-acre Boy Scouts of America camp in Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma. The researchers observed how competition arose when the two groups had conflicting goals. When the groups came back together, clarity around a set of common, “superordinate” goals that both groups held a vested interest in solving enabled the two groups to cooperate and work together.

The lesson? Intergroup conflicts are often rooted in a lack of objective understanding.

It’s up to you as a leader to help provide clarity around your team’s goals, individual roles, and expectations. How do the individual and team efforts contribute to the company’s overall strategy? What’s expected of each person, and how is their performance measured?

Providing a common framework and language around work within your team builds trust. When employees fully grasp what’s happening in the environment around them, they’re able to better understand the context of their individual contributions to the team and organization.

Clarity helps eliminate conflict, enabling your team to solve problems faster and with less friction.

Give Every Member Ownership Over the Outcome

Collaboration and communication are integral to effective team performance. But a recent body of research has underscored the critical importance of one aspect of these team dynamics: Providing each individual member of a team with an equal share of voice.

In an article for HBR, Alex Pentland notes that “the key to high performance lay not in the content of a team’s discussions but in the manner in which it was communicated.”

Pentland found that successful teams share several defining characteristics:

1. Everyone on the team talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short and sweet.
2. Members face one another, and their conversations and gestures are energetic.
3. Members connect directly with one another—not just with the team leader.
4. Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team.
5. Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back.

Pentland’s research aligns with what Google found in their quest to build the perfect team. In 2012, the company embarked on an initiative called Project Aristotle to find out why some teams are more effective than others.

Google’s research eventually identified two characteristics shared by all highly effective teams:

“First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.” As long as everyone on the team had a chance to talk, the team did well. But if only one person spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.

“Second, the good teams all had high average social sensitivity — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions, and other nonverbal cues.” People on ineffective teams seemed to have less sensitivity towards their colleagues.

Both of these traits are part of what’s known as psychological safety — the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.

Providing your team with a safe environment for sharing their ideas, asking questions, and respectfully challenge each other is paramount to effective teamwork. Give your team members ownership over the outcome by encouraging dialogue, vulnerability, and empathy.

Encourage Casual Collisions

Companies like Google and Pixar have used the idea of “casual collisions” to design their workspaces in a way that promotes spontaneous, random discussions among employees. In fact, Google intentionally designed their New York City campus so that no part of the office was more than 150 feet from food.

Why? Because these companies understand that collaboration can’t be forced. Their workspaces are designed to promote organic collaboration among workers.

While designing a workspace for casual collisions may not be in your sphere of control, you can encourage spontaneous collaboration through activities outside of work. This might be as simple as a weekly happy hour on Fridays, or team lunches outside the office.

Many companies offer perks like catered lunches. But these companies miss the point. In practice, these perks can actually discourage employees from venturing away from their desks during the lunch hour.

It’s not about free meals. You need to provide your team with a comfortable environment to bond and share ideas without feeling forced. If you want to encourage knowledge sharing and innovation on your team, provide them with opportunities to connect and discuss ideas away from their desks.

Embrace the Challenge

Now that you know some of the most important behavior science behind managing effective teams, it’s up to you as the artist to put these strategies into practice.

Don’t be discouraged if things don’t change overnight. You’re managing a diverse group of people, and people naturally resist change. Bringing everyone on board can take some time. But, this is an opportunity for you to make a positive impact on your team, your organization, and your career.

So, embrace the challenge. Spend time talking with your team members so they understand why things are changing, and how they individually contribute to this new positive direction. Guiding your team to high performance won’t be easy, but it will be worth it.

This article appeared first on ignitur.com

The post How to Master the Art and Science of Effective Team Management appeared first on gothamCulture.

Some fared better than others, and I found people’s individual identities and corporate positions didn’t determine their levels of success. Anyone could grow as a person and leader during a backcountry excursion, but only if he or she was willing to embrace the discomfort that accompanied the transformation — and you can do the same.

The High Cost of Playing It Safe

Do you remember browsing the aisles of Blockbuster and Borders? What about sharing “Kodak moments” with your family and friends? How did companies so deeply ingrained in our collective memory go bankrupt?

According to a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, those companies failed because they relied on what had always made them strong. In other words, they didn’t challenge themselves. Kodak invented the digital camera in the 1970s, but the company stubbornly stuck with film and missed a huge opportunity. That cash cow was quickly eaten by competitors who weren’t afraid to run with new technology.

Meanwhile, Apple flourished because it didn’t shy away from innovation. In the 1990s, the company was circling the drain. Steve Jobs could have stuck with what had worked in the past, but he instead challenged himself and his company. And as a result, Apple broke new ground with the iPod and iPhone, which revolutionized cellphones and knocked industry giant RIM off its pedestal.

How Crisis Leads to Growth

Challenging ourselves leads to positive growth — both physically and mentally.

Not only does learning a new skill help create brain cell connections, but exercise also helps people grow new brain cells. What’s more, Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development indicates we tend to develop consistently until we reach a point of crisis. We then either regress or, if we overcome that crisis, experience a sharp developmental increase.

In an uncomfortable environment like the backcountry, we question every decision. We don’t feel confident or secure, which forces us to reach out to each other for support and break down the barriers our ego puts up. This humility opens us up to change. We call this the “stretch zone.”

The more we put ourselves in the stretch zone, the faster we grow. I know one man who started out sweeping the floors at an organization and now leads more than 10,000 employees as the company president. Even at the top of the corporate ladder, he constantly reads leadership books and business books. He considers challenging himself the key to his success.

Shaking Leaders Out of Their Comfort Zones

The great thing about growth through a challenge is that it’s within your control. If you want to grow as a leader, try these strategies for escaping your comfort zone:

Cultivate diversity of thought. Hire people who think differently than you, who will argue with you, and who are smarter than you. You don’t need sycophants and “yes men.” You need to be challenged by authentic, positive, and loyal individuals. You need folks who are going to tell you the hard truths. These kinds of co-workers create an environment where you’re constantly being challenged to make better decisions.

Create a safe place to fail. Businesses today seem obsessed with perfection, and mistakes are often met with chastisement. Give yourself and your employees permission to fail. There is a ton of literature that proves failure is necessary for innovation. I’ll challenge you to look it up and read for yourself. See what I did there?

Challenge even your basic assumptions. No matter who you are, you’re wrong significantly more often than you’re right. If you don’t believe me, it might be time to adjust your ego. It’s OK to be wrong as long as you realize you’re headed in the wrong direction. Once you realize that, challenging your assumptions can help you avoid pitfalls you wouldn’t ordinarily recognize.

Change your environment. Luckily, you don’t have to explore the wilderness to get out of your comfort zone. Even getting out of your office building can have a positive effect. Most folks don’t realize how much their environment influences their thoughts and behaviors. Stanford Business studies have shown that something as seemingly innocuous as a room’s furniture can make people more competitive and less cooperative. Shifting environments helps your brain think in different ways, so go find your next “innovation spot.”

Read, read, and read some more. Read articles, blogs, books, e-books, or all of the above. Just read. Read about your industry and about other industries. This will force you to face opposing viewpoints and allow you to make connections between seemingly disparate concepts. A lot of “innovation” comes from repurposing an idea from one industry to another.

Hang out with your kids or grandkids. Young people are typically better inclined to learn new skills. I remember reprogramming the VCR for my mother and thinking I would never fall behind the technology curve like that. Well, I have. (How are you supposed to learn to use apps when they don’t come with directions? Stop laughing, Millennials — your time will come.) Young people challenge us to understand their world and their worldviews, forcing us out of our comfort zones in a fun, safe way.

Listen to crazy ideas. Some ideas your employees come up with might seem, frankly, batshit crazy. You don’t have to adopt every idea, but listening opens you up to different viewpoints. Even the craziest ideas usually have elements that make a moderate idea work better. Spend 10 seconds considering what changes could make a seemingly nutty idea work. Those 10 seconds could change your company’s future.

Getting out of our comfort zones is never easy — but it’s not supposed to be! Find your perfect balance of challenge and support to land yourself smack-dab in the middle of the stretch zone, and you’ll realize your true leadership potential.

This article originally appeared on business2community.com.

The post To Grow Leadership Skills, Get People Out of Their Comfort Zones 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.

Probably not much. But over a decade ago, this young man created a groundswell of change in a massive Federal organization that altered thousands of lives for the better; including mine.

How did he do it? And what can we learn from his story about creating large-scale change from the bottom up?

It was 2004. I found myself in Camp Beuring, Kuwait, preparing to cross into Iraq with my battalion to support the surge that was in place for the first Iraqi election. Afterward, we would remain in Iraq for a year-long rotation.

Two weeks prior to launch, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited Kuwait, for a press conference designed to energize the troops prior to the mission. This is when Specialist Thomas Wilson stood up and asked the following question:

“We’ve had troops in Iraq for coming up on for three years and we’ve all been staged here out of Kuwait,” says Wilson. “Now, why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?”

Specialist Wilson wasn’t joking about digging around scrapyards. In the weeks leading up to this moment, we’d spent day after day scouring through junkyards full of destroyed American vehicles to assemble the equipment and armor we needed to protect ourselves. It was a tense time for all of us, and morale was understandably affected.

Now, we weren’t asking for the heavily armored vehicles you see today. We were shaping nickel-plated, ballistic steel onto our vehicles to provide a most basic level of protection. When we launched, the vehicles looked like they were straight out of a Mad Max movie. It wasn’t much. But we had something.

Specialist Wilson was literally at the bottom of the food chain in the largest and most diverse organization in the country; speaking to the man who reported to the President himself. His question sucked the air out of the room in that moment. It was completely counter-cultural to ask it, but he had the courage to stand up and create real, meaningful change with a simple question.

Within a week, cargo aircraft were landing in Kuwait full of ballistic steel for us. Thomas Wilson saved many lives in the moment and in the years to follow as his action shined a spotlight on a real issue. Over the next few years, our armed forces began to be supplied with proper equipment to achieve their unique mission and, without a doubt, Wilson’s actions had a far-reaching impact on thousands of lives.

Change Is A Complex (And Necessary) Process

No matter how small or large, change is, at its core, a people process, and it’s possible to create change no matter where you sit.

But, as we all know, large-scale change is never easy. People are creatures of habit, after all, so it’s not surprising that they naturally resist change. We don’t like things messing up our world, even if our world kind of sucks.

It’s our sucky world and we’re familiar with it. If it changed, who knows what might happen?

In addition to peoples’ general tendency to resist change are the complexities of an organization’s culture and the various subcultures that exist, which can have a significant effect on peoples’ behavior.

Your organization likely has a variety of unique subcultures (by role, by location, etc.), each bringing a variety of different beliefs and assumptions to work each day. Understanding the beliefs and assumptions that exist within your organization and its subcultures can help you make sense of “what right looks like” and how to succeed.

Workplace culture helps guide our behavior. It’s what makes our work lives consistent and predictable. But sometimes, it can hold us back. Thus, it’s imperative that we make the effort to understand our culture and ask ourselves what existing beliefs, assumptions, behaviors, and processes may no longer be serving us well.

Creating Change Without Positional Power

Change is, at its core, a people process. So how do we create change when we’re part of a massive organization and not in charge?

Challenge your individual and collective beliefs and assumptions. What is real and what is self-imposed? I typically work with clients who are struggling with a set of assumptions that are either completely self-imposed or that may have been true at some point but are no longer valid. Honestly examining the “reality” that you operate within and to be questioning what is and is not valid in the present context can help you gain an understanding of how you may be limiting your own possibilities without even knowing it.

Identify what is within your span of control and your span of influence. Your sphere of control may be somewhat smaller than you’d like but it is important to consider what you can influence in your role. It’s surprising, when you actually sit down and think about it, how much each and every one of us can influence in the day-to-day.

Use tools to measure the “issues” and help others understand the impact on the business. As a business leader, I feel like this is the price of admission, but I’ve called it out explicitly anyway. In order to create change, especially when you’re not in charge, doing your homework is critical. Bringing valid data to the table to help you present your case will help others get on board.

Seek out a sponsor. Identifying someone who has a larger sphere of control and getting them to buy into your case can help open a lot of doors. Understand and respect that this sponsor may be putting a lot on the line to support you and they will likely want to make sure you’re case is water-tight before committing too much to it.

Learn to sell your ideas in “leader speak.” Understanding your audience and articulating your ideas in ways that resonate with what they are concerned with is a surefire way to get noticed. Just because you think something is important doesn’t mean they will, so presenting it in the context of the business will help your ideas resonate.

Recognize your hidden assets. If change is a people thing then creating change is not constrained by position. Anyone can create change person by person if their ideas are sound and if they are able to convey them in a way that gets people on board. Understanding what assets and resources are available to you, both in yourself and in the network around you, can help you gain momentum.

You’re super passionate and you see an opportunity to create positive change in your organization. Fantastic! Be mindful that creating change need not include leaving a trail of bodies in your wake. Acknowledge that others may have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Just because the solution seems simple to you, there may be many other factors at play that you are unaware of. Staying objective requires you to present your case with an air of diplomacy.

Knowing What You Don’t Know Isn’t Enough

At the end of the day, action is what creates change.

Specialist Thomas Wilson’s courageous statement all those years ago changed the course of my life and the lives of thousands of others. He challenged the way things were done in a respectful and professional way, which in turn, kicked off a series of events that pressured the US government to find a way to make positive change quickly.

It is possible. My challenge to each of you is to work with your colleagues and leaders to find opportunities to create change in the areas that you have control or that you can influence. Test your beliefs and assumptions. Work together to identify what is within your span of control and your sphere of influence. Use the tips in this article to create little victories that can build upon each other over time. And most of all, have some fun doing it!

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

The post How To Create Change When You’re Not In Charge appeared first on gothamCulture.

“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.

Once upon a time, employees and companies enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship. Workers stayed with one company for their entire careers, taking pride in their output and putting their noses to the grindstone for the sake of the organization. In return, companies offered pension plans, training, development opportunities, and reasonable work hours.

While those days might seem like distant memories, the churn-and-burn mentality of the modern workplace isn’t sustainable.

Corporate leaders shrug their shoulders when confronted with the fact that employees stay at companies for only 4.2 years, on average. Baby Boomers might have been willing to work dead-end positions for 10 years, but what happens when hundreds of thousands of Boomers retire? Suddenly, Millennials become the bread and butter of corporate America. Considering that the same report found that 25 percent of Millennials would quit their jobs in a heartbeat, the simmering situation is primed to boil over into a full-blown crisis.

Many companies are guilty of living in the moment rather than planning ahead. It results in a roller coaster for workers: When business is booming, companies reward workers and treat them handsomely; when downturns inevitably strike, the benefits and perks are replaced with layoffs and attrition. Most companies are oblivious to the ripple effect caused by this sort of bottom-line thinking.

Reaping What You Sow

Your people represent your business to customers. If they’re suffering at your hands, how can they create and foster lasting client relationships? Prospects aren’t stupid. High turnover is a huge turnoff.

Companies that don’t value employees tend to be less productive with lower job satisfaction figures. Employees who feel dissatisfied with their supervisors also tend to embrace an attitude of disengagement. The only notable increase in these unhealthy workplaces comes in the form of higher absenteeism. These outcomes quickly have a negative effect on profit margins, sales, product quality, and innovation.

Need another reason to change how you treat employees? You can expect to spend about 150 percent of every mid-level worker’s salary to recruit and hire a replacement. While you’re recruiting a new hire, work can’t get done, sales won’t go through, and customers won’t feel acknowledged. Your organization will be at a standstill.

When managers view workers as commodities instead of human beings, they become expendable. Have a problem with an employee’s productivity or behavior? Get rid of him. When a manager doesn’t “get it,” push the low performer into a different department and hire someone new. This sends a clear message to team members: Shape up or ship out. The excuse is that coaching, developing, and mentoring take too much time and capital — but it will cost you more in the long term.

Millennials are choosing to ship out in droves rather than be treated as chattel. After decades of positive reinforcement, these young workers would rather go it alone than feel stuck working for a company that doesn’t value them.

Many Millennials are giving traditional business the heave-ho and founding their own companies. They’re reinventing the wheel in their own images and achieving serious success. They’ve learned that they might need to start from scratch if they hope to out-perform their parents.

Companies must change the way they value their human resources or risk losing top talent. It’s time to acknowledge that common employee demands might not be unreasonable. Workers who want to spend only 40 hours a week in the office, demand to be treated with respect, actively seek out faster promotions, and crave more responsibility are not the exception to the rule — they’re the new normal.

5 Ways to Reorient Your Thinking

Changing workplace culture isn’t an overnight process. It requires a lot of time, energy, and dedication, but it’s not impossible as long as you commit to making the change stick. Here are a few steps to start viewing your colleagues as people instead of possessions:

1. Think strategically about engaging Millennials.

Your team probably spans several generations, but the biggest group of up-and-comers is Millennials. You’ll need to get creative to promote engagement with this crowd.

BrewDog in the United Kingdom provides a fascinating yet extreme example. The company’s policy regarding puppy parental leave drew a lot of interest — and some criticism — for what seemed to be one of the oddest organizational perks: BrewDog employees can take one week of paid leave for the adoption or purchase of a new pup. I wouldn’t advocate for every company to offer its employees puppy parental leave, but this example shows imagination on the part of BrewDog’s executive team, as well as an understanding of what resonates with its employees and brand.

Paid leave for pet adoptions is probably far-fetched (pun intended) for most companies, but you can start with something as simple as ditching tired tropes like yearly performance reviews. About 42 percent of Millennials are interested in getting feedback on a weekly basis instead of waiting 365 days for an evaluation. Take a tip from Google, which uses a process called objectives and key results to keep employees engaged and productive through regular assessments.

2. Offer the possibility of job rotations.

Numerous successful CEOs started by filling multiple C-suite roles. This experience served them well when they reached the pinnacle of their corporate careers. Encourage this sort of job rotation at your company to build a challenging environment for employees who crave variety and self-driven education.

3. Devise unique compensation models.

Have you noticed how creative some positions sound? Companies are choosing innovator monikers rather than sticking to tried-and-true titles. Bloggers have become social curators. Receptionists are directors of first impressions. Project managers have morphed into project meanies.

Why? It’s a means of rewarding people for their individuality and contributions. It also gives your organization the ability to structure rewards like nominal raises and promotions in ways that won’t break the bank. You could create a level-based system for positions, with a level-two social curator making slightly more money than a level-one version. As long as you meet legal limits, you can set up these sorts of perks any way you want. It ensures your employees feel like the unique, beautiful snowflakes they are.

4. Provide low-cost benefits focused on work-life balance. 

People love having time away from work. They’re perfectly willing to work extra hours one week in exchange for an extra day off, tackle tasks from the comfort of their own homes, or embrace flex time to create a schedule that meets their needs. As long as the work is getting done, who cares how it happens?

My wife still grieves the loss of a concept known as “Summer Fridays” she enjoyed at a previous job. Employees can work late during the week in exchange for working a half day on Friday; they can also pool those half days to enjoy a full day off every other week. It’s a completely free benefit for companies, but it ends up making employees much more productive during the week. People want to get their work done as efficiently as possible so they can start their weekend a little sooner.

5. Train managers to be “intrapreneurs.”

The intrapreneur movement is gaining ground — possibly because three-fourths of Millennials crave on-the-job leadership development. Get on top of this trend by allowing managers to give their direct reports whatever they need to be successful.

Too many companies force managers to do too many jobs simultaneously, which doesn’t leave time for managing, mentoring, or developing talent. Instead, give them the time they need to create a startup culture in each department. It will foster a fast-paced, innovative, engaging environment, and folks will thrive. Set the tone, and let your employees overcome obstacles as teams.

Take a walk around your office. See all those people working diligently at their desks? They’re human beings with lives outside of their cubicle walls. The faster we stop thinking of employees as minions to bend to our whim under the threat of termination, the sooner we can reap the benefits of a fully engaged, energized workforce. Start viewing your people as, you know, people, and your company will be all the better for it.

This article originally appeared on CEOworld.biz.

The post Are They Employees or Widgets? The Results of People-as-Commodity Cultures appeared first on gothamCulture.

But, is any of it working? Gallup recently reported that nearly 70 percent of U.S. employees are disengaged, and 51 percent are looking for new opportunities. Even more problematic is the fact that these numbers have stayed stagnant for at least 15 years.

So, what if our ideas about employee retention are all wrong? What if we are being held captive by our own beliefs and assumptions about the very nature and structure of work in today’s society?

The Problem With Talent Retention Today

Common thinking is that we, as business leaders, should retain talent as long as possible in order to capitalize on things like organizational knowledge and relationships with co-workers and vendors. And somehow, employees who stay with us will be eternally motivated and highly productive members of the team as a result.

We may also subscribe to the risk mitigation side of the argument, seeking to keep talent to avoid the costs—financial and otherwise—of having to recruit, onboard, integrate, and train new talent to fill in the gaps that departing employees leave.

The issue with this philosophy is that we’re basing these rationales on our own beliefs about how work should be, not what it is. We can no longer assume that the longer the tenure of the employee, the more productive, engaged, and fulfilled they will be.

We tend to equate tenure with loyalty, and loyalty is a sought after attribute. But today’s workers don’t necessarily view their experience with one employer from a permanence perspective. Instead, they move from job to job, and organization to organization, in a constant effort to find a place where they can make a meaningful contribution and develop professionally.

This problem started several decades ago and has been reinforced by continued economic uncertainty. Faced with tough economic times and stiff competition from an increasingly global workforce, employers no longer honored the social contract of lifetime employment. Layoffs and the discontinuation of long-term compensation packages like pensions began to break down the sense of security and loyalty that employees had to their employers.

Finding a job with a reputable organization no longer guarantees a lifetime of stable employment and a predictable quality of life.

Younger generations saw their parents and themselves affected by these changes. If they can’t rely on their employers to be there for them, why should they commit to being there for their employers? Is it any surprise that our employees—regardless of generation—are poised to leave within the next 5 years?

Bottom line: we reap what we sow.

Changing the Conversation About Employee Retention

There are two approaches to navigate and excel in this current reality.

First, we could do our very best to attempt to reestablish that social contract between employers and employees. Many organizations work toward this every day to varying levels of success.

The second option is for employers adjust their expectations and shape their organizational culture in ways that are adaptable and agile enough to not only survive employee turnover but actually thrive.

What if, rather than trying our best to hold onto employees and satisfying our own needs, we redesigned work to be accomplished by people who give us their all while they’re with us, and seamlessly pass the knowledge onto new generations of employees when they moved on?

Rather than fighting against the values and trends of the times, what if we embraced the values of younger generations and evolved the way we do business to capitalize on a more consistent stream of new and diverse viewpoints and ideas? What if, instead of spending mounting resources trying to retain talent, we used those resources elsewhere and flexed our way of thinking to thrive in a new age of business?

With the speed of change in organizations today, is the job even the same as it was two or three years ago? One might argue that many jobs today evolve rather quickly, and the gains of retaining talent are a bit overstated. Let’s think about re-designing work and re-shaping our workplace culture to take advantage of new talent that fills these roles over time.

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

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