By Nilesh Bhagat, CHRP

Practices which value unity, openness and highlight the drivers for human motivation arguably trump those which are built on closed loops, greed and mechanical efficiency. What if an organization was built upon the former; what would some of its systems and practices look like?

Strategy, structure and compensation are three influences which help to shape an organization’s chemistry, growth and success (and of course, people are what fuel these systems). I’ll use examples of how each of these influences can be modified to align with new-school business function.

Strategy – Top-down control replaced with bottom up intelligence

The group of employees which have the greatest pulse on how an organization can and should respond are its front line workers. They constantly interact with and try to understand the needs of the people who fuel a company’s survival: customers. So why not use this suite of intelligence to formulate, implement and renew business strategy?

Using front-line connectivity with stakeholders outside of the organization, organizations can develop a database of organizational actions. It’s bottom-up strategy formulation – the organization listens to what its internal and external environment is telling it, and responds accordingly. This is the underlying notion of open-sourced intelligence, where we use the people in the action to tell us how to support them.

Structure – Old-school complexity replaced with new-school simplicity

I find job descriptions too restricting. I understand that they are meant to provide clarity in what’s expected of your in your role, but it’s also an excuse to do only what’s expected of you in your role. If that’s not a recipe for disaster in today’s constantly evolving landscape, I’ve learned all the wrong things. We’re all driven in the same way to create positive identities for ourselves, and a product of this drive is constant growth and redefinitions of our boundaries. We cannot redefine our boundaries if we’re expected to play within our job definitions.

One solution may be to remove the laundry list of complex role objectives and replace them with simplified, easily understandable goals. Rather than listing responsibilities and expectations, why not list the core goal of the job (mission statement-style) and illustrate its relationship to other roles using simplified statements or diagrams? This helps to leave the job open to your own interpretation, rather than restricting you to act accordingly with what’s listed.

Compensation – Greedy incentives replaced with unifying rewards

We aren’t greedy creatures by nature. The selfish gene is wrong. Our very survival has always depended on our close relationships with others and ability to align our behaviors with others’. Michael Shermer (The Mind of the Market) and Howard Bloom (Global Brain) are among a host of thinkers that believe we are evolved to depend on each other for survival, rather than on what’s best for us individually across situations. So, why are our reward systems then based on individual accolade, rather than collective harmony?

Whole Foods uses several team-based and egalitarian compensation systems to reward its employees. The company uses team-based incentives – such as business unit profit and gainsharing, and salary caps ‘that (limit) any individual’s compensation to no more than 19 times the company average. (In the average Fortune 500 company, that ratio is more than 400 to 1.)’ These systems highlight our social nature by removing within-group segregations (based on pay) and aligning efforts to common goals.

We’re being forced to constantly reinvent the way we do business. Core to these reinventions are systems and practices which enable us to leverage innovation, understanding and humility.

Nilesh Bhagat, CHRP, is a rewards coordinator with Best Buy Canada. Nilesh graduated from Simon Fraser University with a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, First Class Honours. He majored in Human Resources Management and tacked on an extended minor in Psychology. He’s a self-confessed nerd (the first step is admitting), likes to read, loves hockey and is struggling with the complexities of learning the game of golf.