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Simple Rules for Creating Great Places to Work
Gareth Jones, author of “Why Should Anyone Work Here?”, explains the things managers know, but struggle to do.
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Gareth Jones, author of Why Should Anyone Work Here?, explains the things managers know, but struggle to do.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael. Today I’m talking with Gareth Jones, co-author with Rob Goffee of the new book Why Should Anyone Work Here? Gareth, thank you so much for talking with us today.
GARETH JONES: My pleasure.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So I wanted to start talking a little bit about employee engagement and organizational culture, which is not really what the book is about but a lot of people have been talking about those two topics lately. And I thought since you’ve written a book that addresses some of the same issues but isn’t really about engagement or, strictly speaking, organizational culture as such, I thought we could just start with, what do you think is sort of wrong or limited with the way that we’re talking about those topics now, currently?
GARETH JONES: Well, I have slightly different views on each of those topics, by the way. If we take engagement first, engagement has been the kind of buzz word of HR departments for the last 10 years. Guess what? Engagement levels have remained stubbornly low, using a global perspective. Most people are deeply unengaged with their work, and that’s a kind of quite depressing thought, given that whether you like it or not, you’ll spend the bulk of your adult waking life at work.
So there’s something not quite right about the way we’ve conceived the engagement. I suppose in my more cynical moments I think of it as kind of like another trick, another trick in the HR box of tricks, which is to get people to work harder. And I think in this book we say that in order to fundamentally address the issue of engagement or how people relate to their work, we need to start thinking much more about authenticity as a property of organizations.
Now, the second topic that you mentioned, of course, cultures, been with us for some time. In fact, Rob and I wrote a book about it a long time ago called The Character of a Corporation, How Your Culture Can Make or Break Your Business. In this case, by the way, I don’t think an obsession and organizational culture is a fad. It’s something real and important and indeed, the wave of corporate scandals that’s engulfed modern business most recently, and perhaps shockingly with the unfolding ramifications of the VW scandal, suggest that issues about culture, values, norms just won’t go away. The task for leaders in organizations is to build sustainable cultures, which are both successful and business, as businesses, and which do the right thing.
So I think the obsession with culture is a sort of healthy response to the state our organizations are in. And I suppose it’s worth saying, by the way, that organizations, especially big ones by the way, are not in robust health. People are in danger of falling out of love with organizations. And this is not just commercial organizations, by the way, it’s political organizations, it’s even the military organization. So trust indices in the Western world are really at all-time low.
So there is an issue about how big organizations, in particular, can sustainability attract and retain talented people and get them to do their best work, which is, I suppose, what the new book is really about. Why should anyone work here?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, and let’s talk a little bit more about that because I think it’s a provocative question. Why should anyone work here? And it’s also something where I feel like the answers you’re giving are, on the one hand, sort of commonsensical, but on the other hand, completely unlike anything that actually happens in most organizations. So, tell me a little bit about what the book does to address the problem.
GARETH JONES: OK, well, it’s interesting what you should say, Sarah, about the things we describe. Most people would say, well, who could be against those things? And we kind of agree with that. So here’s a paradox, then why are there so few organizations that do this?
Now in order to kind of unravel that paradox, we need to go back to the previous book that we wrote, which is called Why Should Anyone Be Led By You? And in that book we concluded that authenticity was a necessary but insufficient condition for the exercise of leadership. In other words, be yourself but more with skill. That was our kind of message and I think that message has resonated very well and the book was well received and we’ve sold lots of copies.
However, some clever readers have said, well, thank you Rob and Gareth, I kind of get that. Do you know what? I’ll be authentic when I work in an authentic organization. But since I don’t work in an authentic organization, since I work in an organization characterized by high levels of politics, much of a negative, I’ll go on being the same political player I’ve been for the last 15 years.
So about five years ago, we started to ask people, well, OK, you tell us what an authentic organization would look like. What an organization you really wanted to work in look like? And that’s where the findings in the book came from. So would it be useful if I drive through the six characteristics of authentic organization?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah, I would say just give us a quick overview because I know it’s much too much to go into detail but I think it would help people to have some specifics in mind. Yeah.
GARETH JONES: OK. So, one, difference beyond diversity. I want to work in an organization where I can be myself. Two, radical honesty. Tell me the truth before someone else does. So our view is that in a world of Freedom of Information Acts and WikiLeaks and social media, the age of corporate secrets is over. E, Extra value. Add value to me, don’t exploit me. Many people still experience their working lives as exploitative, not developmental.
A, Authenticity. Mean what you say and say what you mean. Don’t rewrite the mission statement every two years, you’ll just breed further cynicism. M, I want a Meaningful job in an organization, which itself has meaning. And then finally, and perhaps the most difficult of all, give me simple, agreed rules and not a fog of bureaucracy.
So, difference, honesty, extra value, authenticity, meaning, and simple agreed rules are the characteristics which people told us would constitute authentic organizations where they really wanted to work.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So just to dig a little deeper on one of those, radical honesty. I have to ask, what is the difference between just regular old honesty and radical honesty?
GARETH JONES: Well, it’s faster. It’s proactive, not reactive. It sets the agenda, doesn’t respond to it. So you see I think many organizations are beginning to realize that what we’ve learned in the last 10 or 15 years is that reputational capital is more important than we thought it was and it’s simultaneously more fragile.
So the kind of communications agenda has moved up the pecking order in many organizations but the people who populate it often come from a kind of PR-spin background. And they haven’t grasped the idea that it’s not just a question of how you spin the story, it’s about how you tell the truth before someone else does. So radical honesty is a bit different from even having a properly functioning communications department.
I mean, in the chapter of the book we contrast two stories, really. One is the failure, really, of BP to control information about the Gulf oil spill with disastrous consequences, by the way, both for themselves and for the people suffering from this spill, and for the people who died in the explosion. And we contrast that with something that happened to Heineken, where somewhere where there had been a Heineken marketing event was subsequently used for a dog fighting event. And Heineken picked this up on social media very quickly, responded openly and honestly, told them this is nothing to do with Heineken and told the truth before anyone else done.
There’s also a very nice little story about Lars Rebien Sorenson who, interestingly, has just won the HBR award for the best CEO in the world who, after a strategic review, decided to close down an R&D facility in California.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And this is Novo Nordisk by the way, yes.
GARETH JONES: It’s Novo Nordisk. He flew to California, he called a town hall meeting, he explained the reasons for the decision openly and honestly and do you know what the response was? Applause.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh. That’s interesting.
GARETH JONES: I [? could ?] [? translate ?] with some banks recently where people have realized they’ve lost their jobs by reading The Financial Times.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh, that’s terrible.
GARETH JONES: That’s not good, is it?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
GARETH JONES: That’s not good.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, it’s interesting as you’re talking about some of this, it’s easy to imagine that there could be a company where, at the very senior level, perhaps, the executives think that they’re already doing some of these things. You know, they think they’re being honest and transparent, they think they’re letting people be themselves, they think that they have a mission statement, there’s meaning involved. But you could see that maybe on the front line people would feel differently. So how can executives, sort of, diagnose where their organizations actually are on this spectrum?
GARETH JONES: Well, they need to take a deep dive. Remember that power relations distort communications. So if you’re at only on the top of organizations, much of the information that comes to you been heavily sanitized, so you need to work really hard to find out what’s really going on in your organization.
By the way, I’m not entirely convinced of your hypothesis that this is related to hierarchy. I think there are lots of people who have got to the top of organizations, or at or near the top of organizations, who have got there by being kind of rather canny political players. And they’re finding it quite hard to adjust to a new world in which, rather than people fitting in with organizations, organizations have to build a sort of social architecture, which is attractive to talented people who want to come there and do their best work. But it’s certainly true.
Remember we had a fad in organizations some time ago called management by walking about. And it’s quite a good fad by the way, because if you don’t walk about, it’s quite hard to know goes on. And, of course, in a world where your team might be global, or at the very least might be in more than one location, the task of finding out what’s really going on is, in a way, got a bit harder. But it’s just as important as it ever was.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, I am wondering, you know, conversely– OK, so set aside the whole hypothesis that I just threw out there. Conversely, what if it’s flipped and, you know, you’re sort of lower down on the totem pole, you don’t have a lot of sway over the whole organization but you manage a team. Is there a way that you could create this little, sort of a mini-version of what you’re talking about just on your team, even if you’re in a big inauthentic organization?
GARETH JONES: Absolutely, absolutely. And of course, our study of big organizations always throws up, kind of, islands of sanity, islands where usually effectively leaders have managed to create a great buzz around the menswear floor of a department store, or the grill chef in a motel. They’ve managed to create a place where people feel they’re in the know, where they’re given the chance to develop, where their opinions are respected and valued. So, yes. And that’s why as we wrote this book, we said this is for everybody who wants to make the workplace better.
And there’s a sort of rather old-fashioned notion which underpins this, which is this. Without good work, we can’t have good societies. So our view, by the way, is that work is a sort of species characteristic.
You see, even our very near neighbors, the other higher primates, the chimpanzees and so on, they don’t really work. We work. Bees make great buildings they just don’t know they’re doing it.
Human beings are cursed with language and consciousness. We know what we’re doing and one of our defining species characteristic is work. This is a sort of old-fashioned notion, really, is that dignified places of work, where you can be your best self, enable us to be full citizens, to act in a democratic way, to take fully part in society and here’s how you develop a healthy kind of civil society.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, Gareth, I think that’s actually a lovely note to end on. I really appreciate you taking time to come on the program today and talk with us a little bit about your vision for this healthier society and healthier workplace.
GARETH JONES: Yes, great. I really think it’s very important for all of us actually.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That was Gareth Jones, co-author with Rob Goffee of the new book Why Should Anyone Work Here? For more, go to HBR.org.