Crowd funding for adaptability: encourage an internal market in adapbatilbty activities by having employees with ideas to bid for resoruces and other employees to bet on the most succesful ideas
Recognition programmes: Directly and immeidatly rewarding those employees whose behavours support the design principles
Time awards: reward those who come up with innovative and creative suggestions supporting adaptability, specific time to develop their thinking and ideas.
the beauty of the hack is that it allows staff not traditionally in leadership roles to feed in their awareness of customer experience and organisational pressures into the hack. It fits in the gap between leadership perception and actual need by helping prioritise in line with 'on the ground' requirement. What better source of information for a leadership team to recognise misalignment in the organisation (or to reflect upon their own perception of the business) than the group voting up a project they don't believe is relevant.
In many organisations ideas are generated from the top of the organisation or from the “Research and Development” department. There are complex management processes to turn ideas into projects. As a result the creativity of the workforce and their implicit knowledge is lost to the organisation
The problem the Hack addresses is outlined by Doz and Kosenen’s work on strategic agility. Managers hoard their resources rather than actively sharing with others. This hack challenges the management orthodoxy that they control resources and workers utilise them at management command.
This approach will also encourage management to have a clear and compelling vision of organisational goals that engages the workforce so that their ideas are congurent with the vision of the organisation
The approach is based on the concept of crowdfunding innovative ideas by creating and developing an internal market in adaptability. This is achieved by each employee being able to propose a project idea and put it forward to all employees. Individuals have a “bank” of hours - for example ten per month; that they can bid against individual projects.
The projects with the highest number of hours bid goes into process.
There is a parallel incentive plan that rewards employees who have come up with successful projects with a percentage of the hours bid as “free time” for them to use as they wish; either for holiday, or to work on the project or to be converted to cash.
This is a total break with the normal approach on idea generation and project management. It puts power, in the form of resources, into the hands of employees rather than management.
The approach also unleashes employee potential as they need to think strategically and outside the normal organisational silos. It also encourages and extends collaborative team work and project management. The growth in these skills will also lead to individual centirc management development - a key traning goal.If managed well the approach will be integrated in to the HR and Human potential strategy by employees understanding their own devlopment needs in conjuction with reflective practice wile building on the creative ideas and projects.
Traditional notions of pay and reward will be oveturned as succesful project groups will be "rewarded" for their project work. HR and people talent strategies will need to change to reflect an organistional strucutre based on co-operative, self developing teams - a truly exciting and innovative approach alginging organisational strucutre far more with the concept of "human being" and "human potential" than current organisational framworks largely derived from Taylorist concepts of the division of labour.
it allows staff not traditionally in leadership roles to feed in their awareness of customer experience and organisational pressures into the hack. It fits in the gap between leadership perception and actual need by helping prioritise in line with 'on the ground' requirement. What better source of information for a leadership team to recognise misalignment in the organisation (or to reflect upon their own perception of the business) than the group voting up a project they don't believe is relevant.There is a huge gap between organisational mobility on a grand scale and smaller incremental processes that do not need massive project infratcture ovealid but do need the alignment to the corporate goals and vision.
The hack is stunningly simple. Here is an example of the approach:
This allows employees to make bids simply against a project and against their own budget.
Each employee will write a presentation for their project with a time financial and skills budget which will be shared with employees.
The project control is thus:
|
Projects |
Skill set |
Redesign of customer rewards program |
New project design incorporating social media feedback |
Security staff roster to allow them to join Reserve Forces |
Profit sharing plan for all staff |
Streamline invoice submission |
% of individual budget |
|
Staff Bids |
|||||||
|
J Smith |
IT |
5 |
50% |
||||
|
P Davies |
HR |
7 |
70% |
||||
|
S Cowell |
Finance |
1 |
10% |
||||
|
F Flint |
Finance |
5 |
50% |
||||
|
C Davidson |
Sales & Marketing |
6 |
60% |
||||
|
R Prenzer |
HR |
4 |
40% |
||||
|
M Gilmore |
Design |
9 |
90% |
||||
|
H Fowers |
Finance |
4 |
40% |
||||
|
Abdul James |
IT |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
50% |
|
James Ray |
IT |
9 |
90% |
||||
|
Tom Robinson |
Project Management |
4 |
40% |
||||
|
M Jagger |
Finance |
7 |
70% |
||||
|
David Guy |
IT |
9 |
90% |
||||
|
Jane Dess |
Finance |
5 |
50% |
||||
|
Total project hours |
21 |
14 |
16 |
10 |
19 |
||
|
Enter your name: |
|||||||
|
Enter your supported project name |
Table 1
|
Projects |
Hours required |
Hours Bid |
% of required hours |
Hours Ranking |
|
Redesign of customer rewards program |
100 |
21 |
21.0% |
1 |
|
New project design incorporating social media feedback |
175 |
14 |
8.0% |
4 |
|
Security staff roster to allow them to join Reserve Forces |
18 |
16 |
88.9% |
3 |
|
Profit sharing plan for all staff |
40 |
10 |
25.0% |
5 |
|
Streamline invoice submission |
30 |
19 |
63.3% |
2 |
Table Two
|
Projects |
Skills hours required |
IT |
Project Management |
Sales & Marketing |
HR |
Finance |
Production |
Design |
R&D |
Total |
|
Redesign of customer rewards program |
25 |
10 |
25 |
5 |
15 |
5 |
5 |
10 |
100 |
|
|
New project design incorporating social media feedback |
60 |
10 |
30 |
20 |
10 |
30 |
15 |
175 |
||
|
Security staff roster to allow them to join Reserve Forces |
5 |
13 |
18 |
|||||||
|
Profit sharing plan for all staff |
20 |
20 |
40 |
|||||||
|
Streamline invoice submission |
10 |
20 |
30 |
Table Three
These three spreadsheets are linked to the HRIS to record hours committed and project suggestions raised.
The open nature of the approach (probably run on the organisation’s intranet), generates engagement, trust and openness.
A major additional advantage would be that both management and employees would start to think about the concept of working hours and their direction in a different way with an growing culture of employees being more “in charge” of their working hours and thus encouraging engagement with the organisation, a sense of ownership of organisational development and a culture of challenge and innovation to everyday organisational activities.
While the prlject works best for ideas in the space of culture, customer experience etc it is a little less applicable - in the early phases, for IT and infrastructure enhancments; but it woudl be very useful as a wseighting mechnanism to better understand a more holistic viewo of organisational priorities.
Reviews of project success involving sponsors from the leadership team and project members. Bringing together different levels to assess delivery and learning that can be applied to other projects to improve their effectiveness. There is an element of survival of the fittest in the project allocation in that if projects fail to attract enough hours they have failed the internal weighing mechanic
A financial control network will be established that not only allocates a "seed funding" for the succesful project but ploughs back revenuie from the succesufl project in to the overall project funding pool - thus creating a virtious circle. Each project team will be responsible for the budget, both time, financial and resources for each idea.
The final and most exciting development of the hack would be the ability for the project groups to work and collaborate with project groups from other organisations, both competitors and collaborators. Clearly some projects would be commercially sensitive; but many projects would gain traction from sharing with other organisations. Protocols would have to be developed to manage the intellectual property dimensions as would new financial frameworks. Although existing models of collaborative working could very easily be applied or developed to support this exciting and innovative approach.
The key challenges of this hack is management culture. The traditional model of command and control is diluted and mediated by employees making choices about the use of their own and the organisation’s working hours resources. Managers may comment that they cannot carry out their normal activities if employees are “off” undertaking project work
The solution is that the employees budget for hours can be very flexible depending on the business demands. It does not need to be a fixed number of hours; each employee’s bank of hours could be individual and spaced throughout the year to fit in with work patterns. This gives the additional advantage that the employees who are leading the projects will have to contend with resource constraints and project management disciplines that will reflect normal management activities, thus also aiding the development of individuals in management skills in a very practical and engaging way.
If the project groups evolve to work with other organisations - competitors, academics, suppliers etc; new protocols would need to be devleoped for both intellectual property rights and financial frameworks. There are already availabe models from current organisational collaborations that could be adapted for this exciting approach.
a) This hack could be started in 30 days; if a large organisation it could be broken down into cross functional teams of say 100. It is possible for a pilot scheme to yield results in 90 days particularly if the project bidding window is, say, 30 days.
b) The hack relies on employees taking the initiative on the project once the initial infrastructure is in place.
c) Because the projects are crowd funded on a competitive basis, effectively no approvals are required.
d) The two overhead costs are the initial setup and then the release of hours from “normal” activities to projects. As noted above there would be controls on when and the number of hours that could (not must) be committed to the project.
Applying desire to work at their fullest capacity and stretch their capability, we see a new breed of employee - the assignment based worker. Yes there's project portfolios and more already in existing ways of working but people who can apportion time, scrutinise the development opportunity, assess their contribution as an expert and bid in a process to belong to a project enterprise is a market approach I've long hoped we'd see.
So to have a process, criteria and an understanding of how this would work in an open and fair environment is a real bonus and allows for responsibility to be shifted from Leader creating a team to the team forming around the need. Not who you know, who's shrewd enough to judge the benefits and pitch to win a space. There's a lot of responsibility lost by any project leader in finding people and more in them helping with the selection process and coaching people around and within it.
Self-selection, self-determination and self-reliability are all critical in this hack and the increased levels of ownership for their development and having people form around projects presents a viable challenge to who you know and become more what you can offer and gain.
As with other hacks, some of this may go on already in pockets but a recognised approach to bid for slots on projects is intriguing and likely to give healthy market-style competition to people and the products that are the result of the bids.
Now, who's brave enough to take this on prove what a great concept this is...
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I think that IBM designed a quite similar idea arounf the concept of "Work Marketplace" and time exchange .
http://www.research.ibm.com/social/projects_workmarketplace.shtml
Description from the website:
Work is becoming less tied to specific locations. It moves across organizational boundaries. Dynamic and unique mixes of skills are required for success. And those who can do the work are contracted through new models for getting work done, from live auctions to crowd-based multi-sourcing to collaborative hackday events.
Numerous point solutions and niche-market platforms exist to support one or another of these new developments. The Work Marketplace brings this all together into a virtual exchange, where work is traded between those who have work that needs to be done and those with the capability to do the work.
Imagine you could share work on a virtual exchange throughout your enterprise, or even across enterprise boundaries with people around the world who have unique skills! Our functional prototype illustrates this vision, highlighting the design of work for the Work Marketplace, posting and bidding on work in auctions, and earning a social reputation through the performance of skilled work.
Contact
For more information about the Work Marketplace, contact Melissa Cefkin (mcefkin@us.ibm.com)
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