FWOW

WFH

In: FWOW, Leadership, Virtual Teams

Offer as much flexibility as possible sums up the new Microsoft employee guidelines for working from home and we can all learn from their example. With everyone around the world working from home for the last few months, embracing the flexible workplace just sounds logical. At Microsoft they have taken this to a new level by providing clarity in guidelines Offer As Much Flexibility As Possible The guide from Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan, starts by explaining how empathetic she is about the emotional toil that come from the new demands of everybody working at home and often needing to contribute to home schooling at the same time. Working from home is mostly a supported choice and returning to the office is optional for employees (except for those essential onsite roles). It goes on to state that Microsoft plans to “offer as much flexibility as possible to support individual workContinue Reading

In: Agile, FWOW, Leadership, Motivation

Over recent years the term ‘Servant Leadership’ became mainstream in business schools and leadership education. Synonymous with Agile Teams the servant leader empowers and enables the teams, effectively reversing the traditional role of staff making the manager successful. This article from McKinsey Quarterly explores the link between employee satisfaction and how managers are improving the quality of workplace relationships and in particular driving cultural change through servant leadership which includes engaging everyone within the organisation with “compassion and genuine curiosity”. Substantial research has documented that a good workplace is established when managers are able to provide workers with a work environment that is meaningful (clarity, context of the work; as well as autonomy, tools and guidance to do the work) and offers psychological safety (the absence of interpersonal fear as a driver of employee behaviour). “a good manager instills a sense of trust and confidence, with a clear set ofContinue Reading

In: Agile, Culture, FWOW, Leadership

Transforming your organisation requires a mindset transformation, the excellent illustration below was shared this week on LinkedIn by an ex-colleague and it sums up how organisations need to think about and plan for transformation. Well done to Thoughtworks and Tanmay Vora who created this image. “The most profound business challenge we face today is how to build organizations that can change as fast as change itself.“ Gary Hamel, Global Peter Drucker Forum, Vienna Austria The authors start by pointing out that John Kotter wrote a paper on “Leading Change” in 1996 (required MBA reading) where he highlighted that only 30% of change initiatives are ever actually successful. The reason is that there is a lack of commitment to drive a change of culture. Culture is created and solidified over time through expressed actions and reactions and not cooked up based on generic sounding mission statements that are disconnected from realContinue Reading