You�re probably reading this post sitting at your desk. You probably spend an disproportionate amount of your waking hours sitting right there.
I�m always interested in how other people work. I’m always trying to find techniques and procedures that will increase my efficiency and of course trawling the web in the vain hope of finding software that might give me a couple of extra minutes each day.
I�m also very interested in new models for structuring an organization. After all, most of us work in a traditional structure that hasn�t changed in fifty years.
This week I came across two interesting examples of different work environments. Both of them question how we think about the structure of organizations and as a result the treatment of employees.
First up, CIO Insight magazine has an interview with Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco, whose unique approach to organizational management is well publicized and covered in his books. Ricardo believes in a radically different work environment where amongst other things employees decide their own hours, suggest their own salaries and the organization seems to be held together through a combination of professional pride, peer pressure and innovative hiring policies.
“Nor did he stop with flextime. He did away with dedicated receptionists, org charts, even the central office�it now resembles an airlines’ VIP lounge, with people working in different areas each day. He encouraged employees to suggest what they should be paid, to evaluate their bosses, to learn each other’s jobs, and to tolerate dissent�even when divisive. He set up a profit-sharing system and insisted that the company’s financials be published internally, so that everyone could see how the company was doing.”
I found the second example in the recently published book: Bang!: Getting your message heard in a noisy world. It’s written by Advertising Agency executives Linda Kaplan Thaler, Robin Koval and Delia Marshall. While it does primarily center around advertising, there are some interesting angles for any marketer.
In the book, they cover the issue of how you can build a workplace that promotes creative thinking. One of their suggestions particularly resonated with me. The issue of how you manage career advancement in a marketing agency.
I’ve covered this issue before in relation to the fact that the traditional PR agency promotion model doesn’t help staff to specialize in the areas where they can add the most value.
Instead everyone looks to get away from office administration, then they try and get away from media relations and then they hope to start managing staff, budgets and clients. The result is that the media relations is often left to the newbies which annoys journalists and doesn’t guarantee the best results for the client.
The authors’ answer to this problem is to can promotions. Instead of creating a deep, traditional structure (think Account Administrator, Account Executive, Account Manager, Account Director etc.) they have nominal practice areas (in PR terms think “Media Relations”, “Client Management” etc.) and they incentivize the people to focus on the areas they are best suited to. So people good with the media become well paid media specialists while people with skills in client management focus on that area. In one step you can remove the issue of good media relations staff wasting time managing people and budgets when it’s not their strength. Instead leave that task to people who are good at it.
The result is a flatter organization with skilled operatives doing what they’re best at.
That’s an interesting alternative to traditional thinking of PR agency structure…
Murphy's Law 