'Maximum interplay and employee interaction boosts workplace productivity'
The
home television is Yves Morieux's favorite example of cooperation and
how it differs from collaboration or coordination. Cooperation is
when the wife reads a book when the husband wants to watch a major
sports event or the husband decides to go for a walk when the wife's
favorite soap is on. There is a trade-off, a compromise where each
one agrees to a sacrifice.
Buying two televisions, on the other hand, is not cooperation, though this is what many loving couples do in order to avoid imposing trade-offs on each other. The organisational equivalent is pumping in more resources to solve a problem, like the bank that creates a 'middle office' to interface between its warring back-office and front office.
Instead of finding ways to get its people to cooperate, the organisation increases complexity. "Cooperation means using less resources but we avoid it because it is difficult and causes strained relationships. It is easier to buy a second TV," says Morieux .
As a senior consultant with The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Morieux has worked with over 500 companies and he's found that lack of cooperation is usually the main source of unhappiness in organisations, leading to employee disengagement and loss of productivity.
In a recent TED talk in San Francisco, he declared that competitive advantage has nothing to do with the competition -- it is an internal battle against ourselves.
Revolutionary words, given that competitive strategy has always been BCG's mainstay but Morieux says, "The competitor is just a rhetoric, I have never met him. But the complexity and bureaucracy we have created in our organisations is a reality and we must battle it."
In his recent book, Six Simple Rules: How to manage complexity without getting complicated, co-authored with BCG colleague Peter Tollman, Morieux lays out some ground rules.
The rules he lists are by no means simple ("Simple actually means not impossible," he says in a telephonic interview from Washington) but for large organisations struggling with increasing complexity, they have the potential to be a lifesaver.
The first rule is to understand what people in the organisation do -- how they cooperate, find resources, solve problems -- which is not always easy for those at the top. Here, Morieux gives the example of a major hotel chain he worked with, which was then faced with low profitability due to low occupancy rates, poor per-room revenues and low customer satisfaction levels.
The problem, it turned out, stemmed from rooms that were held out of service for maintenance. Housekeeping saw maintenance issues but didn't call them in since employees here were incentivised to clean rooms fast and repairs only slowed things down.
Receptionists bore the brunt of customer's anger and were faced with two options: give rebates or transfer them to other rooms. They kept rooms in reserve just for this purpose, thereby reducing occupancy rates and profits.
On BCG's advice, the hotel chain solved the problem by giving receptionists power over housekeeping and maintenance so that they could cooperate to solve customer problems without giving rooms away.
In addition, it changed management career paths so they could learn what others did and how they all fit together. The hotel receptionist is a natural 'integrator', a special category of people that are the focus of Morieux's second rule: reinforce integrators.
"You can recognise a potential integrator from the fact that he or she is the one suffering most from lack of cooperation. The receptionist is this type. The second type is the one who is powerful and doesn't need to cooperate. In this case you have to find ways to make them cooperate," says Morieux.
The third of Morieux's six simple rules is to increase the total quantity of power within the organisation, which essentially means you need to be careful to make it a positive-sum game. "If you take a zero-sum, taking power away from one person and giving it to another, there will always be a negative impact. The idea is to create new goals and give people the power and responsibility over them," he says.
In the hotel chain example, the power given to the receptionists to oversee cooperation with maintenance and house-keeping was in line with the goal of reducing the number of rooms kept in reserve. It did not take away from anyone else's power.
In a world that is becoming more interdependent, corporates need to follow suit and ensure there is maximum interplay and interaction among employees. Increased reciprocity, the fourth rule, has to be direct and not enforced through intermediate 'middle offices' set up solely for increasing cooperation, like a second TV.
"Sometimes you have to take away the extra TV in the house just to make people cooperate to decide what to watch on the one TV," says Morieux. "You need to put people in situations where they have to address mutual performance requirements. A certain degree of fuzziness can be a good thing. It's wrong to think we can be accountable for our work only if we are the sole authority over it and control all the resources."
Borrowed from Game Theory, Morieux's fifth rule is 'extend the shadow of the future', which means giving people a taste of the future consequences of their present actions. Here, he gives the example of an international vehicle manufacturer, which found itself obliged to match a competitor's five year warranty offer, in contrast to its own two year warranty.
The company's engineering department was already a complicated five dimensional matrix, with units working on petrol consumption, noise control, anticorrosion. To do this, it tried adding another unit for repair-ability, with its own key performance indicators and incentives, whose task was to ensure vehicles sent to the garage would henceforth be fixed in less time.
For example, the vehicle had to be re-designed so that the engine didn't have to be removed to get at the headlights. Creating a new function added to the complexity without solving the problem because what was really required was more cooperation between the existing engineering units.
To make the vehicle more compact, the designers had taken away the space that the electrical engineers needed for wiring, which is why the whole engine had to be removed to fix the lights.
Buying two televisions, on the other hand, is not cooperation, though this is what many loving couples do in order to avoid imposing trade-offs on each other. The organisational equivalent is pumping in more resources to solve a problem, like the bank that creates a 'middle office' to interface between its warring back-office and front office.
Instead of finding ways to get its people to cooperate, the organisation increases complexity. "Cooperation means using less resources but we avoid it because it is difficult and causes strained relationships. It is easier to buy a second TV," says Morieux .
As a senior consultant with The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Morieux has worked with over 500 companies and he's found that lack of cooperation is usually the main source of unhappiness in organisations, leading to employee disengagement and loss of productivity.
In a recent TED talk in San Francisco, he declared that competitive advantage has nothing to do with the competition -- it is an internal battle against ourselves.
Revolutionary words, given that competitive strategy has always been BCG's mainstay but Morieux says, "The competitor is just a rhetoric, I have never met him. But the complexity and bureaucracy we have created in our organisations is a reality and we must battle it."
In his recent book, Six Simple Rules: How to manage complexity without getting complicated, co-authored with BCG colleague Peter Tollman, Morieux lays out some ground rules.
The rules he lists are by no means simple ("Simple actually means not impossible," he says in a telephonic interview from Washington) but for large organisations struggling with increasing complexity, they have the potential to be a lifesaver.
The first rule is to understand what people in the organisation do -- how they cooperate, find resources, solve problems -- which is not always easy for those at the top. Here, Morieux gives the example of a major hotel chain he worked with, which was then faced with low profitability due to low occupancy rates, poor per-room revenues and low customer satisfaction levels.
The problem, it turned out, stemmed from rooms that were held out of service for maintenance. Housekeeping saw maintenance issues but didn't call them in since employees here were incentivised to clean rooms fast and repairs only slowed things down.
Receptionists bore the brunt of customer's anger and were faced with two options: give rebates or transfer them to other rooms. They kept rooms in reserve just for this purpose, thereby reducing occupancy rates and profits.
On BCG's advice, the hotel chain solved the problem by giving receptionists power over housekeeping and maintenance so that they could cooperate to solve customer problems without giving rooms away.
In addition, it changed management career paths so they could learn what others did and how they all fit together. The hotel receptionist is a natural 'integrator', a special category of people that are the focus of Morieux's second rule: reinforce integrators.
"You can recognise a potential integrator from the fact that he or she is the one suffering most from lack of cooperation. The receptionist is this type. The second type is the one who is powerful and doesn't need to cooperate. In this case you have to find ways to make them cooperate," says Morieux.
The third of Morieux's six simple rules is to increase the total quantity of power within the organisation, which essentially means you need to be careful to make it a positive-sum game. "If you take a zero-sum, taking power away from one person and giving it to another, there will always be a negative impact. The idea is to create new goals and give people the power and responsibility over them," he says.
In the hotel chain example, the power given to the receptionists to oversee cooperation with maintenance and house-keeping was in line with the goal of reducing the number of rooms kept in reserve. It did not take away from anyone else's power.
In a world that is becoming more interdependent, corporates need to follow suit and ensure there is maximum interplay and interaction among employees. Increased reciprocity, the fourth rule, has to be direct and not enforced through intermediate 'middle offices' set up solely for increasing cooperation, like a second TV.
"Sometimes you have to take away the extra TV in the house just to make people cooperate to decide what to watch on the one TV," says Morieux. "You need to put people in situations where they have to address mutual performance requirements. A certain degree of fuzziness can be a good thing. It's wrong to think we can be accountable for our work only if we are the sole authority over it and control all the resources."
Borrowed from Game Theory, Morieux's fifth rule is 'extend the shadow of the future', which means giving people a taste of the future consequences of their present actions. Here, he gives the example of an international vehicle manufacturer, which found itself obliged to match a competitor's five year warranty offer, in contrast to its own two year warranty.
The company's engineering department was already a complicated five dimensional matrix, with units working on petrol consumption, noise control, anticorrosion. To do this, it tried adding another unit for repair-ability, with its own key performance indicators and incentives, whose task was to ensure vehicles sent to the garage would henceforth be fixed in less time.
For example, the vehicle had to be re-designed so that the engine didn't have to be removed to get at the headlights. Creating a new function added to the complexity without solving the problem because what was really required was more cooperation between the existing engineering units.
To make the vehicle more compact, the designers had taken away the space that the electrical engineers needed for wiring, which is why the whole engine had to be removed to fix the lights.
In
the end, the solution was simple: the company mandated that the
engineers would move to the service function in two years, where they
would have to repair the cars they'd designed. "You sometimes
have to make people walk in the shoes they make for others so they
are exposed to the problems their behaviors can create," says
Morieux.
The last of the six not-impossible rules is to reward those who cooperate. They are the ones who help others and ask for help themselves, which in turn has maximum impact on engagement and productivity.
"Performance and comfort do not go together," says Morieux. "As Jean-Paul Sartre said, 'hell is other people' . Cooperation means having to engage and negotiate with other people, which can be hell."
Six simple rules
The last of the six not-impossible rules is to reward those who cooperate. They are the ones who help others and ask for help themselves, which in turn has maximum impact on engagement and productivity.
"Performance and comfort do not go together," says Morieux. "As Jean-Paul Sartre said, 'hell is other people' . Cooperation means having to engage and negotiate with other people, which can be hell."
Six simple rules
1.Reward
those who cooperate: Make
it useful to cooperate and dangerous to avoid cooperation.
2.Extend the shadow of the future: Make people experience the consequences that result from what they do today.
3.Increase reciprocity: Kill monopolies, remove resources and create new networks so people have mutual interest in cooperation.
4.Increase the total quantity of power: Give powers to people down the line, without taking away powers of those higher up.
5.Reinforce integrators: Find out how cooperation happens and who makes it happen.
6.Understand what your people do: Learn how they cooperate, find resources and solve problems.
2.Extend the shadow of the future: Make people experience the consequences that result from what they do today.
3.Increase reciprocity: Kill monopolies, remove resources and create new networks so people have mutual interest in cooperation.
4.Increase the total quantity of power: Give powers to people down the line, without taking away powers of those higher up.
5.Reinforce integrators: Find out how cooperation happens and who makes it happen.
6.Understand what your people do: Learn how they cooperate, find resources and solve problems.
By Dibeyendu
Ganguly, CDET140912
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