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Brain Circuits
Only connect: How to keep disparate workforce elements happy and motivated
Today’s workforce often includes a mix of permanent employees, freelancers, and outside contractors – but even organizations with mostly external workforces or highly autonomous workforces need proximity to succeed over the long term. Here are four strategies to ensure these disparate elements connect.
1. Clear accountability structures
This affects how objectives are set, implemented, assessed, and reviewed. Typical manager-led performance evaluations may be used, but they will sometimes need to be complemented by peer and client-led feedback and reviews, especially in companies with large external workforces. Organizations need to draw on various accountability mechanisms, complementing more typical processes and output control with social control. If not, employees of highly decentralized organizations may feel unaccountable.
2. Structural sources of alignment
Novel work designs may lead to flatter organizations, but management still provides guidance. When autonomy and reliance on externalized labor increase, organizations need to spend more effort on developing an internally consistent management system where the various elements support and reinforce each other, tying together work design, staffing, workflow management, performance evaluation, and incentives. Such a system provides a critical source of alignment and guides work behavior.
3. People-based sources of alignment
Companies should introduce liaison roles to connect and align teams to avoid organizational units drifting further apart. These are pivotal positions where key interfaces exist between a company’s functions, departments, business units, and subsidiaries. Such roles can be a team of organizational translators that transfer the company’s management system between units or countries, a corporate culture center that helps roll out and spread the company’s culture across its different divisions and units, or individuals with cross-functional or cross-cultural experience.
4. Material sources of alignment
Other forms of alignment can help keep companies relying more on externalized labor together. One example is building an early product prototype, which helps create a tangible vision for a product or solution that can unite employees by providing a big picture and a clear direction.
Key learning
Forging productive connections under novel work designs requires a different approach than when all employees work under similar contracts and conditions. Building a new sense of proximity is a fundamental part of keeping disparate workforce elements happy and motivated.
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