Leadership

Books, eyelids, convenience stores and even web browsers all have one thing in common... For them to function effectively they need to be open.

The same is true of the employees in any team, department or organization. Engagement (and all the good stuff that goes with it) thrives in a culture where open communication and workplace relationships are strong. In fact, today's workforce expects nothing less as they are used to posting their life stories in various public, online outlets.

Being open is having the capacity to

Innovative and, some would say, radical organisation design methods like Holacracy have sought to get rid of traditional management structures with the aim of introducing more agility, more creativity and more autonomy.

It’s official. HR has gone out of fashion. It can join trifle and perms in the category of things we look back on and wonder how we ever let that happen.

Let’s look at the evidence: HR leaders, surely the champions of their profession, don’t have HR in their job titles any more.

Workforce diversity is much more than just another corporate buzzword.  It’s an important business topic these days as organizations regard differing viewpoints a critical element in being innovative and competitive in a fast changing world.

Regardless of any social factors, the individual employees within every organization have a wide variety of business-centric ideas, perspectives and behaviors that usually lead to one of two outcomes. 

Many organisations embarking on an enterprise-wide transformation to agile working, struggle to sustain or scale the benefits they initially achieve. The journey towards agility is a marathon, not a sprint, and it requires continued commitment, at all levels of the organisation, to ensure agile ways of working stick.

The first six to 12 months of introducing agile throughout an organisation will result in visible improvements in speed to market, productivity, efficiency and employee engagement.  

‘Well,' I said. ‘Eventually, the blob will get you. It’s important to run as fast as you can in the early days of your transformation, because organisations have an in-built protection mechanism; the ability to morph into a blob of slime that will eventually catch up with you, surround you in slime and kill you off’.

Large organisations are in danger of responding to new world changes and pace with old world traditional thinking, models and answers. This won’t work.

We conducted a Q&A interview with Jardena London, Transformation Leader and Blogtoon Publisher at Rosetta Technology Group, around work-life balance, how employees embrace change and leadership.

Could you introduce yourself and what you do?
I like to say that I help work not suck, or said more politically correctly; I help organizations become healthy, productive and fun. Most of my work is in the space of Business Agility, but I also publish a daily blogtoon and I’m doing some work on increasing the Gender Quotient in the workplace.

How often do you think about your employees in respects to the experience they have from the beginning to the end of their employment with your organisation, from the moment they hear about your company to the time they walk away? We're launching a series of blogs that focus on the elements within the employee lifecycle and as we've covered a lot about attraction in the past, we're moving on to onboarding.