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2017 GLOBAL WORKPLACE TRENDS 2 SODEXO 2017 GLOBAL WORKPLACE TRENDS Sodexos Focus: Quality of Life Sodexo is the world leader in services that improve quality of life, an essential factor in individual and organizational performance. Operating in 80 countries, Sodexo serves 75 million consumers each day through its unique combination of Onsite Services, Benefits and Rewards Services, and Personal and Home Services. At Sodexo, we believe that when companies place peoples quality of life at the center of their thinking, they create a more committed and engaged workforce. We have worked to make quality of life something that is concrete and operational, reconciling individual expectations with the goals of companies and viewing workplace trends through the lens of quality of life. We have identified six dimensions of quality of life on which our services have a direct impact: The Physical Environment: Ensuring that employees are safe and feel comfortable Health work increasingly across cultures, borders and workplaces; and move quickly to market, among so many other entrepreneurial tactics. That shift brings new approaches to addressing challenges: new forms of collaboration and more inventive and faster ways of delegating and sharing responsibilities. For some employees, adjusting to the new order creates a fair amount of discomfort. But according to Michael Bazigos, Ph.D., Managing Director at Accenture Strategy and Adjunct Professor in the Department of THE AGILE ORGANIZATION STRIKING A BALANCE BETWEEN SPEED AND STABILITY As 21st-century organizations become increasingly agile, so must individuals. This can be challenging and require practice, but mindfulness is a discipline that is proving useful. 9SODEXO 2017 GLOBAL WORKPLACE TRENDS Organization and Leadership at Columbia University in the United States, the future of businesses hinges on embracing that agility. 1 “In the context of a competitive, globalized market, we need to accept that everything we believed about how success could be achieved may change suddenly and all at once, requiring us to rethink the entire approach and to aggressively and rapidly transform,” he says. “Those management cultures that give their people permission to wonder about, question and debate whether the way things are done today is the best way forward are the ones best equipped to deal with agility.” THE RISE OF AGILITY The move toward agility has mirrored workplace technological advances. In the 1980s, organizations started to shift from being solo silos in the marketplace toward developing collaborative networks with partners such as suppliers. As a result, employees needed to embrace flexibility, adaptability and a true commitment to teamwork. The next phase: transversal organizations, that is, those that focused on compressing project and business activity life cycles, allowing products and services to be created, refined and made available in ever-shorter time frames. Multidisciplinary teamwork became important here, with members from all corners of organizations working quickly toward a common vision for specific projects. Isaac Getz, Co-Author, Freedom, Inc.; Professor of Leadership and Innovation, ESCP Europe Business School, says the subsequent evolutionthe liberated businessis “one in which the majority of people have the freedom and responsibility to take any initiative they think is best in alignment with the organizations objectives.” 2 Today, the next iteration, the cellular organization, is on the rise, with autonomous cells inside organizations operating in a spirit of collaboration and friendly competition, but joining forces when necessary. 3 It is poised to revive the entrepreneurial/startup spirit in any size business. The old sense of “rules and procedures” functioned like “historical layering of sedimentary rock, which can ossify organizations over time.” MICHAEL BAZIGOS, Ph.D., Managing Director, Accenture Strategy; Adjunct Professor, Department of Organization and Leadership, Columbia University 10 THE AGILE ORGANIZATION Striking a Balance Between Speed and Stability WHAT IS AN AGILE ORGANIZATION? THREE MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF THE AGILE ORGANIZATION Common orientation toward organizational goals Emphasis on teamwork Principle of adaptive performance HOW MINDFULNESS CAN LEAD TO AGILITY Helps achieve balance between speed and stability Helps employees focus and achieve greater calm Promotes compassion and sense of community Creates accountability Nimble and responsive Early adopter of technology Moves quickly to market Works across cultures, borders and workplaces Source: “Work in the 21st Century: Agile and Mindful,” Institute for Quality of Life, Sodexo, June 28, 2016 11SODEXO 2017 GLOBAL WORKPLACE TRENDS Each of these evolutions has taken big bites out of the barriers within organizations, and that has translated into the need for greater agility, both from organizations and the individuals who work within them. The old sense of “rules and procedures,” Bazigos says, functioned like “historical layering of sedimentary rock, which can ossify organizations over time.” As recently set out in a Harvard Business Review case study, the danger of not recognizing and addressing those hardened layers of business bureaucracy can be significant. “At one Fortune 1000 company, for example, flame wars broke out between customer support units, desperate to respond faster to customer complaints, and the technical design group, equally desperate to avoid ad hoc fixes,” says the case study. “Neither group could effectively solve the problems without the other, but their overlaps quickly became sources of conflict rather than collaboration. That pathology isnt uncommon.” 4 MAKING AGILITY FIT It might seem as if agility and stability are pitted against each other, but Bazigos sees a way forward: “When we look at agility, there are two parallel systems that may seem to be at oddsbut actually they are not: a stabilizing structural backbone and capacity for velocity. Most companies still need hierarchy and structure; so rather than blow up the structure, the question becomes: How do you become agile behind that?” We can thank the tech world for giving other business sectors a road map towardand multiple case studies for successful agility. Software developers outlined and pushed the importance of steady adaptation, steady output back in 2001, signing and publishing the then-controversial, now clearly prescient Agile Manifesto. Among its core edicts: “customer collaboration over contract negotiation” and “responding to change over following a plan.” 5 Fast-forward to the present and, as HP Technology Evangelist John Jeremiah said on TechBeacon (an online hub for developers and technology professionals), “agile is now the norm.” 6 This circles back to the old adage that “Change is the only constant,” but nudges remain necessary for companies all across the corporate landscape. In order to avoid ossification and embrace agility, Bazigos squares in on “People dont resist change; they resist being changed.” ISAAC GETZ, Co-Author, Freedom, Inc.; Professor of Leadership and Innovation, ESCP Europe Business School 12 SODEXO 2017 GLOBAL WORKPLACE TRENDS mindset. Businesses need, he says, to “innovate, be more productive, integrate acquisitions and shorten time to value.” It helps to start at the top: An agile mindset embraced by management fosters adoption throughout an organization; once adopted, agility yields benefits both inside and outside. To get there, businesses can set their sights on three principal characteristics: 7 1. A common orientation toward organizational goals 2. An emphasis on teamwork 3. A principle of adaptive performance AGILITY AT WORK For the workforce, agility definitely is as empowering as it is demanding: Along with calling on employees to take responsibility for acting in line with the companys objectives, it allows them to experience freedom, and it encourages and rewards proactivity and creativity. Bazigos says that in order to tap into the potential of an agile workplace, “employees need to embrace ambiguity.” That embrace can be challenging for many employers and employees. “Traditional organizations are built for cost reduction, optimization and efficiency, imperatives that do not necessarily underpin flourishing, creativity and innovation,” says Bazigos. “And the traditional workforce had been conditioned to adhere to well-defined roles, which can put a brake on velocity.” Traditional organizations also tend to be helmed by traditional leaders, who might struggle to adapt to a more tactical, nimble approach much like youd see in a fencing match. “There are a small number of organizations whose leaders have the ability to make decisions quickly and adapt to a changing environment,” Bazigos says. “They also have a flexible structure that allows them to move fast without disrupting the very structural support that allows for this ability to move quickly in the first place.” Bazigos points to the business rewards of optimizing both: “Of 277 companies we studied at Accenture, the ones with higher levels of both stabilizing structural backbone and velocity were 436 percent 13SODEXO 2017 GLOBAL WORKPLACE TRENDS likelier to be seen as outstanding financial performers in their industry than those that lacked both. This is consistent with published research in professional journals that documents the contribution of agility to operational and financial performance, and finds that agilitys power roughly doubles in volatile environments compared to stable ones.” 8 To gain insight into agility, companies can look for inspiration from their in-house pros who are immersed in the agile tech world: their information technology team. “Agility has long been essential to creating usable software quickly, and chief information officers have developed a suite of agile approaches and tools to address long delivery cycles and inflexible legacy systems,” says Paul Willmott, a Director at global management consulting firm McKinsey. “Many of these approaches can be expanded well beyond the perimeters of IT and applied across an organization.” 9 “Bringing agile philosophy beyond IT function is hard for many companies because it requires the transformation of their structure, such as hierarchy and functional silos,” says Getz. But thats just one of many challenges. He offers the example of Brazilian manufacturing company Semco as showing great agility when facing the external pressure of a national economic crisis. More than half of the companys 500 employees accepted an offer to leave Semcos payroll. Some took their severance and left; about 200 stayed, and another 200 became satellite employees, working in positions that were once contracted out, starting their own businesses with the support of Semco resources (but perhaps not even with Semco as a client) and other scenarios. Its one of dozens of innovations the company has used to keep employees engaged, creative, loyal, productive and happyand Semco profitable. 10 For many companies, intentionally developing into an agile organization comes with swift, clear dividends. WORKPLACE IMPLICATIONS As Getz tells us, “People dont resist change; they resist being changed.” Organizations that recognize the challenge to their workers created by the need to pivot and adapt quickly are “Agility is not limited to a sector or geography. If we allow people to have freedom and the responsibility to work out the challenges of today, well see a surge in innovation and creativity. The potential of human beings remains largely untapped.” ISAAC GETZ, Co-Author, Freedom, Inc.; Professor of Leadership and Innovation, ESCP Europe Business School 14 SODEXO 2017 GLOBAL WORKPLACE TRENDS striving to help employees embrace agility by introducing them to practices such as mindfulness. Marc Benioff, CEO of U.S. tech company Salesforce, for example, has added a meditation room to every floor of the groups San Francisco office tower, while European beverage manufacturer Carlsberg has engaged a mindfulness consultant. 11 As a type of voluntary, intentional mental training, mindfulness can be a space for balance and a counterweight to the information/responsibility overload that can cause workers to feel overwhelmed, frustrated and even disengaged. New studies show that making mindfulness a group activity could make it even more effective as a productivity enhancer. 12 Here, too, it helps to start at the top: Engaging a high-visibility individual in the organization, and clearly communicating the facts and benefits of participating, tends to encourage employees to take advantage of opportunities to learn mindfulness techniques and practice them. 13 Among the perks of the practice of mindfulness: It can make it easier for employees to focus, strengthen their sense of community, promote compassion, create accountability and help them achieve greater calm. 14 It can also help employees achieve the necessary balance between speed and stability that makes agility worksomething companies across all industries, and across all borders, should be pointedly aiming for. “Agility is not limited to a sector or geography,” Getz says. “If we allow people to have freedom and the responsibility to work out the challenges of today, well see a surge in innovation and creativity. The potential of human beings remains largely untapped.” 15 16 SODEXO 2017 GLOBAL WORKPLACE TRENDS T here will always be room for incremental change and improvement, but no discussion about economic growth and prosperity is complete without mention of disruptive new ideas and those who make them work. Innovation is the drumbeat of the relentless change thats such a feature of 21st-century work and life: new products, new processes, new services, new ways of organizing and new ways of thinking. For consumers, this innovation has become so normal, so expected, that people have started taking much of it for granted. Increasingly, we assume that whatever need we might have, someone somewhere has probably concocted a smart way of meeting it; it just takes the right online search terms to track it down. Most of the time, we dont see an innovative product and wonder, “How did they come up with that?” THE RISE OF CROSS-WORKPLACES ACCELERATING INNOVATION THROUGH CHANCE INTERACTIONS As innovation moves from optional to essential, organizations are seeking to structure environments where employees generate new ideas by virtue of interacting across boundaries. 17SODEXO 2017 GLOBAL WORKPLACE TRENDS For employers, its a different matter. They cant afford to take innovation for granted, to simply “consume” it. They have to generate innovation if they want to get ahead of competitors rather than be overtaken by them. They cant just watch and wonder where people get new ideas; they must understand how to do it for themselves, to find a magic formula that enables them and their employees to pluck brilliant new ideas as i
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