Do you encourage collaboration between departments?
Are you ready for a changing demographic in your workforce?
Do you know how technology will change your organization in the future?
This past spring, Queen’s IRC hosted a summit to explore our workplaces in motion. We thought of our summit as a discovery space. We invited people to come together to reflect, share and re-imagine how their workplaces could become more transparent, integrated and inspiring. Through an old world – new world lens, we explored how four inter-related trends (see model), are shaping the new employee, the new work, and the new workplace.
Our lofty aim was to reveal how the workplace principles and frameworks that worked in the past no longer serve us. While we all appreciate that the era of centralized governing systems and rigid hierarchies is over, many of the legacy principles are so deeply engrained, we simply do not see or question them. Our task was to surface the principles that no longer serve us, and define a new set of workplace fundamentals promoting connectivity, innovation and adaptability.
In service of keeping those conversations going, we offer our old world-new world models as a starting place for you to ponder the future of your workplaces. As you reflect on each of the three models (the new employee, the new work, the new workplace), gather your colleagues together and answer the questions below. We’ve employed a technique called reverse brainstorming to surface the organizational practices and systems that may, inadvertently, be rooting your organization in the past.
Are you ready for change? Our inaugural Workplace in Motion Summit, held on April 16th in Toronto, brought together over 100 HR, LR and OD professionals eager to learn about the forces that are changing the way we work, and to brainstorm strategies for organizations to prepare for the transformation of our workplace cultures and practices.
In this article, we take one of the more interesting and useful models of professionalization and apply it to the Human Resources field to see what insights can be had.
Most experts advocate creating a vision as a necessary step in any change initiative. But managers have a tough time following this advice. Change vision statements are often too long, too confusing or too generic to motivate action in the direction of the change. It’s tough to condense the vision into a couple of sentences or paragraphs that sing, but it is worthwhile to try. For example, Google’s pithy vision statement has long provided a guiding star for employees to follow: “To make the world’s information universally accessible and useful.” Contrast it with the following vision statement from an actual Fortune 500 firm that shall remain nameless: “Our vision is to maximize shareholder value by enhancing financial performance and providing long-term profitable growth.” Very few employees are going to spring out of bed each morning full of enthusiasm to “maximize shareholder value.”