The city of Rome, which stands as an epitome of beauty and grandeur from the past, with all its architectural beauty, was an outcome of persistent efforts and pain that traversed years. Similarly, building a great place to work is not an overnight journey! Rather, it’s a long voyage, each moment of which needs to be decorated and celebrated with the employees of the organization.
Building a great place to work is the dream of each entrepreneur, and there are numerous ways in which one invests to achieve that goal. Following are couple key points I have learned while working with great places to work.
Enable the enablers. Great places generally invest a lot in their so-called supporting functions. They actually follow the philosophy of ‘Enable the Enablers’ over ‘Supporting the Support Functions.’ Yes, the success mantra here is to invest in the non-revenue generating enabling functions of the organization like HR function, learning and development, marketing, and finance.
These departments may not directly contribute to the revenue of the organization. However, they do lay a strong foundation for any organization. “Even the tallest tower starts from the ground,” which makes it imperative to lay this foundation strongly enough.
Trust-based management. This kind of management style basically implies at delegating inasmuch responsibility to employees as possible and at the same time targeting control over tasks and projects. Rather than enhancing the productivity through control measurements, the entire focus is on performance, in turn based on trust between the concerned individuals/parties. The two great advantages of this style of managing talent are, encouraging accountability and creativity, a huge boost to an organization’s chance to become a “Great Place to Work.”
Lenin once said, “Trust is cheaper than control,” which seems to be outweighing the controls. Organizations need to continually remember that while they are tempted to sort the challenges by tightening the controls, it cannot be done at the cost of derogating the trust. An indirect inversely proportional relationship exists between control and trust and this must be remembered always.
Bon voyage!
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I LOVE this article!
…Although I would personally hesitate to quote Vladimir Lenin regardless of how poignant his words are.