8 Characteristics of Highly Effective Workplaces
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I did my first class for new supervisors sometime in the early 1980s. The exact date and situation have drifted away, due to poor memory, bad recordkeeping, and a hard drive failure or two.
In one of the very first sessions, I started doing an exercise that helped participants identify the characteristics of a great place to work. I've done the exercise for more than twenty years now.
I started by asking them, individually, to remember a time when it was great to come to work. Everybody, at least everybody in my programs, had at least one time in their life where it was great to come to work. Working in groups, participants pooled their experience and came up with a list of characteristics of highly effective workplaces.
The wording varied slightly from group to group. But I can tell you after hundreds of sessions and thousand of participants, that what follows is about as close to consensus as it gets. Here are the characteristics they described. The wording is mine.
Productivity. Participants generally identified situations where they worked hard and the team produced superior results.
Community. Participants cited working with great people. They often mentioned how great it felt to be part of a successful team.
Interesting and meaningful work. Work might be interesting because it was constantly new or because the participants were learning a lot. And they chose situations where their work made a difference to the organization or the world.
Clear and reasonable expectations. They like situations where they knew what was expected of them and they had the means to mean those expectations.
Frequent and usable feedback. Lots of feedback was characteristic of great work situations. Many times the feedback was described as part of the "clear expectations" characteristic.
Consistency. Rules stayed the same. They were consistently applied both across situations and for different individuals.
Fairness. Consequences and performance match up. As one class member put it decades ago: "The good shall be rewarded and the unjust punished in accordance with their deeds."
Maximum control possible over work life. Participants didn't mind earning the right to control their work life. But the great situations they described always included freedom from excessive oversight and freedom to make decisions.
Boss's Bottom Line
If you're the boss, your job to help create a situation that has the characteristics above.
Trainers: Click here for a description of the exercise I used. It's in PDF format.
Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.
Categories: supervision,Great Working Environment,Management,Leadership
Tags: Great Working Environment Supervision Management Leadership
This is a great list. Off the top of my head I can't think of anything I would add. Basically, people want to come into work feeling secure everyday (consistency)and do something that is challenging enough so they are busy AND learning, while having the opportunity to interact with other individuals. They want to be recognized and rewarded for their contributions. They want to enjoy coming to work without it becoming the total of their lives. I believe these jobs do exist! The problem is...how long do they last? You asked the group to "remember a time..." Unfortunately, it seems that good times don't last forever...someone always steps in and decides to add an unsavory ingredient to the pot.
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Thanks for both the comment and the question, Lynn. I think I can offer a partial answer.
Those good times last as long as the supervisor is in place. Many people in class over the years had several good times to choose from. But usually it wasn't the job that made the environment great as much as the supervisor.
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Good point. It is definitely who is overseeing it all. If someone is that good they are able to have their workers this happy, they are certainly producing great results....that reflects on the supervisor and the supervisor is given the opportunity to move on to bigger and better things. The chances of someone replacing that person who has this kind of understanding of good leadership is pretty slim. Of course, the more your advice gets out the better the chance!
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Thanks for that. It's the sort of thing that warms a writer's heart.
I tell supervisors in my programs and in the Working Supervisor's Support Kit that everybody wins if they help their people to develop so that they can work with minimal supervision. The supervisor frees up time to deal with growth or discipline problems. The team member has more satisfying work and the sense of being trusted. The company gets more productivity and innovation.
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This is a great post - thank you. For me the point about setting clear and reasonable expectations rang a particular bell. So often people are not clear in their own minds before they set the expectations and as a result they confuse their team. You really do need to take the time to think out just what you are expecting and what that means for your team. That is part of being fair which for me is another key point and something which always had a dramatic effect on my own morale when it was lacking.
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Thanks for that insight, Wendy. What you're describing happens on two levels. If we think about it at all, we consider the expectations of a particular assignment. That's important. But it's equally important to think through what you expect from each of the basic tasks/jobs you want team members to perform.
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Wally:
We really liked this post that reminded us again that it isn't always the tangible things that matter in the workplace. We are featuring your post on the Compensation Cafe's Friday Special today.
http://compforce.typepad.com/compensation_cafe/2009/05/friday-special-at-the-cafe-4.html
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Thanks Darcy. I appreciate the honor.
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In our society today, more and more businesses and organizations should make principles like these a mandatory focus in the culture. Several companies have and will continue to lose good people as a result of not creating a great work environment.
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Spot on, Wally! Notice that none of that vision or mission crap made the list? This stuff is "rubber meets the road" and not "a walk in the woods." Well done, and thanks.
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You know, Bret, I never noticed that until you pointed it out. When they described an great working environment from their perspective it was all about everyday things. I don't remember any consultant-speak either. No one that I can recall mentioned "empowerment," for example.
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Wally, Bret,
I wouldn't say that the mission and vision crap isn't on the list, but it is there from the employees perspective. This is something that the mission and vision should incorporate more.
"Interesting and meaningful work. Work might be interesting because it was constantly new or because the participants were learning a lot. And they chose situations where their work made a difference to the organization or the world."
These situations where "the work contributes to a difference in the organization or the world", to me, is employee talk for working toward the organizations mission. What are your thoughts?
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I can see that perspective. What got me about Bret's post was that I hadn't noticed before that things like "mission and values" were not reflected in the comments. I think that the values of the boss became the values that mattered. I think you're right that there was a greater purpose, but I don't think it involved any official mission statements.
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This is an excellent post. I can relate with almost all of the points mentioned above about a great orgnization.
As the saying goes, nothing succeeds like a success, for me personally working in a productive organization with a community feeling doing meaningful work (Immediate noticable, tangible impact in the lives of customers) was really critical and I was fortunate to have experienced that multiple times throughout my career.
As Jack Welch advocates, Open, frequent and usable feedback is important for workforce to build the confidence and make postive impact on the work culture.
Great post. Keep up the good work.
Vish Agashe
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I've watched enough men and women get energized when talking about a time when it was great to come to work, to resonate with that statement. Thanks for sharing it.
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Hi Wally:
Do you have any suggestions concerning maintaining fairness in the work place? Perhaps this will seem a bit cynical but in a no winners, no losers culture, the work place is fair most often when the other person is being held accountable for their errors, poor workmanship, poor performance, etc.,
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