More Humanity in Workplace of the Future

Josh Bersin of Bersin by Deloitte

Aneel Bhusri, Co-Found & CEO, Workday

Matt MacInnis, CEO, Inkling

The workplace of the future is “becoming more human” is one of the themes that emerged from the 2nd Annual Ultimate Culture Conference on Oct. 18 in San Francisco organized by Human Synergistics, a consulting firm focused on helping organizations improve their effectiveness through culture change, leadership development and team building.For someone whose consultancy, Joyful Planet, is focused on helping individuals and organizations unleash greater success, fulfillment and joy in their lives and in the workplace, this was great news!“Jobs are becoming more human.  Listening, empathy and communication are skills needed for the future,” said speaker Josh Bersin, Principal, Bersin by Deloitte, part ofDeloitte Consulting LLP.He cited a study that GM had done, involving their highest performing product introduction teams to determine the predictive traits for success.  The only predictive trait they could identify was that team members were “highly networked” within the organization and understood what others were doing so they built things that would succeed in the GM ecosystem, Bersin said.Bersin, who top-lined a staggering amount of global research done by his firm during his presentation, also said that “(Employee) engagement has not gone up in 20 to 30 years.  In successful companies where engagement is high Bersin said, “it’s because of the way they treat their people and the way they think about their people.”  He cited Workday Co-Founder & CEO Aneel Bhusri, saying he puts employees first and a little bit before customers.  Bhusri has explained in media interviews that employee satisfaction is behind innovation, agility, and revenue at Workday, which was founded in 2005. Today, Workday has 5,200 employees and revenues of $1B from its offering of enterprise-level software solutions for human resource and financial management.Adam Leonard, Executive Development, People Development at Google, shared how the company works hard to create “an open source and collective ownership culture.”  Leonard described Google as “Wonderfully de-centralized and diverse” and characterized its culture as “a kindness, a heart and good intent” and “a love affair with technology and big data to improve peoples’ lives.”He also talked about the People Development team’s “work with leaders to be vulnerable” because “it frees up the stuckness” of contentious or difficult situations, involving colleagues and teams.  This is part of Google’s efforts to create “psychologically safe” working environments because their extensive research has shown that psychological safety, more than anything else, is critical to making a team work.Edgar Schein, Culture Expert and Professor Emeritus, MIT Sloan School of Management, and widely regarded as the most influential authority on organizational culture said, “I get impatient with words like ‘humanism’ that don’t mean anything.  Until you get specific it will scare most executives.  I think we have to be clear we mean a climate in which people feel it’s safe to speak up because it’s in the interest of the work of the organization.”Matt MacInnis, a former Apple executive and now CEO of Inkling, a company that provides tools for businesses to build, manage and distribute digital content, said in his presentation, “Unlearning Apple and Rethinking Company Culture,” that the “top down, rigorously optimizing approach to management at Apple was dehumanizing.” He talked about the extreme secrecy where “information was weaponized” in the Apple culture, saying it had a “horrible, cultural side effect.”He admitted to making the mistake early on when starting Inkling of trying to replicate Apple’s culture only to realize that he and his employees were miserable.  He characterized Inkling’s culture today as “Transparency. Humility. Equality.”  He juxtaposed this against Apple’s culture, which he characterized as “Secrecy. Isolation. Communism.” MacInnis’ focus on people and culture seems to be paying off with accolades from Fast Company, which recognized them as one of “the 50 most innovative companies” of 2014, and #105 on the Inc. 500 list of “America’s fastest growing companies” in 2014.MacInnis also talked about his company’s Conscious Business reading club where every week a cohort of Inkling employees reviews one of the book’s six qualities of conscious leadership – Unconditional responsibility, Essential integrity, Ontological humility, Authentic communication, Constructive negotiation and Impeccable coordination – undergirded by Emotional mastery.  “Nothing contributes more to being an effective leader than being your authentic self,” he said.In summarizing the many speakers who spoke about the personal and business result of creating a better workplace for humans, Robert Cooke, CEO, Human Synergistics and Associate Professor Emeritus, the University of Chicago, said, “If you change an organization, it can spill over into peoples’ lives and into the community and into the world.”