Weekly inspiration #35: Corporate culture of the future
“In my dream job I’ll have day-to-day variety, I’ll see ideas become reality, I’ll work with great people, and I’ll have tangible impact on the success of interesting projects.”
Over the past two years, we have been observing members of the Sandbox community, the jobs they choose, the way they work, the companies they start. We have been the witnesses of a rapid change in the the wishes and priorities of the younger generation of leaders with regard to their job. To better define this change, Paul Gleger – who works with us from New York – has recently conducted a study about the future of the workplace involving a panel of Sandbox members and HR leaders.
At the last LIFT conference in Geneva, I had the privilege to give a workshop about the future of corporate culture and although the study is not finished yet, I presented the first results in the form of six bold trends that stood out of our first analysis. All of them go into the same direction: people are always less interested to work for large organizations that don’t have a human face.
It doesn’t mean that they don’t want or like to work: at the contrary, Sandboxers are among the most driven people there are in this world. It just means that they feel the need to develop new approaches to make work more efficient and more fun. It is amazing to watch the change happening right now because of them in many start-up companies and in some bigger organizations. We believe that these trends will have a major impact on how we will all work in the future.
More meaningful work
The first and major trend cited by almost all participants to the survey is that they want work to be more meaningful. They want to feel that they have an impact. Organizations can improve that by more levels in strategy making, but even more importantly by defining a core mission, a bold mission statement, that truly inspires the employees. Then, they can help employees understand how their projects help achieve their vision and how through their work, they contribute to impact the organization and further, the world.
Genuine corporate values build trust
Sandboxers want genuine corporate values, that match the reality. How to define these values? Several startups have written a manifesto, check out the Holstee manifesto. By having everyone agree on common values, you create a family feeling between the employees. How to make sure that your employees share your values? It goes through defining them collaboratively, hiring – and maybe also firing – in consequence.
Trust allows to give more freedom
As a result of having strong values shared by everyone in the organization, you can trust your employees much more and give them more responsibilities:
- Netflix lets employees decide of their own holidays
- The German magazine Brand Eins mentioned recently an example of a company where employees even decide on their own salary!
Intrapreneurship rules
“Resistance to change and innovation is very frustrating – especially when the changes I propose would save money and time.”
Young leaders want their ideas to be heard. How to empower intrapreneurs?
- create the right climate (no fear of failure, no judgement)
- you have to give your employees the tools, ex. Google’s 20% rule
From top to bottom to horizontal organizations
The way organizations are built, and maybe also their size, might change in the future.
Today, all big corporates are built from top to bottom. In the future, we will witness the arrival of more horizontal structures:
- with small, specialized teams
- that come togehter project-based
- that are inspired by the way web applications work
Think of Wikipedia for example: large amounts of great work have been done without a strong central hierarchy.
Constant rewards
Last thing we observed: the need for constant and instant rewards. Young leaders need to feel progress and to receive recognition for their successes. How to go into their direction? By changing the promotion system: more, smaller promotions instead of big steps forward.
Antoine is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Sandbox. The big trends cited above are the first results we derived from the Sandbox HR study. The study itself will be published in the next weeks.
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