Transformation — the social revolution is upon us and we are failing

Why are we still structuring organisations like we are stuck in the Industrial age when clearly the revolution is here?

It might sound like a stupid question, but however hard it is to grasp, it is a reality we simply cannot escape. We are doing it en masse, and it needs to stop if your organisation wants to remain relevant in the changing business landscape.

No longer can we give lip service to putting our people first, by writing it in publicly available corporate plans. We need to completely change the way we organise and operate our businesses, finally putting the people front and centre.

Is your organisation stuck, relying on outdated hierarchical structures that control all the power and decision-making at the top of a heavy organisational structure, that is reminiscent of the industrial revolution?

I am sorry to be the one to break the bad news to you. If this is your organisation, then you are likely already on a fast slide down a very slippery slope.

There are several warning signs to look out for, showing you might already be on that downward trajectory.

So what are these warning signs?

They are in plain sight, literally right in front of you. They include employee disengagement, high staff turnover, a decline in employee satisfaction, an inability to attract and retain quality candidates and quiet quitting, to name but a few.

Businesses today are literally riddled with unnecessary complexity. Organisations are unnecessarily spending millions of dollars attempting to transform their businesses, through what would seem is a hope that digital technology will be the saving grace. And we are failing on all fronts.

Why? Because businesses don’t transform people. People transform businesses, and digital technology is only as good as your people are empowered to uplift it within your organisation.

We have failed our people en masse, completely failing to see the need to change as the landscape changed around us. We progressed from the industrial revolution, where we told everyone what to do. In these times, people were expected to be obedient, and they were because work was scarce.

Then the world moved into the Information revolution where technology began to make the world a whole lot smaller, whilst our field of interaction expanded exponentially.

The average person connected to social media is now less than six handshakes away from every other person. Our spheres of influence have expanded exponentially. The information we gained access to through the information revolution is hard to fathom. Yet, in business, we didn’t see the writing on the wall and continued to do business in the same old ways.

Now, here we are today in the social revolution, where people value their quality of life, whilst they have literally everything at their fingertips.

Within 100 years we stopped spending almost our entire day collecting and preparing the food we ate to survive, to outsourcing everything with services and gadgets, whilst many have filled their lives with social media instead.

After the significant changes due to the information and social revolutions, organisations are still holding onto the do-as-I-say mentality of the industrial eras long passed. Holding all the power and decisions at the top, with actions disseminated down multiple levels of organisational structures, leaving any purpose or vision completely lost in translation. This is happening right in front of you, whilst the people in your organisation are telling you it’s not working by their actions, as they walk out the door.

Whilst many organisations put their head in the sand and maintain the need for multiple levels of complexity and unnecessary hierarchy structures, smart organisations have been on a flattening curve downward for years.

Why? Because they realised the value of their people.

These smart organisations also understood that their people want different things from their work nowadays. These smart and progressive organisations saw the benefits of loosening their grip, engaging their people and encouraging growth through fostering skills in amplification rather than diminishing their people’s value. Then it all went on high speed as the pandemic hit, and the world of employment changed completely.

If you are an organisation trying to force your workers back to the office, unfortunately, you are stuck in an outdated industrialised mindset from the all too distant past. I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news. Your organisation may have completely missed the vital lesson the pandemic brought us all.

Disruption can be incredibly uncomfortable, however, it also creates a platform to spring forward. People have built inner resilience and want more from life than just a job that no longer satisfies them. The statistics on employee satisfaction speak for themselves here. People in our businesses are feeling undervalued, under-utilised and overworked and are pretty much fed up, causing disengagement en masse.

You see, in all the levels of management power and control, we lost sight of the fantastic people we employ. We dropped the ball and took our people for granted. We started focusing on business capability modelling instead of human capability modelling. We’ve been defining people by their job titles and position description for far too long. There are people throughout our organisations that have skills, passion, knowledge and understanding far beyond their current job role.

We have stacked our organisations in such a way, that they are literally tumbling down that slope, whilst we are falling over the rubble on the way down.

We’ve pigeoned-holed our people without consultation and bogged them down in unnecessary and artificially created complexity, all to justify the heavy structures above. All this is right in front of us, while we are burning people out that chose to stay with us at an alarming rate.

We seem to have missed the fact that there are now more jobs than people and an above 80% dissatisfaction rate of those currently employed in our organisations. It is no wonder at all why people en masse are choosing to either work for themselves, or find something better.

Is it time to flatten your organisation and distribute power and decision-making in a more effective, efficient and enjoyable way of working?

I think so. Why?

Because it works. When people are engaged and empowered in the process they change and so does the face of your business, including the bottom line. We seem to think we change the business and then somehow magically the business changes the people, yet it was always the other way around.

The longer you wait to change with the times, during this social revolution, the further down the slope your business is going to slide. Thus making the climb back up to stay relevant in the new world, progressively steeper every day you wait.

What are you going to do next?

Want to know more about how your organisation can create its own people revolution to catapult it into the future world that is unfolding?

Reach out and we may be able to help you on your way.