A DISORGANISED workforce sounds more like an excuse than a recipe for financial success, but, according to a report from Demos, the think-tank, disorganisation will soon be the only way for companies who want to hang on to their best people.
Sadly for those of us with an anarchic take on professional responsibility, disorganising doesn’t mean throwing everything on your desk into the air and hoping that nothing lands in the coffee. It’s about re-thinking businesses so that companies are built around people rather than expecting people to hammer themselves into the corporate mould when they walk in the door.
One example cited in Disorganisation: Why Future Organisations Must ‘Loosen Up’, is WL Gore, a company that makes waterproof jackets. It has no employees, relying instead on a network of 6,000 associates who share ownership of the company between them. There is no management hierarchy: natural leaders arise, but sink down again if others no longer want to follow them.
Similarly, at Semco, a Brazilian industrial company, employees vote on “major decisions that affect the company as a whole”.
Not all companies will be willing or able to change their way of doing business this radically, but disorganised concepts can still be woven into a more traditional corporate format. Flexible working hours, support for volunteering, decentralised management that gives frontline staff serious decision-making power; anything that gives employees more control over where and how they work can contribute to disorganisation.
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Paul Miller, co-author of the report, says that creative companies are already catching on to the idea. “They are ahead of the curve, but other companies are realising, and will realise more in the future, that it’s just as important to them — they will lose their best people to creative companies if they don’t,” he says. “It’s all about the direction of work as the job market changes. There will be fewer people doing mundane jobs and more doing creative, service-based jobs.”
One of disorganisation’s big advantages, from a company’s point of view, is increased employee loyalty. Recruiting good staff is difficult and expensive: retaining those already on board is a much better idea. Fiona Cannon, the head of equality and diversity at Lloyds TSB, says that the bank rethought its flexible working policy five years ago. “We discovered that it . . . wasn’t really about flexibility but about working shorter hours within a frame that was still rigid,” she says. The scheme was virtually never used by managers or men. “Now anyone can work flexibly as long as they can make a business case that it will work.”
One obvious change is that 20 per cent of all requests now come from managers, compared with none under the old scheme. The reasons people choose to work flexibly, while not relevant to whether or not they are permitted to, have also changed.
“It’s grown away from being a women’s issue and a childcare issue. For example, one man uses it to allow him time to referee rugby.”
Since the changes, staff satisfaction has risen from 57 per cent to 77 per cent, while the number of women in senior management positions has nearly doubled. “Clearly the improvements aren’t down just to flexible work, but that’s part of it.”