Group items tagged

Multinational IT giant Atos has pledged to become a zero email company in a bid to help its 80,000 employees cope with information overload.

As the global economy emerges from the Great Recession, many organizations continue to experience its far-reaching effects, but it is not the only force at play as organizations continue to evolve. Technology, demographics, shifts in work relationships, regulatory environments, and globalization exert themselves to reshape work.  And many uncertainties remain about the future of the work that  will affect the structure and practices of the work experience.

it seems like the matrix form is alive and well in today's organizations - albeit having evolved from its early days. Why? Perhaps there is no bigger driver for the re-emergence of the matrix than organizations' increasing use of teams - virtual, project, cross-functional and global - to improve speed of delivery, customer responsiveness, cost concerns and productivity.

Your company's workforce is its most valuable asset. It is the employees who translate your organization's strategy into reality, interact with consumers and determine the corporate brand. "Living the Brand" demonstrates how you can empower and enthuse your employees to create "brand champions". This approach enhances employee commitment, improves service standards and focuses efforts to deliver business goals.

Summary: "Although groups are initially "wise," knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines the wisdom of crowd effect in three different ways. The "social influence effect" diminishes the diversity of the crowd without improvements of its collective error. The "range reduction effect" moves the position of the truth to peripheral regions of the range of estimates so that the crowd becomes less reliable in providing expertise for external observers. The "confidence effect" boosts individuals' confidence after convergence of their estimates despite lack of improved accuracy. Examples of the revealed mechanism range from misled elites to the recent global financial crisis."

HILLSBORO, Ore. - Intel was never one of those technology companies where employees had beanbag chairs, designer desks and pinball machines. Its offices were known for their endless rows of gray cubicles, low ceilings and fluorescent lighting. For decades it resisted any changes to its office environment. In the last two years, however, Intel has quietly been trying to inject a little more fun into its offices and make them places where employees can be more collaborative. The company has remade one million square feet of office space thus far in a sweeping redesign.

From the post: "For de Groot, this failure was a revelation, since it suggested that talent wasn't about memory - it was about perception. The grandmasters didn't remember the board better than amateurs. Rather, they saw the board better, instantly translating the thirty-two chess pieces into a set of meaningful patterns. They didn't focus on the white bishop or the black pawn, but instead grouped the board into larger strategies and structures, such as the French Defense or the Reti Opening."

What is better: more or less freedom to work where and when people want

More structure can be better than more freedom to foster collaboration. Yet, it is not the goals a team leader needs to define but the roles of each team member need to be clarified so they are well understood by all.

It wasn't that long ago-in the memory of most workers today-that people "went" to work. The work place was actually a "place" and people went there to earn a living. Some people still do. If you assemble circuit boards for Intel or automobiles for BMW, you will go to the place where the tools you need to do your job are kept. For the rest of us, a change has taken place that has fundamentally altered the way that work gets done. A typical project, for example, is planned in a series of meetings, launched in a rented conference room in an airport hotel, executed in who knows where, and managed using email and on-line tools. Sales meetings, to cite another example, take place on conference calls not in conference rooms.

Participating in social media has become a business imperative. More than 70 percent of organizations operating around the world are now active on social media. Many are finding significant benefits and unexpected risks along the way.  KPMG surveyed more than 1,800 managers and 2,000 employees at organizations in ten major markets and found that - in many cases - there remains a significant gap between expectation and reality when it comes to social media.