Employee Added Value (part 2)

Employee Value through Radical Autonomy

This newsletter, 'People-centric and Strategic HR' is about a new multi-sided model for HR. In the last edition of the newsletter, I suggested that organisations need to add value for their employees, including by reducing organisational friction. This time around, I look at the opportunities for using radical autonomy to increase the level of value an organisation is adding.

I'll then be explaining the opportunities to create value for employees, and the new multi-sided model for HR that results from this analysis in later newsletters. Subscribe now for more information on all of this as it is published..

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Advantages of Autonomy

Increasing autonomy provides a huge opportunity for organisations because we want to help people optimise their contributions but many of them are currently held back by organisational friction and 'bureausclerosis' etc (see newsletter 4). It often makes sense to free people up so that they can have more impact than they currently do.

But autonomy also provides a great way of helping employees. Most people want to do a great job at work and not being able to do so is a major source of disengagement. Autonomy helps people deliver, and is a core intrinsic motivator within self determination theory, acting as the basis for flow and becoming.

I also support Sharon Parker's suggestions in MIT's Sloan Management Review recently that more autonomous work enables motivated exploratory learning, helping people to improve their performance ('How Well Designed Work Makes Us Smarter') - hence the inclusion of 'agency' within her 'SMART work design model. (My own work has plenty of agency / autonomy, but I get challeged over relations and tolerable demands sometimes - you can score your own job at the Future of Work Institute / Smart Work Design.)

For me, autonomy is mainly about Employee-Added Value (E-AV) because it helps people achieve what they’re coming to work to do. It’s therefore more valuable to workers than most of what we’re currently focusing on within employee experience, as this is just Value for Money for them. And OK, it may still not give people what they really want from their employment (Employee-Created Value), but it’s probably easier for organisations to deliver, and has more direct impacts on business performance as well.

Or, instead of having one single value chain (like the one I showed you in newsletter 3), it enables organisations to create multiple chains – one for each team or individual pursuing their own opportunities.

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By the way, this is clearly an inefficient way of working, but if often required to keep ahead of ongoing disruptions and provide the capacity for experimentation and innovation, etc.

There are lots of different ways of organising, but most seek to align organisation to business needs, meaning there’s always a lag in meeting these – something that was well explained by Christopher Meyer in Lessons from the Future (2001):

“Traditional organisations are always trying to catch up with the business. Try using models that never fall behind in the first place. In the decades ahead we will see many new ways of organising. Organisations that run in real time – like the businesses they represent – transcend space, run on no matter, and mass customise.”

Or as, Gary Hamel says:

“The most profound business challenge we face today is how to build organizations that can change as fast as change itself.”

Trends and Principles for Autonomy

You can see the growing importance of autonomy in more and more organisation principles, or suggestions for the principles organisations should use, such as these for humanocratic organisations from Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini:

Ownership is about autonomy. Markets, meritocracy, openness are ways to encourage it. Experimentation is enabled by it. Community and paradox are a bit different, but we'll return to these in later editions of this newsletter.

?The importance of autonomy can probably be seen even more clearly in these work trends (informing organisation principles) from Corporate Rebels:

Here, moving from profit to purpose and values, or really adding purpose to profit (paradox - all of these should be additions not substitutions) is something different, but again, we'll come back to both purpose and values later. But networks of teams, supportive leadership, freedom and trust, distributed decision making and radical transparency are all factors encouraging autonomy. Experimentation and adaptability are enabled by it. And talents and mastery, another aspect of self determination theory, both encourage and are enabled by it.

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Example of Radical Autonomy

There are also more and more examples of radically autonomous organisations, included ones that run mainly on decentralised communities (eg Buurtzorg), decentralised teams (eg truly agile organisations) and distributed networks (eg Gore).

There are also even more radical examples including digital platform based ‘organisations’ like Haier’s RenDanHeyi model, below (see Hamel and Zanini’s article 'Yes, You Can Eliminate Bureaucracy' in HBR) and distributed autonomous organisations (DAOs).

Summary (for now)

There's more to take you through but I'll finish my review of radical autonomy and E-AV in my next newsletter. For now, I'll just add a final note that whilst I believe increasing autonomy is important, it's not something I personally find as exciting as other aspects of multi-sided HR and therefore, it's not something I tend to spend a great deal of time on. So, I realise that today's article has mainly provided summaries of other people's ideas, rather than sharing many of my own.

However, my next newsletter edition will mostly contain my own analysis and recommendations for increasing autonomy. This will include a review of the major challenges to incorporating radical autonomy, and suggestions for a way forward for most, perhaps less radical organisations, which responds to these challenges.

I've had a bit of gap in publishing between newsletters 4 and 5, and I'll try to make this up a bit by publishing this next edition next week.

As always, I’d love to hear your own views on the points I've made above.?Please share your comments below. I look forward to discussing these and broader points around multi-sided HR with you! Also, please subscribe for future insights on multi-sided HR.

I also invite you to check out my broader insights on both strategic and people-centric HR in the Strategic HR Academy. Learn about the latest thinking and opportunities in on-demand courses on HR and Competitive Advantage; Performance Management Re-engineering and Reward Innovation ; Organisation, Process, Work and Job Design; 2023 Planning, Strategic Partnering and HR Transformation. Then discuss application within your own organisation with me and other HR practitioners in regularly scheduled study groups.

Kind regards - Jon