I’m Busy, Why Do I Care? High-performing organizations choose to empower and trust their employees to do the right thing. They also enforce accountability for those standards. The alternative is to try to micro-manage each individual, which creates oppressive organizational cultures and environments, and eventually saps the employees and the organization of vitality.
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Q: What does the stodgy German industrial giant Siemens have in common with Netflix?
A: Both have cultures that emphasize trusting employees and holding them responsible for their outcomes.
That answer may be a surprise. Netflix is well known for disrupting the entertainment industry while moving at high speed. Siemens is a conglomerate that makes everything from trains to washing machines.
There are differences: Netflix built its internal culture from scratch as it grew, consciously seeking to avoid the seemingly inevitable slide of big organizations into trying to control behavior through an ever-greater number of rules.
Chaos, bane of all organizations. Be careful how you manage it.
Siemens has come to some similar conclusions during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has disrupted traditional work arrangements around the world. According to their press release this not just about working from home.
Employees will be free, in consultation with their managers, to “choose the work locations where they’re most productive.” The company recognizes that this is not a superficial change. “These changes will also be associated with a different leadership style, one that focuses on outcomes rather than on time spent at the office.”
At the heart of the announcement is this:
“We trust our employees and empower them to shape their work themselves so that they can achieve the best possible results. With the new way of working, we’re motivating our employees while improving the company’s performance capabilities and sharpening Siemens’ profile as a flexible and attractive employer.” --Roland Busch, Deputy CEO and Labor Director of Siemens AG.
What Herr Busch seems to be saying here is--maybe oddly--something also in Netflix’s pioneering playbook, which explicitly called out a culture of freedom and responsibility.
Also like Netflix, Siemens is ambitious: “This new model applies to more than 140,000 of the company’s employees at over 125 locations in 43 countries and is effective immediately.”
That’s taking a huge risk. With that many people involved, even if 95% of people take to the new arrangements, Siemens will have to sort out what to do with the 7,000 who don’t.
It speaks to how important Siemens thinks the change can be that it’s willing to disrupt itself. And it makes responsibility--the focus on results--critical. Without that, Siemens risks inviting a very un-German level of chaos.
Netflix tries to hire very carefully and then be brutally honest in assessing employees. As a result, though, the company has been able to have an exceptionally streamlined set of policies which reinforce performance.
Five words, and some amplifying guidelines. Very little structure and probably even less bureaucracy is needed to enforce this.
To some extent, this swims against the current of many contemporary trends, at least in American society. (In the middle of writing this, I went down stairs to show my ID to an Instacart person who needed to scan it verify I am old enough to buy non-alcoholic beer.) There is a certain feeling of safety that comes from falling back on rules, rather than judgment.
Still, as leaders and managers there is a clear lesson in the choices these companies are making. Freeing employees, reinforced with accountability that’s about outcomes rather than just rules, promises to take our teams to a level which just rules alone can’t touch.