Ronald Alsop
Roberto Henriquez had an intriguing idea. The 30-year-old information
technology project manager thought he and his IBM colleagues could work more
efficiently if they had an app enabling them.
Normally, he would need approval from a senior-level review board for such an
idea.
But not this time.
Instead, he quickly received the blessing and financial backing of his
peers through a new corporate crowdfunding system in IBM s internal IT
organisation.
Henriquez s idea was pitted against other proposed projects seeking funding
from employees in the IT group. Each of the more than 300 participants from
entry-level workers to vice presidents received $2,000 to invest over an
eight-week period. Then, through the crowdfunding system, Henriquez managed to
raise a total of $20,000, and after a few months of development and testing,
project managers started using his app.
The experience was empowering for Henriquez, who is based in Bratislava,
Slovakia. I don t feel like I work for IBM; I feel like this is my company,
he said.
That s music to the ears of IBM executives who hope the iFundIT project will
engage employees and spark more innovation from the bottom up.
Getting employees engaged
Employee engagement is a pressing issue for most companies these days. In a
study of 142 countries, Gallup found that only 13% of employees worldwide are
engaged in their work. The percentages vary widely by nation, with 30% of
workers in America saying they are engaged; 24% in Australia; 17% in the UK;
15% in Germany; 9% in India; and just 6% in China.
One possible solution to this problem: more egalitarian workplaces where
employees feel they have more control over decisions, such as IBM s iFundIT
program.
Companies need to be more compatible with this democratic age of the Internet
and social media that we live in now, said Traci Fenton, chief executive
officer of St. Louis and London-based WorldBlu, which provides consulting
services for creating freedom-centred workplaces. Organisational democracy
means decentralizing power and recognising that good ideas are everywhere in
the workplace.
Seeking employee input may slow some types of decision-making, but Fenton
believes it could speed up the execution process because workers would feel
more invested after having their say. Of course, companies only want to do
this if they re sure they re going to act on a group decision, she said. If
they don t follow through, they ve done more harm than good.
WorldBlu compiles an annual list of the world s most democratic workplaces
based on such factors as being transparent and accountable, sharing power, and
giving employees meaningful choices. The biggest obstacles to workplace
democracy are executive ego and ignorance, Fenton said.
Some people simply don t want to give up control; others fear what they don t
understand, she said.
A democratic workplace has cross-generational appeal, although IBM believes its
crowdfunding project will especially resonate with millennials, who are used to
airing their views in blogs and social media and believe they deserve to be
heard at work, too. Millennials is a term used to describe the generation of
people born between about 1980 and 2000.
Small workforce, big voice
Some companies with a small workforce are going even further and giving
employees a voice in some very major decisions. When DreamHost s founders
decided in 2011 to recruit the first CEO for the Los Angeles-based Web hosting
firm, they let employees vote on the finalists. More recently, its 165 workers
voted on the company s health benefits plan.
We feel that by letting our employees make the decision after they know how
much different benefit packages will cost, we re empowering them and
encouraging them to stay with the company, said Ed Wesley, director of
organisational development and learning. It takes guts to be democratic and
give employees more control, but the payoff is happiness and engagement.
Companies like DreamHost and Menlo Innovations, a software company in Ann
Arbor, Michigan, also are opening the financial books to their employees to
guide their decision-making. Our goal is for the staff to make decisions about
where we spend money, but they need to understand the big financial picture of
the company first, said Rich Sheridan, the CEO at Menlo, which has about 50
full-time and temporary workers.
Already, Menlo gets 15 to 25 workers involved in assessing a job candidate as
he or she goes through interviews and tryouts. We work in pairs so we want to
see evidence of kindergarten skills, whether they can play well with our
employees, Sheridan said.
Of course, it s easier to democratise small businesses than multinationals with
thousands of workers scattered around the globe. But IBM shows that even a
company with more than 430,000 employees in 170 countries can give at least
some of them more decision-making authority.
We need to flatten the organisation; not every investment decision has to be
made by a director or vice president, said Francoise LeGoues, the head of IBM
s CIOLab and creator of iFundIT. We want collaborative innovation. How do we
ensure that young people s ideas get attention and that someone in Bangalore
connects with someone in New York?
Eligible projects must be related to internal information technology, although
they could also be applied to products, such as IBM s social software platform
for businesses. It has to be a small project, LeGoues said. These won t be
large, multi-year projects like a redesign of the entire HR system, for
example.
About 160 projects were submitted during the first two crowdfunding rounds this
year, with 20 reaching their funding target of between $10,000 and $30,000.
Funded projects included Influence of Communities from China (search results
based on influence, not popularity) and reMap from the UK (a collaborative
outlining tool to organise and share information across teams of all sizes).
The level of excitement and participation has surprised me, LeGoues said.
People have even begun running internal campaigns to try to get others to spend
money on their projects. This is really a game changer in the way people think
about what it means to be an IBMer.