Pim de Morree: Want Happy, Inspired and Motivated Teams? Here's Everything you Need.

Maureen: Our next speaker is Pim de Morree of Corporate Rebels. Seven years ago Pim left his job to explore the world of radical business; which meant visiting self-managing companies across the world, including Happy. Corporate Rebels is now the place to go to explore the most radical ideas in business. Quite simply Pim wants to make work more fun. Pim is going to be speaking about the vital ingredients for highly motivated teams. So thank you Pim for joining us and I'm handing over to you. 

Pim: Thank you very much and thanks for having me here, I'm happy to contribute. I'm going to share two very quick sessions: some insights of what we've learnt over the past few years and how successful progressive teams organise themselves. I'm going to make it as practical as possible so you can walk away with some tangible ideas on how you can upgrade teams in your organisation. First of all I have to start with telling you, Henry, that I lied to you, once again. I told you I wasn't going to use any slides however I am. I'll send them over to you so you can add them to your platform.  [Henry is heard laughing] After that confession let me start.

So we've been travelling with Corporate Rebels around the world for 6 1/2 years now to understand how progressive organisations organise work in a completely different way than we are used to in traditional organisations, which is 99.9% of organisations around the world. We were highly frustrated in our previous careers so we set out to find examples of companies which were doing things differently. One of them indeed was Happy where we learnt much about how they approach things and how they look at organising work in a completely different way. But we visited many organisations around the world; companies of up to 80000 employees that organise themselves in a radically different way, without lots of layers of hierarchy. Where employees have the freedom to elect their own leaders, to make their own decisions when it comes to hiring and firing. Pretty radical ideas. And now I'm going to summarise the things that teams do in those organisations to organise themselves more successfully and also to make their work more fun. And we at Corporate Rebels spend a lot of time talking about organisational structures: so how do you reduce Hierarchy and give employees more freedom and more trust in the way they work? But for many people firstly they don't have the power to change such structures, secondly the problem with that is that you focus on trying to change the big things first and in many organisations if you want to start a transformation it's much better to start with the small things, that anyone in the organisation can influence. So even if you work for a very hierarchical organisation but want to change the way you work and make your workplace more fun you can have a very big impact starting on a very small scale.

I'm going to give you some ideas on what you can actually do to change the way your team works based on the research of more than 150 organisations that we've been visiting around the world. I have six elements that I'd like to discuss. The first three are: redesigning your meetings, distributing your decision making and giving better feedback. Let me start with the first one: redesigning your meetings. This is obviously something that we all have something to do with. We all spent a lot of time during the work-week stuck in meetings and the past few years, during the pandemic, we've even seen that companies have been increasing the number of meetings; so we had this great opportunity of all working remotely and not having to be stuck in an office and meeting each other all day but whilst we moved into a different location most people still spent the vast majority of their time in meetings. Some people have up to 80 or 90% of their days spent in meetings, which, as we all know, is not the place where the work actually gets done and it's also, most of the time, not the fun place to be. So these organisations first of all focused on reducing the amount of meetings that they have in their organisation, trying to get rid of as many meetings as possible simply to free up time to actually get things done. But still probably, in your organisation too, you will still need a couple of vitally important meetings to get some alignment done, to communicate with each other, to make decisions, to brainstorm new ideas; you probably want to meet once in awhile with your colleagues to make sure you can be successful as a team. These organisations have very clear meeting formats, meeting structures, to help them to be more effective, to make the meetings more fun, and to also make sure that everybody in the team gets the opportunity to contribute. So, for example, there are some meeting structures that are taken from sociocracy where you have a very clear format that you're using: designate one person as a facilitator, another person is a secretary noting all of the to do’s of who's doing what and by when, so that kind of summarises the output of the meeting. And then you have a very clear structure that you're following. You make an agenda on the fly so the moment you start having your meeting only then do you start building and writing an agenda. Don't prepare it upfront. Always you hear the main tip for preparing a meeting is to build an agenda upfront and communicate it to people. In this format they stop doing it, it's a waste of time. No one ever prepares for meetings anyway so let's focus on setting up the agenda on the spot. People can just add their agenda items to it and they simply have to say for each agenda item: do I want to make a decision? Do I want to inform others? Or do I want to get advice? These are the only three options that you have; so you either want to make a decision, you want to inform people of something, or you want to gather advice so that you can make a decision outside of the meeting. When the agenda items are added people say what the purpose of that specific agenda item is and they go through the agenda items one by one and people talk in rounds. And this is a big revelation for many people and a very very powerful thing that anyone can start doing tomorrow in the meetings to create more psychological safety and to get everyone in their teams to speak up. Just talk in circles: so you start with one person and then the next, then the next. With every agenda item that's on the list people first say what's the goal then you go through the item. You propose what you would like to discuss then you have a round of clarifying questions, then you do another round of reactions where you can get people's opinion and then you either make a decision or if you've gathered advise, so have finished the agenda item, or if you have informed people and everyone is up to speed, and you have clarified your things, then you can tick off the agenda item and move onto the next. So you have a very clear format that allows people to contribute,  that allows the meeting to be much more effective and a lot more fun. It takes a bit of practice but it's a very powerful thing that anyone can do to make the workplace more fun. 

Secondly, distributing decision-making. To make sure that there's not just a manager in the team who's making decisions for the team which creates a bottleneck and takes a lot of the fun out of the work that the team is doing. How can you distribute decision-making through the team? There's a lot of cool ways to do it. At Happy we are seeing the ‘pre-approval’ that  they used to allow people to make more decisions within the team and take more initiative and show more entrepreneurship; and in other organisations there's this thing called the advice process which they use to make decisions: so it's not consensus, it's also not authoritarian decision-making, it's an alternative to it. One person picks a topic, just gathers advice from other people who will be influenced by the decision, and then it's up to them to make a decision themselves. Once again it focuses on more initiative taking and much more entrepreneurship and commitment within the team. So find ways to distribute decision-making, even if it's just decisions you make within your team. This is a very powerful way to make work more fun for the people working in that team. 

And then thirdly, another important thing is to make sure you learn how to give each other better feedback. Find ways, simple ways, to give each other feedback when needed. What we do at Corporate Rebels is we focus as much as possible on giving each other direct feedback, so when something happens we say it directly to that person and we promote it as much as we can for people to feel comfortable sharing their feedback directly to people. If they like something but even if they do not like something; and being Dutch that's probably a bit easier than for British people but still it's a challenge to be direct to one another when we feel that something is wrong in the way that we collaborate with each other. So a lot of practice and training is needed to do this and additionally we have, every quarter, a more in-depth feedback session where we use a very simple process to gather feedback from the team; we simply ask them: what do you want me to stop doing? What do you want me to start doing? And what do you want me to continue doing? So: stop, start, continue, very simple approach, no complicated forms needed, no tools needed for it. Simply ask people what do you want me to stop, start and continue doing? And then listen to what people have to say and adjust your way of working if you feel that is an appropriate thing to do. 

So those were the first three tips. I'll continue with 4, 5 and 6 after the breakout; but now I'm going to send you off to breakout rooms to discuss which of these three would have the biggest impact and make work more fun in your teams or organisations. So, which of these three tips would make work more fun in your team or organisation? 

Pim: Perfect! Alright so you've all picked one already, that's a good start. Now I'm going to show you three more and I hope that you pick one of them too in order to have two nice things you can start doing in your team to make your work more fun. 

Here we go, number 4, 5 and 6: Roles and responsibilities, resolving conflict better and Results-based working; and I believe we've already touched upon the last one, I saw some tips in the chat on some books that are also on this topic. But let me start with roles and responsibilities. In many companies we work based on fixed job descriptions and in these job descriptions it neatly says what day-to-day activities people pick up and what responsibilities they have. The challenge with that is that they're mostly very fixed. So we have a job description and then we try to look for a person that we're going to hire for this specific job description; that doesn't make a whole lot of sense because the chance that you are going to find a 100% fit with that job description is very very small. Therefore progressive organisations like to find people who fit in with their culture, that are a great addition to the existing culture, and then they build a job around the main talents of those individuals, this is a thing called job crafting. And research shows that if you're able to do this you end up working in a situation where people are able to pick up the roles they like to  pick up and that fit their talents and their interests then you actually get higher engagement and higher productivity. And we did another big research study on talents in the workplace, and painfully we found that 67% of respondents said they could not use their main talents in their day-to-day work. So just one third of the people could use their main talents in their day-to-day work. It's not just painful from a point of motivation, but it's also painful for these organisations because apparently there's a huge amount of untapped potential in the workplace. Progressive organisations do not focus on these fixed job descriptions because they don't believe it makes a lot of sense; instead they work with roles and responsibilities.  People can pick up various roles based on their interests and their talents and if you don't already work in roles there's a very simple process you can go through to actually get there. So what do you do? You sit down with your team, make sure you have a whiteboard, Post Its or an online version of that in place. The first thing you do is write down all of the activities that you need to do as a team to be successful. Write all of them down, don't miss any, just as much as you can think of, all of the activities that you as a team need to do to be successful, then put them on Post It's or something and put them on the whiteboard. And then the second step is clustering these activities into roles: pick the activities that are more or less similar, or that belong to each other, or that would make sense to put into the one specific role, and then you have a couple of clusters of activities. These are so-called roles; and, for example, at Corporate Rebels here we have a role that's a Blog Publisher role and that's a person who's responsible for publishing blog posts and making sure we have enough blog posts to publish and there's a whole list of activities involved in that. And then, once you have all of these roles in place you can write down the purpose of each role, the main accountabilities of each specific role and you might want to add some metrics so that you can figure out ‘are we actually doing this role in a proper way?’. Then, the next step is that you let people pick up the things that they like to pick up. So, first one: pick your activities, cluster these activities and then ask people based on intrinsic motivation which roles they would like to pick up. And then you might have a challenge because some roles in your team might still be left and nobody wants to pick them up. There's a couple of things you can do: some progressive organisations say we are not going to execute those roles because we don't want people to pick up work that they don't want to pick up; and they say we'll start with that, we simply won't perform these roles and if we run into problems then we'll find another way to solve it. We might hire somebody new who wants to pick up that role, we outsource it to somebody else in the organisation or even an outside agency. So there's a lot of creative ways to go around it but the first thing they say is let's not perform it at all, and in many cases you will find that no problem at all is arising meaning that you have been performing an activity that nobody likes to do, that doesn't actually contribute to the success of you as a team; so it’s a great way to test whether you actually need to perform that role or not. Another way to do it is to rotate roles that nobody likes to pick up. Make sure every six months or maybe every year you rotate the roles so that somebody else then has to perform it.

So, that's just a couple of quick tips there on working on roles, so therefore people can move much more fluidly in their career, constantly picking up the things that they like and they like to develop and ditching the roles that they are not fond of anymore or would not like to execute anymore.

Then, resolving conflict better, especially when you talk about self-managing teams but in any other team as well. In a traditional situation when you have a conflict with a team member you are very much encouraged to go to your manager and then ask the manager to solve the issue. In many teams, in these progressive companies, there isn't a manager in place so there's not the option to go to a manager and sort of use them as a referee to fix your problem. Therefore it is important to have a very clear process in place for how you would like to resolve conflict within your team; and most companies use a very very fixed format for that where they simply say: first you talk to the other person, try to solve your issue, try to resolve the conflict. If that doesn't work go to a trusted colleague. that you both trust, and use that person as a sort of advisor where they can say ‘ok I've listened to both your situations, here is what I would advise you to do’. Then it's up to the other people to decide if they actually do that or not. If that still doesn't work then step 3 is to ask a panel of colleagues to be involved so you have more perspectives on the situation. Once again they give advice but it's up to you to fix it. So having such a clear process in place is something that helps organisations, especially self-managing organisations, and self-managing teams to create a better workplace; because then conflicts don't need to escalate but they can be resolved gracefully and simply by using this process and trusting to have this process in place. 

Then the final one to share: results-based working. It doesn't make sense, and we've all learnt this the past two and a half years, and many companies have been saying this for decades, it doesn't make sense to focus on how many hours people spend in the office behind their desk. So why are we keeping track of the amount of hours that people work? Shouldn't we simply focus on the outcome and the output of their work? Because that's what we're paying people for, we're not paying them to spend a set amount of time behind the computers. We are actually paying them to get work done, so why should we track the amount of hours instead of the outcomes? In most organisations we don't really track the performance of individuals and teams, we simply expect that if they are working 40 hours a week that they are productive. Of course, the pandemic changed this a bit but still there is a lot of improvement to be made because a lot of companies and teams don't have a really good understanding of who is performing on which specific level. So creating a lot of transparency around it, focusing very clearly on goals, on team goals and individual goals, and then tracking  progress as you move along is a vitally important ingredient to make work more fun. Also because people love the feeling of contributing to something bigger than themselves and if they can very clearly see what their contribution is to the bigger picture it helps them to become more motivated in the workplace. 

So, those were 4, 5, and 6. Once again a question to you: Which of these three: roles and responsibilities, resolving conflict or result-based working, would have the highest impact- pay attention- in making work more fun? So here you go again, into the breakout rooms.

Henry: Hands up if you've got a question for Pim.

Participant: I do.

Henry: Caroline…

Caroline:  I find the little short videos that you do really helpful, so why don't you do more?

[laughter]

Pim: You mean the animations that we do?

Caroline: Yeah, they’re just really helpful to make points clear, because often you just don't see it, and you've never heard of it before, so you don't get it, and to be able to show somebody in 3 or 4 minutes ‘This is what results-only working is’ or ‘This is what 360-degree feedback is’ or devolved decision-making… I just think they're really, really good so I would love to see more of them. Thank you.

Pim: Well you're in luck because we're releasing at least 6 new ones over the next 5 months.

Caroline: Yeah! Great, thank you.

[Henry laughs]

Henry: Ok Mike, what's your question?

Mike: Hey Pim! It's been a great session. In our group we were talking… we really liked the roles and responsibilities the most, but we're fleshing it out: how do you facilitate the process of identifying the kind of roles and responsibilities in a way that everything gets picked up? So not just what they know themselves but what the organisation needs? For example it might include stuff like regulatory requirements or similar. 

Pim: Yes, good question. So in most cases people are perfectly aware of those because they are already working inside those teams for quite a long time, if you are changing it from the current situation to a new one; otherwise just kind of make sure that you involve the right components: that you create a leader, or a leadership of an organisation, if you're going on a journey like this. Set a very clear framework of what that team needs to do. Having a clear purpose for the team is vitally important in this. If the team knows what it's there for then it's, most of the time, quite easy for them to come up with the activities that they need to perform to be successful. Even if it's about regulatory things that they need to keep into account, you can evidently trust that the people in the team know quite a lot about it, and in most cases you cover 99.9% of the stuff that actually needs to be happening in the team. 

Henry: Okay… Chris?

Chris: Our little group didn't choose the results-based working because we all agree that it's really hard, it seems really hard, a real struggle, to choose good goals that are genuinely useful to measure progress against, and we just wondered if you have any tips for making that work successfully? 

Pim: Yep, good point. And a lot of people, and teams, are struggling with this. But let me show you how we do it here at Corporate Rebels. We have a number of different things that we do in our company: from giving presentations and workshops, to doing research, writing blog posts, writing books, running an online academy, a lot of different stuff; so it's hard to come up with a single metric to measure how we are performing as a team. It's almost impossible for us. So what we do is a very simple process: every quarter we get together with the team, we write down the most important goals of what would like to accomplish in that specific quarter, we put them up on a wall, on display, and every time we reach our goal we move it to the done section of that board. And every month we go through it with the entire team and at the end we have a celebration if we achieved our goals or not. So this is results-based working in a sense as well, just a very simplified version of it. And everybody in the team knows, if your team is not too big, so if your team is a maximum of 10 to 12 people maybe, everybody perfectly knows who's performing and who is underperforming, and you know who's contributed to the goals and who is not. Having such a simple process in place and just sitting down every quarter or every half a year with the team, saying ‘these are the top things we would like to do’, everybody knows how they can contribute to it and then get to work and keep track of how you are progressing towards these goals. So it's a very simple way. If you're in a more measurable environment like a production setting, a manufacturing setting, it's of course a lot easier because you have a lot of things that you can make very tangible, but if it's a bit more complex try and simplify the process to something like this.

Henry: Okay, just a couple more questions. Kim, what's your question?

Kim: Pim! Hi, thank you. So I focused on that last one too because it looked like the hardest one. So having identified what the results are, do you- it's so easy to link pay to hours- do you then put a monetary value to the different outputs? And if so, how do you quantify what anything is worth?

Pim: Mostly I would stay away from that. Most organisations I would advise to stay away from that discussion really. Tying goals and performance to compensation too directly… it doesn't really work that well, according to research. If you do it on a team level or an organisational level it might work better but definitely not so much on an individual level. I would definitely just prefer to have a salary in place that feels fair for what that person is contributing to the team or to the organisation. You can do that through a salary committee or, more traditionally, through a managerial role who's in charge of that; or have people in the team, as peers, who provide advice on that. But just have a base salary in place that feels fair to the contribution of that individual and then forget about it and just focus on the goals. Because if you set the right goals that are inspiring to people then you tend to tap into intrinsic motivation, which is much more powerful than financial motivation. Don't make it too complex, just focus on the simple things you can do. Fair pay is obviously very important to one’s contribution to the team, but then focus on kind of gamification and making these goals interesting to pursue; and then go for it and celebrate it in another way if you achieve these goals. 

Kim: Thank you.

Henry: One last question: Harriet.

Harriet: Sorry, I was muted. Thank you so much. I just wanted to ask what you've come across as the main barriers to making the changes? Because, actually, what you're describing is not particularly new but clearly there's a need for it. Is it just that people don't want work to be fun? What are the big barriers?

Pim: Yeah, good question and one I don't really have a clear answer to still, after doing this research for quite a long time. I think one of the main things is that I think people think that change is really hard and make things overly complex when we talk about subjects like these. And of course it is, when you talk about organisational structures and changing them, and the power required for this, and the expertise required to do so; but changing these simple things, many people think it's really hard to change the way you work, but if you start changing these simple and small things you can see that you can make big progress in just a couple of weeks or months time. So I think one of the big barriers is the belief of people in their capability of making work more fun. And there are a lot of other factors but I think this is one of the main ones. 

Harriet: Thank you.

Henry: Thank you so much Pim. I don't know if you saw all of the chats but one of the groups said that everyone in the group was a little bit in love with you. 

[Both laugh]

Pim: Well, you've made my day. 

Henry: Thank you very much, that's been great. And a big round of applause for Pim.

[Clapping]

Pim: Thank you very much. Bye-bye!

Henry: Fabulous stuff Pim, fabulous.