B
BOOKEND
The Fearless Organization
Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning,
Innovation, and Growth
Amy C. Edmondson, Wiley, 2018
I
n 2000, Nokia ruled the air-waves. By 2013, it was almost sunk. What went wrong?
Despite engineers being fully aware that Apple and Samsung were set to launch
a superior product, a culture of fear prevented them from voicing their concerns.
Down that same fearful road lie a myriad of corporate and other organisational
disasters. Google, on the other hand, spent several years evaluating what makes
high-performing teams work. The single most important differentiator between
high and low-performing teams was that members of high-performing teams felt
comfortable in each other’s company. In other words, they had created a sense of
psychological safety. Sadly, it’s all too easy for leaders to foster a culture of fear
without even being aware of it. Edmonson’s book offers strategies to help employees
feel safe to stick their heads above the parapet and speak up.
IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY AT WORK
By Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
F
ried and Hansson co-founded Chicago-based web-design firm Basecamp. Famous
for empowering staff to work when and wherever they like, they limit employees
to a 40-hour week (a four-day week in the summer) on the grounds that tired workers
are unproductive. They argue that incentives designed to keep employees at work
(free lunches, doctor visits) are counter-productive ploys. Incentives should be about
getting people away from work; they offer subsidised holidays, sabbaticals and
monthly massages at spas. The book also reverses much holacratic thinking which
supports everyone knowing everything. There’s nothing wrong with staff not knowing
chapter and verse if they can concentrate on what they’re paid to do – their projects.
They argue FOMO (fear of missing out) should be replaced by JOMO (joy of missing
out) and that firms should do everything to rid staff from stress and interruptions.
This includes not requiring staff to deal with requests instantly, culling meetings and
not setting unrealistic ‘dreadlines’. It’s a gently iconoclastic book that punctures the
work-hard, play-hard firms out to loudly and humourlessly ‘disrupt’ everyone.
LAB RATS:
How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
Dan Lyons, Hachette Books, 2018
H
as Silicon Valley become a religion rather than a region? Dan Lyons, best-selling
author of Disrupted, thinks so and argues that the veneer of cool (ping-pong
and bean bags) often hides cultures as cut-throat and brutal as any other. Tech
companies, often run by bullish ‘frat boys’ intent on launching the next unicorn, can
be toxic. These firms have inculcated a culture of transactional job insecurity that
has seeped into the general discourse and made life miserable for staff. Netflix’s HR
‘culture code’, for example, insists the organisation is “a team, not a family”; your right
to remain depends only on your latest performance. But this gets basic psychology
upside down, Lyons argues. He proposes a radical solution: stakeholder capitalism.
This means involving and rewarding all employees. Unicorns are a myth. Better to
focus on ‘zebras’ (zebras are black and white – they both make money and improve
society). All-told, the book is a clever put-down to a swathe of transactional HR.
practices that can make employees want to head straight to the craft beer fridge.
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