Synthetron works with the crowd at CSW Global

Synthetron CEO Joanne Celens caught audience’ interest as she addressed the tricky topic of how to make sure crowds are wise not foolish.

The group that came along to the follow-up workshop were intrigued to hear us say that the 6 C’s model of Employee Engagement wasn’t our own idea. We explained that like all Synthetron conclusions it was based on our grounded theory approach – using what we have heard from thousands of employees over the last few years.

We know what things matter because we have heard them over and over again.

Click here to see the model, which is work in progress we are happy to share, and see how your last employee engagement scored against this crowdsourced checklist. Maybe you are ready to try a new approach and level up your employee engagement to improve your score – and of course your organizational effectiveness since that is always the end goal. We’d love to discuss that with you!

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Click here to watch our CEO Joanne Celens talk about “how to make sure you get the wisdom from your crowd”

Crowdsourcing Intelligence:
Do Intelligent Questions create Intelligent Crowds?

During the Crowdsourcing week conference in Brussels, our CEO Joanne Celens answered the question: do intelligent questions create intelligent crowds? Watch it here.

The talk has been split up in 3 parts below:

1: Crowdsourcing is in our DNA but there are pitfalls and biases to think of

2: Get the right crowd through the right process

3: Ask the right question with the right attitude

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Business culture should emphasize autonomy to empower people.

Brussels, June 23, 2014 – Managers feel under considerable pressure from imposed KPIs. They deem it possible that a leadership style empowering the employees with a high degree of autonomy could help to lower this pressure. Steering using the 80/20 principle works best to align employee engagement with company success. These are major findings of an online discussion between 25 managers of big European companies invited by the Belgian method-based consultancy Synthetron N.V.

 The discussion took place on a secure Internet platform. The participants shared and evaluated 343 ideas altogether, anonymously and in writing.

The messages that were evaluated positively conveyed the following points:

• Managers feel pressure as an immediate consequence of imposed KPIs. ¾ of them do not agree with the way KPIs are currently used.
• Many KPIs can result in a culture of just trying to avoid mistakes. The more KPIs are used, the more they indicate a less productive and authoritarian leadership style.
• Top management changing goals often is insufficient reason for daily pressure of all staff.
• Too many and too detailed KPIs and those leading to poorly thought through procedures strain cooperation within the company.
• The participants suggest that the management concentrate on key KPIs. Executives should pay more attention to listening, delegating and communicating strategic context.
• Most favour smarter processes in day-to-day business, not than a substantial turning away from KPIs in general.
• If a company decided to renounce KPIs altogether, they would need to be able to articulate their vision completely and also to build on the engagement of employees acting with their own autonomy.
• Further questions about leadership culture and about the degree of accuracy of KPIs do not show a uniform opinion.

By Michael Erben & Jeanette Kalthof

Is “bottom up” the poor cousin of “top down” in your organisation?

Most European Companies stick to a task oriented way of working. Managing activities step by step (operational issues) are delegated to the troops – and as this is the way the Napoleonic wars have been conducted, ‘troops’ is the exact reference for this cultural paradigm. Fashionably called empowerment, many operational issues never get on board agendas.

The opposite is true for all strategic issues – from a merger to new markets to investing into another cite it’s daily board business, it’s top-down: Intellectually challenging but in the end always a yes/no question. Top management is used to this yes/no situations. What’s mostly not on their stake is including a bottom-up understanding: Adding the ‘how’to the ‘what’. One is still on risk when bothering with the ‘how’. A spotlight on it often shows that bottom-up is not as appreciated as top-down. It’s the poor cousin of strategy. It’s put into an employee survey with results carefully filtered before they get published and cascaded down. It’s a matter of politics, of worker’s council acceptance, of securing personal data.
And last but not least it’s open a pandora’s box. However, listening, engaging many to add their wisdom, backing a decision by better understanding the needs – that’s the way a socially grown up enterprise gains attraction not the least on the talent market.

It’s change business on its best. A cultural shift – when troops count not only by numbers but by intellect.

by Michael Erben

> have a look at some cases in which we work bottom up
> experience a synthetron session in which we look for information bottom up

Mary Barra’s Staff Engagement Challenge

opinion by Graham Bobby

December 1, 2014

I enjoyed a recent extended profile in Time magazine of Mary Barra, the new CEO of General Motors, by Rana Faroohar, linked here (a subscription is required to access the full article) http://time.com/3429651/mary-barras-bumpy-ride-at-the-wheel-of-gm/.

Why is it that whenever we read profiles of female executives, they are interspersed with lots of copy about family and style choices, whereas these are still rarely mentioned in the case of men? I guess neither Faroohar nor Barra would want it this way, but somehow they pander to readers who still expect it. Change comes slowly in this world.

Barra is an engineer and a lifer at GM, promoted amidst a crisis that threatened the future of the company. The tip of an iceberg of safety product recalls threatened to expose a rotten culture underneath it, where not just safety but also customer focus and personal accountability were subsumed by corporate expectations. With the 2008 bailout fresh in people’s minds, public and political goodwill was going to be wafer thin, and any perceived failure could mean the end for Barra and even for GM.

Barra has had to respond decisively, and be seen to do so, without willfully killing her own lifetime employer nor losing the trust of her new staff. So far she has achieved this balance with deftness and passion, helped by her obvious love of her company, her wide existing industry network inside and outside of GM, and by a commitment to engagement.

The article explained how she has visited plant after plant, engaging with shop floor employees and hosting town hall sessions for staff, listening, showing humility, and emphasizing the culture she aspires for GM, centered around the customer.

While this is truly admirable and I wish her well, I can only wonder at her stamina and at how sustainable this model of engagement is. In trying to achieve the same in a more efficient way, this would be an excellent application of our Synthetron method.

What was she trying to achieve here? As a new CEO, she wanted to understand what her staff were saying and thinking, in all departments and all markets. As she crafted her own key messages, she could benefit from using language that resonated positively as widely as possible. She needed to dig and to listen, and be seen to be listening, to unearth the full extent of the safety failings. Finally, she wanted to demonstrate that speaking up and challenge are good, while slavishly hiding behind managers would no longer be acceptable.

She could do this in person in a couple of locations per week. She could give interviews and write memos, instantly forgotten by most employees. She could create some scapegoats, at a cost to leadership morale. She could create bulletin boards and whistleblower opportunities, likely to be treated with great suspicion by staff long used to a very different culture. All these things are helpful, but all are also slow and frustratingly limited in impact.

Synthetron could certainly have helped, and maybe still could. All of the goals can be addressed via our method, at high speed and low cost. It could not replace the other steps, but it could complement them and amplify their impact. With Synthetron, I suggest that Mary Barra could be a few steps further forward on her long road to a recovering GM.

Most of us are lucky enough not to face challenges as intense as those of Barra. But what company would not wish to know how staff were thinking, utilize resonant language, be able to unearth potential issues early and encourage honest engagement? Who is not interested in high speed, wide reach and low cost, whether to reach staff, consumers or other stakeholders?

– Graham Bobby

Synthetron @ CSW 2015 – What is Synthetron?

Our CEO Joanne Celens was invited to talk at the Crowdsourcing Weekly Summit in Singapore to talk about Synthetron and share her lessons in Crowsourcing.

Synthetron @ CSW 2015 – some Synthetron Cases

21Our CEO Joanne Celens was invited to talk at the Crowdsourcing Weekly Summit in Singapore to talk about Synthetron and share her lessons in Crowsourcing.