Radical Ideas about Managing People

Majority of Senior Leaders and Human Resource Executive will reject following ideas as senseless and not achievable. However, these innovative and disruptive ideas are successfully implemented in some companies and help those companies attract the best talent and keep the engagement levels high.

1. Give Your Employees Unlimited Vacation Days

Red Frog Events allows its employees unlimited vacation days. According to Joe Reynolds:

"Through building a company on accountability, mutual respect, and teamwork, we've seen our unlimited vacation day policy have tremendous results for our employees' personal development and for productivity. There. I said it. I think Red Frog is more productive by giving unlimited vacation days."

2. First, Let's Fire All the Managers

Self management is the exact opposite of bureaucracy, and bureaucracy means a large number of people hired on high budgets only to make sure other people produce results. According to Gary Hamel

"Management is the least efficient activity in your organization."

"A related problem is that the most powerful managers are the ones furthest from frontline realities. All too often, decisions made on an Olympian peak prove to be unworkable on the ground." 

"Wouldn’t it be great if we could achieve high levels of coordination without a supervisory superstructure? Wouldn’t it be terrific if we could get the freedom and flexibility of an open market with the control and coordination of a tightly knit hierarchy? If only we could manage without managers"

Morning Star is the success story mentioned in this article. Over the past 20 years, Morning Star’s volumes, revenues, and profits have grown at a double-digit clip, claims Rufer. Industry growth, by contrast, has averaged 1% a year. As a private company, Morning Star doesn’t share its financial results, but I was told that the company has funded virtually all its growth from internal sources, which suggests it is robustly profitable. On the basis of its own benchmarking data, Morning Star believes it is the world’s most efficient tomato processor.

3. The Case for a Four-Day Work Week

"How much more innovative and exciting would your business be if every single team member spent one full day each week devoted to research? What insights, new ideas and energy would be pumped into your business?"

"In our case, Thursday nights after work become an even bigger chance for team socialization and fun. This also seems to be vital to retention rates. A recent study indicated the No. 1 reason for a person not to change jobs is based upon having a close friend at the same company. Sort of makes sense, right?"