Abstract
The chapter will be based on the experiences of a Colombian engineering company from 2003 through to 2013. The company was a local engineering office of an international oil services company based in Scotland but also, with substantial offices in USA and around the world. In 2003 the company was making a loss and in 2004 had to reduce down to 60 people. It had a traditional ‘command and control' approach to management. Over a period of 7 years, they developed a unique culture/working model which focused on allowing employees to contribute and participate in the running of the company and removed all bureaucratic barriers that restricted its employees from working effectively. The company grew to over 1,200 in 2013. The chapter proposes to explain how removing organization charts, eliminating policies and procedures, eliminating working hours, allowing employees to recruit new staff, manage their own holidays, and set their own salaries produced a purpose-driven and fully motivated and successful company.
TopSetting The Stage To Liberate An Organization
Companies tend to restructured themselves about every five years to keep up with a changing world. However, as this world changes very quickly, why not create an organization that restructures itself ever week, or day or hour, depending on what is needed? The only barrier to this happening are the controls and traditional structures that administrators use to control and monitor employees (Largacha-Martinez, et.al, 2015).
If you can bring yourself to believe that it is the employees who have the energy, create the ideas, and develop the initiatives needed to change, and that the manager’s function is to find out what or who is preventing them doing this, then you have the basis on which to develop a liberated organization (Mackey & Sisodia, 2014). In the first instance you have to communicate what you want to do to everyone. Reaching a small group on employees is not difficult so it’s possible be able to communicate your actions for such groups by word of mouth, however, in this case, as the issue was so important it was put in writing.
Before that it is worth understanding as to what a liberated organization could possibly look like. In essence a liberated organization could be one that is not in any way confined by bureaucracy (Hamel & Zanini, 2020). There are many definitions of bureaucracy and almost everyone has their own definition. In the context of this chapter and also in the context of the experience with the Colombian engineering company, it was defined as anything that prevented an employee from performing their work in an efficient manner. You may argue that such things as controlling the hours that employees work is not bureaucracy, and is essential to ensuring that the individual is present to perform the work, but in this context it was considered to be bureaucracy as it limited the hours that the individual could work to those traditionally set by the company as well as, more importantly, when he or she could work. Removing the limitation of the company imposing working hours on someone was considered to be removing bureaucracy (Ibid.).
In order to liberate the organization the company looked at everything that restricted employee’s space to function effectively. Some of these actions were:
Key Terms in this Chapter
Bureaucracy: The controls that companies apply that restrict employees doing their work effectively.
Liberate: Removing the constraints that prevent an employee from doing their job.
Participation: Allowing employees to develop new processes and take decisions in the running of a company.
Organization: An individual company or group of companies.
Subsidiaries: A small part of a large group of companies which report back to a central organization.
Trust: Believing in what people are saying or doing.