Neelix.IO Blog

A New Approach to Coaching: AI-Augmented Feedback for People and Culture Development

Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:29:03 GMT

Part 2 - From Critical Thinking to Collective Intelligence

In the first part of this series, “ Critical Thinking Is a Massively Better Indicator ” , we explored why organisations that rely on traditional engagement metrics, surveys, and static frameworks are increasingly blind to what actually determines performance, adaptability, and culture health.

This follow-up article focuses on how modern organisations can operationalise a better approach - one that moves beyond episodic coaching, intervention, compliance-driven HR practices, and well-intended but sometimes ineffective development programs. At the centre of this shift is a new understanding of coaching grounded in collective intelligence and assisted by Ai augmentation.

The Structural Problem With Traditional Consultancy and Coaching

No matter how capable individual consultancies and coaches are, the reality is consistent across industries: Coaching impact fades once the coach leaves.

Coaches do intend to grow capability and change from within. However, clients often “force” coaches to tip toe and provide temporary pain killers. It does happen that organisations seek “easy” solutions to guide the engagement with statements such as “just tell us what to do”. This breaks coaching. In addition, not all leaders are capable of genuine self-reflection and rapid change.

Traditionally, organisations treat coaching as:

A time-bound intervention

A specialist activity owned by HR

A corrective measure for individuals rather than a developmental system for teams

As a result, behavioural change rarely sticks. Old habits resurface. Teams revert to familiar patterns. The organisation remains dependent on external expertise to “fix” what is fundamentally a systemic challenge.

This mirrors a broader truth: Capability cannot be bought or imported. It must be grown internally.

Sustainable performance emerges only when self-reflection at organisational level is embedded into the operating model itself - not delivered as a service or an HR process on the side.

Why Traditional Models No Longer Scale

Conventional people development relies heavily on tools and practices that are no longer fit for the complexity of modern organisations:

Periodic surveys that capture sentiment too late
Psychometric assessments that freeze people into static categories, and do not facilitate what happens to fluid situations
One-off workshops that lack continuity
Top-down feedback filtered through hierarchy and politics

These approaches are slow, biased, and often disconnected from day-to-day reality. Worse, they can create an illusion of progress while reinforcing the status quo.

Trying to build adaptive, high-performing organisations with these tools is like trying to move global logistics using horse-drawn carriages in the age of high-speed rail.

The Shift: From “Managing” Individuals to Enabling Collective Intelligence

The most effective organisations are making a fundamental shift:

From managing individuals → to enabling systems of thinking.

This is where real-time feedback systems and innovative AI-augmentation become transformative - not as replacements for human judgment and mentoring, but as amplifiers of it.

Instead of treating feedback as an occasional event, modern organisations treat it as a continuous flow of insight embedded in everyday work. In this model:

Every employee becomes a sensor in the system
Every interaction contributes to shared understanding
Every team develops the capacity to self-correct and self-improve

This is what collective intelligence looks like in practice.

What Makes Modern Feedback Fundamentally Different

A modern feedback loop is not a better survey. It is a different paradigm altogether.

1. Real-time and contextual
Feedback is captured in the moment, while context is still intact - not weeks later when memory and meaning are distorted.

2. Focused on critical thinking, not complaints
Rather than collecting opinions or grievances, the system surfaces reasoning, patterns, and decision quality. It helps people reflect on how they think, not just what they feel.

3. Designed for self-coaching
Teams and individuals receive insights from carefully curated Ai-augmentation that help them self-correct without constant managerial intervention. This accelerates learning while reducing leadership load.

3. Scale-able coaching and mentoring
Experienced coaches and mentors still play the important part. Apart from fostering conversations and change, they are able to “clone” themselves into Ai-assistants, thus making the proactive and customised advice to be ever present within the feedback loop flows. This capability fixes a significant enough portion of issues related to “coach was not here, so everything reverted”.

5. Systemically inclusive
Every voice becomes part of the organisational intelligence - not just the loudest or most senior ones.

Why This Matters for Leaders and HR

When feedback systems are limited to “suggestions” or “appreciation,” they create the illusion of engagement while suppressing meaningful change. Everyone knows what’s wrong, but there is no safe, structured way to surface it constructively.

Over time, organisations become ritualised:

Problems are discussed but not addressed
Surveys are completed but not acted upon
Culture becomes performative rather than lived

A modern approach replaces ritual with responsiveness.

By treating each employee as a neuron in a collective brain , organisations gain something far more powerful than engagement scores: situational awareness, adaptability, and continuous learning at scale.

From Feedback to Foresight

The future of people development is not more psychometric testing - it is better sense-making, freedom of expression and quality of critical thinking.

Neelix feedback platform enables organisations to:

Detect emerging issues before they escalate
Identify patterns invisible to human observation alone
Support leaders with insights rather than opinions
Build cultures that learn in real time

This is not about automating HR. It is about maturing human feedback and judgment . This approach helps everyone:

HR can move away from "administration of surveys” to sense-making, and thus become true strategic partner to senior leadership and teams alike

Managers become less overloaded becomes the process of mentoring benefits from proactive advice that does not require hand-holding

Employees benefit simply by have a better way to be heard

The New Mandate for Leadership

If organisations want resilience, adaptability, and sustainable performance, they must stop treating development as an HR initiative and start treating it as core infrastructure. Coaching must evolve from an intervention into an operating system. Feedback must evolve from a ritual into a living signal. And people must be recognised not as resources to manage - but as intelligence to be connected. That is the promise of a modern, AI-augmented approach to feedback loops, people and culture development.

And that is how real transformation begins.

Most organizations measure the wrong things when assessing organizational maturity and employee engagement. They focus heavily on industry benchmarks and lagging indicators. High-performing organizations still keep an eyes on benchmarks - but they improve by reflecting on who they were yesterday, and prioritizing leading indicators of growth.

Create your team’s or organisational space in Neelix platform today!

The Neelix platform allows you to customize assistants that provide advice on any theme, trait, behavior or expertise.

When a person creates a post, the assistant provides helpful tips for user to consider. Assistants can be configured to target specific groups of people - for example, a leader's communication style, a professional topic, or team quality.

Imagine configuring coaching assistants:

How to improve critical thinking content
Leadership style helper
Keep attention on technical debt
How to prioritize being heard over being right

The assistants are configured overseen by coaches. The role of an experienced human being is not demoted, but amplified by making proactive hints more available at the time most opportune time. Creativity of the coach and their ability to write good Ai instructions opens new horizons for fostering change at the grassroots levels.

Why Critical Thinking Is a Far Better Indicator of Organizational Health Than Engagement Metrics

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 12:46:12 GMT

The Future of Engagement Isn’t Surveys - It’s Critical Thinking

Let’s be honest: traditional “employee engagement” metrics - surveys, pulse scores, recognition counts, kudos - are not a reliable foundation for building a truly effective team culture. They too often yield biased, stale or superficial data. Meanwhile, developing critical thinking across your workforce - and embedding it structurally - delivers real impact: driving continuous improvement, informing strategic decisions, nurturing psychological safety, and building an adaptive, high-value culture.

If you are a believer in the behavioral and people-oriented (not metric-oriented) approach to driving teams through the maturity curve, read on. In this post we’ll explain my perspective on why critical thinking - facilitated through a living, evidence-based network - is a far better measure and path for organizational health than engagement scores.

Why traditional employee engagement metrics fall short

There is long-standing evidence and organisational experience that show common pitfalls of traditional engagement efforts. There is a long-standing evidence of how organisational culture and engagement stack up:

Up to 70% of employees are disengaged (Gallup surveys) despite the doubling-down on traditional approaches (that is evidence enough that they are lacking).
Many younger workers (e.g. 35 % of Gen Z, 28 % of millennials in Deloitte’s survey) report feeling mentally distanced or cynical about their work.
Conventional survey-driven engagement programs perform poorly: only 22% of companies get useful results from their engagement surveys, and organizational willingness to act is often limited: only 42% of organizations say they are willing to act on every single survey question . (LeadershipIQ online quiz - “How Good Is Your Employee Engagement Survey?”).

Adding to that, day to day experience shows serious drawbacks when engagement efforts rely heavily on external interventions, discrete surveys or top-down recognition initiatives.

In short: many organizations double down on engagement as if it were culture - but engagement metrics often don’t measure what truly matters: whether employees think, challenge, reflect, innovate and learn. "When a measure becomes a target , it ceases to be a good measure" - Goodhart's law.

Worse: traditional approaches are used to create the illusion of a “healthy” workforce - masking disengagement, cynicism, or shallow compliance - because they don’t capture the internal, qualitative dynamics that drive real performance.

Why critical thinking - and structural dialogue - matters more

Collective intelligence outperforms static engagement

The concept of Collective Intelligence offers a better paradigm. As explained in a previous blog related to developing collective intelligence: when teams think together, generate shared insights, and make smarter decisions - that’s real engagement (that’s where real organizational value emerges).

Everyone seems to buy into the notions that enabling collective intelligence, organizations tap into the combined brainpower of many: pooling diverse perspectives and experiences, surfacing blind spots, enabling continuous improvement and adaptive decision-making. How many are actually brave enough to do it, or have the discipline?

Culture, autonomy and avoiding managerial overload

Traditional engagement often reinforces old-style hierarchical control: surveys, checklists, recognition programs - but those don’t create real culture. People need less psychometric tests, surveys, games - they need more adult dialogue.

Culture built on rigid rules and rituals becomes brittle; true culture arises from authenticity, systems thinking, and the freedom for individuals to act in line with shared values.

Critical thinking, open dialogue and collective intelligence let teams self-organize, own their problems, identify bottlenecks, suggest improvements - reducing dependency on top-down interventions.

Why “Critical-thinking network” is the modern engagement

It’s time to stop treating engagement as a KPI and start treating it as a living process - one that thrives on continuous reflection, feedback, and sense-making. That’s what a “living engagement network” does.

In our experience, real organizational health comes from:

Systems that capture contextual, real-time feedback and reflections - not just tick-the-box survey responses.
Psychological safety and trust - encouraging honesty, dissent, debate.
Mechanisms for continuous improvement, learning, collective responsibility.
Data-driven but human-centric insights: enabling leaders to see patterns, not just snapshots.

That’s why the shift from “proof of performance” to “proof of value” is so fundamental.

And why the future of engagement is not “more surveys” - but “platforms for critical thinking, transparency, collective intelligence.”

How Neelix enables this shift - and makes critical thinking measurable

That’s where the Neelix platform comes in. Neelix is unique because it doesn’t just measure “how engaged employees say they are”. Rather, it enables a network of connected people to continuously reflect, share, critique, and contribute - building a living culture of critical thinking. We empower a modern way to support distributed dialogue in organizations.

The process of critical thinking is the ultimate process of engagement.

The payoff - for culture, performance, retention and growth

By making critical thinking a structural - not episodic - part of work life, Neelix turns employee engagement into a continuous journey: one of learning, adaptation, mutual trust, collective ownership.

Instead of relying on static metrics, leaders see how culture evolves, where engagement is real, when teams get stuck, and where interventions (if needed) should happen.

The result: improved decision quality, better coordination, higher empowerment, reduced churn, stronger alignment, and ultimately - a more resilient, value-driven organisation.

For real impact, measure critical thinking - not just sentiment

In the age of complexity, fast change, and hybrid/human-centric workplaces, traditional engagement metrics are inadequate. They are “lagging” by design. Winning organisations rely on “leading” indicators - this the essence of critical thinking.

Metrics don’t drive performance. The motion is continuous - it is rooted in the ability of people to think, challenge, reflect, collaborate, and grow together.

Critical thinking in the workplace represents continuous dialogue, transparent feedback and shared sense-making. It forms the foundation of adaptive culture, strategic decision-making, and long-term performance.

If you’re serious about building an organisation that learns, evolves, and stays ahead - you need more than engagement scores. It is of mild interest to see engagement metrics move from 60 to 65% (especially that the 100% is not the continuous target). However, it would be much more interesting to see any changes in the percentage of critical thinking, and without the need to conduct surveys.

You need a platform that captures the real pulse of your organisation: one built around critical thinking. That’s why Neelix is more than a tool - it’s the next-generation engagement ecosystem.

Ready to make the shift? Explore Neelix and see how critical thinking can become your organization’s most valuable metric.

How to Build Democratised Engagement Architecture for Workplace

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Wed, 20 Nov 2024 02:14:49 GMT

Workplace engagement challenge

In the rapidly evolving world of work, Human Resources leaders are increasingly challenged with fostering an engaged workforce. The average statistics are daunting: 70% of employees are disengaged , 50% of employees have concerns with poor manager quality , there’s a 13% rise in mental health issues , and a significant portion of Gen Zs and millennials feel mentally distanced and cynical about their work. Amidst these challenges, HR leaders must craft a nuanced, balanced employee engagement architecture.

What executives are asking for is a robust efficiency management system that provides real-time, reliable data from all departments, enabling evidence-based decision-making to drive the business towards exceptional performance and sustainable growth.

This article explores how careful integration of operational performance management, traditional surveys, and modern feedback loops can transcend industry averages and create meaningful, long-lasting engagement.

Assumptions and Hypothesis

Two assumptions influence the debate:

Traditional employee engagement surveys delivery very little value because they are lagging indicators by nature; The data is typically delivered to executive consideration with a 12+ months delay (e.g. a survey performance in September for "last years experiences" is delivered to decision makers with some additional lag)
Traditional performance management does not really develop people, but for some it is a necessary process for compliance reasons

Hypothesis:

Performance focused organizations need to a better engagement architecture which pivots from lagging to leading indicators , and the one that reduces the sense of chores / avoidable overheads

Trends

Trend 1 - Bloating of approaches and solutions

Given the recognition that employee engagement is directly linked to organizational performance, it became an important topic. Gallup research has been depicting little fundamental change in this area from year to year.

The key trend is that the approach to employee engagement is stagnating. This can be explained by few factors:

Employee engagement became an imprecise term that conflates many aspects that are really different considerations. Orgsanizations have been spending resources on one-size-fits-all employee engagement metric that bundles satisfaction, employee retention, employee experience, or company culture.
The surveys are often misinterpreted as positive results. For instance, surveys with 80% participation and 40% those who responded indicating some disagreement are often interpreted as good results because a discrete metric moved from 3.6% to 3.8%. Surveys became overanalytical, conflated and removed from how employees really feel. Goodhart's law demonstrates the danger of becoming over-focused on metrics and not the meaning.
Response to surveys often demonstrates a lack of desire for actual change. Traditional managerial response to a lack of trust in the decision-making process is to explain more to staff the decisions made, even though staff know quite well why decisions are made, they simply do not trust how the consequences of the decisions will be handled.

HR software solution providers have been reacting to the trend of stagnation in ways that creates bloat:

Performance management and HRIS providers are trying to develop some forms of additional signalling to capture employee thinking. These changes will provide little or even negative ROI - individual performance assurance systems are not suitable for inspecting group dynamics or for challenge the status quo, especially if there are issues within management.
Survey solutions providers are trying to respond to industry experience that only 22% of companies get useful results from their surveys and to findings that up to 50% of survey respondents may provide dishonest answers . The response has been to double-down on tricks designed to prevent people from giving dishonest answers. The return on investment for such approaches will be low because they are not new and no revolutionary changes in the ability to understand employees have been achieved.

There is a trend for software providers advertising their products as boosting performance, belonging or company culture. The truth is, no employee engagement software can improve those - only real world outcomes and relationships can. More importantly, organizational efficiency and productivity are a function of an effective operating model, genuine leadership, and capabilities to continuously improve.

Trend 2 - Emerging clarity

In the last decade, it became fashionable to try and affect employee engagement via varying forms of appeasement and support because they target an employee as the subject.

However, it is becoming widely recognised that the root cause of challenges to employee buy-in are senior leadership and what happens in the middle management. Research confirms that 70% of a team’s engagement is directly tied to their manager ( Gallup ). At the same time, 72% (leaders) report that they often feel used up at the end of the day, an increase from 60% in 2020 ( Global Leadership Forecast 2023, DDI ).

There is a form of crisis in leadership, managerial capabilities, management support and mentoring of modern techniques. There are multiple perspectives associated with the stresses observed within managerial ranks. The solution resides deep within adult dialogue between leadership and employees, and not within the over analytical metrics.

No matter how highly a leader values her /his abilities, one can only see the tip of the iceberg.The term “ the iceberg of ignorance ” (1989, Sidney Yoshida) calls out the fact that because an organisation’s senior leaders are a few steps removed from its day-to-day operations, they’re aware of just 4% of all their business’s problems.

Successful modern leaders buy into two notions:

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool" - Richard Feynman
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so” - most frequently attributed to Mark Twain

If your organization is dealing with complexities and consistency challenges, the chances are high that these notions are not well represented within your leadership. Whilst it is possible to engage external consultants to instigate the change, this experience of externally induced change can be hit and miss. Similarly, the impact of internal change champions is likely to be capped or slowed down by existing politics.

Neither performance management signals, nor traditional surveys, nor enhanced management communications can offer a magic solution to the problem of discovering new avenues for efficiency. A simple reason for this is that "90% of good ideas don't come from the executive suite" - Handling Complexity with Professor Richard Jolly, London Business School.

All modern research and successful practice point to the proposition that organizational performance can only be achieved through psychological safety and collective intelligence . The emerging trend is realisation that employee engagement architecture is missing the Live Pulse model as the facilitator and the data lake of collective intelligence.

Most organizations lose valuable data at the organizational level because their Agile efforts and the “voice of employees” efforts are not systematised. This is why building high efficiency and collective intelligence is challenging for firms that double-down on traditional approaches.

How to design a modern employee engagement architecture

Modern employee engagement architecture is directed by three principles:

A set of highly lean, efficient and fit-for-purpose processes
A setup that prioritises real-world adult dialogue, but also captures contextual and measurable data points necessary for reflective thinking, alignment and quick decision-making
A system through which employees and leaders maintain a healthy mutual accountability

Most organizations have pockets of good leadership and high performance teams. How does one translate and propagate that practice across the organization for the sake of collective higher performance and efficiency?

Experienced leaders know that there are multiple perspectives to any challenge. The parable of the blind men and an elephant illustrates the fact it is possible to have measurable experience that results in wrong advice when considered tribally.

Each of traditional employee engagement methods is akin to a blind wiseman trying to understand the elephant:

Performance management process easily identifies underperforming employees, but cannot expose additional information locked behind line managers who are average (not necessarily bad) leaders
Traditional surveys can identify some proportions of the “animal” in the room, but cannot empower the quiet majority to call out if the elephant is actually a three headed dragon from their perspective
Leadership communications and managerial pulse checks on how employees feel can identify some specific sore points, but often backfire through less than systemic actions, unintended reinforcement of tribal perspectives and even status quo politics

The journey towards a wise collective intelligence is predicated on the ability to reimage the architecture of employee engagement in your organisation.

Recommended architecture - separation of concerns:

#1: Operational checkpoints

Optimise existing performance management (if you must have one) in a way that reduces overheads on everyone - avoid re-introducing 360 degree reviews or additional data capture into this process
Stop investing into generic surveys, and use surveys only for testing specific hypothesis

#2: Dialogue rails

Replace generic surveys with the Live Pulse model and redirect investment into coaching employees and leaders on building collective collective intelligence

The key benefit of this architecture is that you can discover reliable understanding about what needs changing to achieve high performance within 3 to 6 months of switching away generic surveys - contact us for a demo and free consultation .

Other Benefits of this architecture:

Does not increase total costs because you simply switch effort from administering surveys to coaching safe and joint reality inspection via the Live Pulse model
Make everyone’s lives simpler and roles more strategic - less administrative work for middle management, HR and change champions as focus shifts from gathering and dissection of analytics to appreciation of narrative and discovery through dialogue
Engages Ai assistant capabilities in a safe and impactful way because Live Pulse model provides and highly authentic and psychologically safe data lake
Delivers fast and sustainable impact on the ability to appreciate multiple perspectives
Enables faster and evidence-based decision making
Guaranteed outcome of employees feeling that they were heard
If external assistance were still needed, then given the inherent capacity for change, bringing in change consultants might produce much better results

Figure: Modern Employee Engagement Architecture - Live Pulse model as the critical leading indicator

* Read more on detailed comparison of tools and solutions

Where to begin

Re-architecting employee engagement is easy:

Take feedback from managers and employees on how performance management can be re-imagined with focus on operational concerns (everyone knows what they are)
Introducing the Live Pulse model and establishing a collective intelligence data lake is achievable within very few minutes: (a) create a space on Neelix Platform, (b) add integrations from the marketplaces of Microsoft Teams or Slack - learn more and contact us for a demo.

Modern employee engagement architecture provides a better balance between operational and People & Culture needs. The Live Pulse model empowered development of programs that uplift managerial capabilities, re-energise employees and create the conditions for a more sustainable and engaged workforce.

Leadership traits required for enabling collective intelligence

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 02:22:33 GMT

The ten most significant shifts facing organizations today include “Leadership that

is self-aware and inspiring” - McKinsey & Company, The State of Organizations 2023 . This study also found that only 25% of employees are inspired by the example set by their leaders.

Evidence is overwhelming that modern executives need to move beyond self-reinforced leadership styles that have roots in old-age management science. Collective intelligence requires strong followship. “Vision without followship is delusion. Followship based on reality (not cultism) is rare” - Georgie Dickins , Stratospheric CEO.

“The secret to becoming a truly transformative leader isn't about following someone else's playbook. Take time to analyze your past experiences and successes thoroughly <through Self-Reflection>” - Dr. Cheryl Robinson, What’s Your Leadership DNA? How To Transform Executive Success, HBR

To be a winner who stays ahead of the curve, stratospheric aspirations are not enough. Sustainable performance requires a culture that is not cut-throat - this means being well-grounded (sustainable), humble and people-centric, but at the same time stratospherically passionate and forward-looking.

Research of 442 executives showed that the habit of reflection can separate extraordinary professionals from mediocre ones - James R. Bailey and Scheherazade Rehman, Don’t Underestimate the Power of Self-Reflection

Enabling collective intelligence requires deep appreciation and respect for the nine laws of group dynamics as defined by Siobhán McHale in her book The Hive Mind at Work: Harnessing the Power of Group Intelligence to Create Meaningful and Lasting Change:

Law of Patterns - Simple group rules produce complex behavior
Law of Connectedness - All behavior ripples throughout the group
Law of Role - Role powerfully influences behavior
Law of Multiple Perspectives - Not everyone sees things the same way
Law of Context - Group behavior is contextual
Law of Embeddedness - Deeply embedded patterns resist change
Law of Pattern Blindness - Group members can ignore the obvious
Law of Unintended Consequences - Change efforts can produce unexpected outcomes
Law of Tipping Point - Even small changes can have a big impact

Organizational and personal self-awareness and self-reflection are critical skills for mastering the nine laws of group dynamics.

Many people think of systemic self-reflection as an unnatural process and a chore. There are many performance related dangers of not resolving your relationship with this discipline:

You can fall into the trap of groupthink and echo chambers because your personality will attract yes-men, and you won't be aware that the yeses you receive come with hidden costs that negate the promises made to you.
You are likely to let go of people who are not of the same type of intelligence as yourself - this will lead you into doubling-down on understanding reality through only one perspective
You are not going to be perceived by others as the listening leader and you will receive even less reliable data about what your teams are capable of

In the process of learning to be a better executive, it is important to treat the experience of other CEOs seriously, but not literally. The system of collective intelligence is a natural companion in this process and you can achieve multiple benefits with the same effort. Practice self-reflection through the same mechanism that enables organizational collective intelligence - create a private and confidential journal for your own data-driven navigation through group dynamics and realities of the modern environment.

What collective intelligence can do for modern CEOs and C-Suite executives

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 02:11:53 GMT

Modern environment of CEOs and C-Suite executives

Times are changing for executives - it's not enough to be able to stay in the role through personal traits and strategic vision. ESG expectations are evolving. Evidence of well-governed and sustainable decisions will likely become a mandatory requirement for executives to be successful and even legally compliant. The personal cost of poor decision-making is rising, even if the director has her / his own justification.

“In today’s turbulent environment, leaders may be tempted to stick with the approaches that have worked for them in the past — regardless of whether they are still fit for purpose — rather than rethinking and changing the way they lead. But the costs of leaders remaining in the familiar zone can be high” - McKinsey & Company, The State of Organizations 2023 .

Executives are expected to continually improve things and push the boundaries of what is possible. C-suite leaders are often trained on the “it’s a lonely job at the top” theme. To complicate matters further, executives often feel pressured to achieve results and feel the need to take action and accept risks. The work is exponentially harder for leaders who push the envelope and desire to build extraordinary companies.

Executives need to “use all five senses to glean intelligence” - Georgie Dickins , Stratospheric CEOs: Inspirational real-world lessons in leadership for the modern-day leader.

This article provides a critical thinking lens on what is needed to achieve sustainable success.

Key reason why executives fail to deliver change

Corporate Executive Board (CEB) estimates that 50% to 70% of executives fail within 18 months of taking on a role . One of the key reasons is: "They don’t prioritize listening and learning — and fail at managing change".

These challenges occur when executives inadvertently breach psychological safety, sponsor "yes-man" culture, tribal politics, and make decisions with a strong bias towards past personal experiences as opposed to specific, latest evidence.

Probability of failure increases when CEOs concentrate power and disable collective intelligence to an extent that procedural checks and balances become ineffective.

Modern decision-making pattern for successful CEOs or a C-Suite executives

Recognise the unintended threats

Many leaders believe that a command-and-control style of decision making is required to enable subordinates to do what they do best and to convey clarity to the organization. This is an outdated view that does not align with the implied expectations of due diligence associated with the modern environment and does not align with the best behaviors needed to build high-performing teams.

First, the command-and-control style of decision-making implies unilateral decision-making, even if trusted persons have been consulted. Therefore, this leadership style implies the need to know almost everything in order to make a decision - this is not a realistic proposition. In the context of modern internal and external complexity, "leaders do not need to know everything" - Tony Martingetti and Mike Ettore podcast .

Research has identified that CEOs, especially startup founders, often exhibit overconfidence bias - “80% of the respondents pegged their chances of success at at least 70%—and one in three claimed their likelihood of success was 100%”. This is akin to the “better than average driver” paradox - majority of drivers, up to 80%, would rate themselves above average , which is not statistically possible. This callout is supported by another study of 1,250 executive teams that revealed a strong link between company success and high executive team performance, yet only 20% of executive teams excelled.

Leaders, and some CEO coaches, explain the benefits of command-and-control through the lens of avoiding drag, communicating certainty and confidence. These assertions do not have supporting evidence and may not apply to your specific context. In fact, most behavioural research suggests that high performance is achieved through co-creation within high psychological safety.

McKinsey & Company, Psychological safety and the critical role of leadership development

An alternative to command-and-control leadership is consultative leadership. It is often perceived as a “decision-making by committee” process, which can be slow and monotonous without the benefit of more tangible evidence. It is true that not all votes matter. However, one "no" can be worth a thousand "yes" - authoritative leadership blocks this critical capability and makes decision-making unsustainable.

Traditional forms of engagement (surveys and top-down communication) lead to a scenario where no voice is truly heard. Authoritative leadership always gets reinforced to such an extent that executive committees become echo chambers. Authoritative leadership is a domain of the outdated autocratic organizational behavior model

Convert Awareness into Opportunity

Fixing decision-making overconfidence does not have to be associated with being slower. There is opportunity - “fixing these decisions through behavioural decision processes could increase economic output by 40%” (Anastasia Santoreneos, ‘Enormous gap’: 40% of business decisions are bad – but it can be fixed )

There is a way to make democratised decisions fast without polluting the process. Collective intelligence powered by the Live Pulse model is the modern solution for avoiding drag associated with committees, whilst still being factual and connected with realities of behavioural dynamics.

Here is how it works:

Implement a collective intelligence data lake
Empower a series of Live Pulse “team journals”, per department or team - the purpose of team journals is to channel and aggregate critical thinking in a psychologically safe and data-driven way; This method is much more powerful than traditional surveys
Team-level journals within the data lake can be confidential if organization-wide sensitivities require controlling excessive sharing of information
Sponsor the flows into the data lake by pivoting the job of managers as facilitators of critical-thinking data points. This process has multiple benefits:
It is much more effective and cheaper than traditional surveys
Re-awakens employee participation
It is easy to detect teams which are unable to generate any inputs, or have broken psychological safety, or are disengaged for some other reasons
Elevates both HR and middle managers to a role of strategy enablers that help aligning execution with vision
Link decisions to themes evidenced by the “always-on” collective intelligence
The data lake of critical-thinking can be interrogated at any time with the help of Neelix Ai Assistant and real-time dashboards

Benefits:

Fiduciary duties and decision-making assurance
The Live Pulse model ensures that decisions are made with the hindsight of experience trends and practical implications to group dynamics
Key stakeholders will have greater confidence that C-Suite executives are making holistic decisions and performing their fiduciary duties well (Australian Institute of Company directors, Individual General duties of directors)
Whilst “the first job of a leader is to make decision with imperfect information” (Stephen Casper, lead director of MarketAxess), collective intelligence makes managing ambiguity easier because it creates a bridge between intuition and analysis - evidence-able assurance when operating with imperfect information justifies greater agility and helps to prevent analysis paralysis
Improved predictability of outcomes
Given that data points supporting the decision were already cultivated within the grassroots, people will align quicker and act together more effectively
It is easier to communicate the rationale behind decisions in the processes of winning hearts and minds of employees
Improve confidence in vision and strength of strategy by
Tracking the success or failure of decisions in order to provide transparency and learnings back to the organization
Tracking of decision-making success focuses everyone's attention on subject at hand - it avoids finger-pointing and therefore supports critical thinking process that feeds collective intelligence
Accountability becomes just as collective as the organizational intelligence
Outcomes are no longer the sole liability of the executive
It is possible to escape the “it’s a lonely job at the top” predicament. You will be assured to have a critical mass of respect when employees feel that they have a voice (it is not about a vote), and that collectively communicated data points trickle through to decisions
Turn individual contributor capabilities into enriched partnerships
Collective intelligence data lake enables better management of risks because action-oriented motivations are balanced against the possibilities offered by systems-thinking
Bridging between perspectives occurs naturally before strategic decisions need to be made - this avoids the decision-making by committee whilst still having decisions that have strong lineage to democratised evidence

How to develop collective intelligence in your company

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Thu, 31 Oct 2024 01:08:50 GMT

What is collective intelligence?

Creating collective intelligence within organisations is an exciting proposition. Many thought leaders reflect on the power of group intelligence at work. Nevertheless, persistent evidence suggests that an environment of hive-mind culture and decision-making is not common. This article explains how to make collective intelligence a reality.

“Successful change leaders know that you do not get where you want to go by changing people, you get there by changing patterns.” - Siobhán McHale, The Hive Mind at Work: Harnessing the Power of Group Intelligence to Create Meaningful and Lasting Change.

Just as other mindsets, such as Agile and Psychological Safety, collective intelligence does not deserve to wear the veil of novelty - the core principles are just as old as systems thinking and organizational behaviour disciplines.

There are three broad definitions of collective intelligence:

Collective intelligence is “ what happens when you get teams thinking together, generating insights, and making smarter decisions than they could have done on their own” - Jennifer Sundberg, What is collective intelligence and why does it matter?
“Collective intelligence is the body of knowledge that grows out of a group. When groups of people work together, they create intelligence that cannot exist on an individual level.” - What is Collective Intelligence?
“ Acting together in a way that appears to be intelligent” is how collective intelligence term was coined by Thomas Malone in his book “The Future of Work, Professor of Management at MIT and the founding director at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

Collective intelligence is the driver for insights and performance results that emerge when people collaboratively and proactively:

engage through a process of collective understanding
achieve measurable positive outcomes by active together

Why collective intelligence is critical for high performance organizations

In 1907, Sir Francis Galton asked 787 villagers to guess the weight of an ox. None of them got the right answer, but when Galton averaged their guesses, he arrived at a near perfect estimate. This is a classic demonstration of the “wisdom of the crowds” - Ed Yong, The Real Wisdom of the Crowds, National Geographic , The wisdom of the crowd is also defined as the collective opinion of a diverse and independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert.

This effect is now being translated into “collective intelligence” through the overlay of behavioural research findings and contemporary business experiences involving co-creation.

Collective intelligence does not contradict the importance of individual contributors. However, latest research into organizational behaviour refined our understanding through the laws of group dynamics such as “if you want to change a pattern, you must deal with individual contributors” - Siobhan McHale.

Two key reasons why organizations must have collective intelligence in order to win:

Being competitive in the modern environment demands diverse intelligence
Modern conditions require that the sustainable goals of an organization be above the ego of any individual (NB: ego is broad concept and is not necessarily bad )
“With increasing complexity, there is greater utility in fostering collective intelligence for finding solutions to complex problems.” - Josep M. Coll, The power of collective intelligence for systems leadership and transformation. Strategy #1: fostering connection
Greater outcomes are achieved when the vision and execution (e.g. leaders and employees) are connected through smart engagement and decision making - see How to Build Collective Intelligence - Guide for modern CEOs and C-Suite executives

It has been confirmed by multiple researchers that high performance is directly associated with healthy psychological safety and daring leadership. These, in turn, are not achievable without a vibrant, healthy employee engagement. Gallup 2024 re-confirmed that best performing organizations are the ones that "make it <engagement> part of their culture".

Healthy engagement and sustainable performance are attributes of the operating model that is based on collective intelligence.

What it means to have collective intelligence operating model

The operating model of any organization is less about org charts and reporting lines - it is more about the underlying organizational behaviour. Whilst it is unlikely for organizations to have a pure pedigree of any one organizational behaviour model, collective intelligence implies a heavy bias towards the Collegial model.

Table: Organizational behaviour models

* Read more here - the retrospective on evolution of organizational behavior models

What stops organizations from achieving a Collegial organizational behavior model:

Organizations that lack innovative People and Culture champions often disseminate information about `culture values` in a manner that reinforces a behavior of command-and-control.
Doubling-down on performance management. Proof of Performance is an attribute of a command-and-control organizational behavior model. A more powerful method of achieving organizatilnal efficiency is Proof of Value - this is an attribute of a Collegial model.
It is a mistake to ring-fence the Custodial and Supportive organisational behavior models by doubling-down on traditional forms of engagement. These models have inescapable consequences - most people are simply doers, and there is a critical-path dependency on the C-Suite. Organizations become stuck, to varying degrees, in Taylorism . This foundation caps performance and will erode competitiveness of even average performers as the pace of changes accelerates.

Key consideration

“Culture cannot be changed by mandating it or formally reorganizing roles and responsibilities. Rather it can only be changed indirectly by altering how individuals work with each other.” - Roger L. Martin , A New Way to Think ; Similar findings have been captured by many other thought leaders - see The Hive Mind at Work by Siobhán McHale.

A better strategy

Pivot the operating model from fully dependending on managers, towards decision-making and execution based on collective intelligence

Transition towards a Collegial model requires patience and business strategy with dedicated focus on sustainability - “Becoming a highly engaged organization was an intentional effort of leadership over several years” ( Gallup 2024, Full Report ).

Where to get started when developing collective intelligence

Transition to collegial behaviour requires imagination and belief

There is only indirect evidence that this model works; Part of the context is that teams that adopted that model have little interest and time to advertise their experience; Majority of use-cases available publicly focus on custodial and supportive models supported by traditional surveys
“No new idea has been proven in advance analytically” - Roger L. Martin , A New Way to Think

It is easy to measure if your organization is ready for change, Ask yourself these questions:

Do people like surveys?
Do you have evidence of authentic employee engagement that is consistently above 80%?
Is your organizational performance easy to advertise as leading edge?

If the answer to any of the questions is a ‘no’, then it is likely that change is overdue.

Just as great business leaders can dream of disruptive external change, so too must they dream of, and empower, disruptive internal change that delivers even greater external impact.

Leading edge organizations always reinvent themselves. Experienced practitioners know that accurate real-time benchmarks are required not only for navigating through challenges, but also for coming up with better models. A perfect state does not exist, or is only a momentary event in the journey towards the next stage.

Quick Wins and Easy Hanging Fruit

Start the journey by incrementally transitioning from traditional surveys towards a system of dialogue that is powered by the Live Pulse model

Plug into existing processes without disruption - retrospective conversations and project delivery confidence votes
Reduce administration and negative perception of managers and HR by elevating their role from “operational doers” to “critical thinking flow enablers” - do less traditional surveys

Having less overheads, removal of stigma and more scope for experience-based dialogue improves everyone’s lives quickly.

Change Strategy

“Change is hard because ecosystems don’t easily reveal their patterns” … and “Hive mind knows that growth at all costs may lead to no growth at all” - Siobhán McHale, The Hive Mind at Work: Harnessing the Power of Group Intelligence to Create Meaningful and Lasting Change. Resistance to experimentation and evolution is often attributed to a reluctance to consider “ slowing down to speed up ”.

Collective intelligence is precisely the area where strategic HR People & Culture champions can reconnect / join forces with the grassroots employees - win back hearts and minds and redefine the HR role as a strategic trusted partner at all levels. “When frontline employees take the initiative to drive change, transformations have a 71 percent success rate” - McKinsey, What successful transformations share .

The democratised Live Pulse model implemented as part of the quick wins (see above) is a great way for HR, Management and Employees to collaborate in challenging the status quo. The strategy consists of two elements:

Empowering employees in pushing critical thinking into their Live Pulse “team journal” - see capabilities related to the process of hearing employees

Employ all 7 change management practices - see summary in full-text paper for “ Resistance to Change: Causes and Strategies as an Organizational Challenge ” by Ahmad Hafizh Damawan and Siti Azizah

Change Roadmap

Building collective intelligence does not require reinventing the wheel. Here is how you can visualise the roadmap with the help of the ADKAR model:

Awareness
Increase awareness on the part of leaders that “decisions <made> through behavioural decision processes could increase economic output by 40%” - Anastasia Santoreneos, ‘Enormous gap’: 40% of business decisions are bad – but it can be fixed
Desire
Increase recognition of highly desirable benefits that collective intelligence offers to C-Suite executives - see What collective intelligence can do for modern CEOs and C-Suite executives
Knowledge
Reconsider research related to group behaviour, group intelligence and high performance
Research by Erich C. Dierdorff and Robert S. Rubin: "We’re Not Very Self-Aware, Especially at Work" suggests that Self-aware teams can achieve
2x BETTER DECISION QUALITY
2x BETTER COORDINATION,
1.8x BETTER CONFLICT MANAGEMENT
4.6x BOOST TO FEELING EMPOWERED
Gallup 2017 - 2022
Only three in 10 employees strongly agree with the statement that their opinions count at work. Gallup calculated that by “moving the ratio to six in 10 employees, organizations could realize 21% rise in profitability, 12% increase in productivity, 27% reduction in staff turnover
Ability
Live Pulse model is the most fitting approach - see the comparison of 25 tools and 4 different approaches for channelling and harnessing of collective intelligence
Invest into leadership traits needed to enable collective intelligence
Embrace a modern approach to getting a data-driven picture of your organization - group dynamics, employee experience, engagement, performance specific factors
Reinforcement
Bring insights gained to executive meetings and connect evidence to the original desire and the catalyst for change
Establish a pattern for leadership to acknowledge employee feedback regularly - this can be achieved in a variety of complimentary ways - reference “Live Pulse” infographics ( analytics or Ai assistant ) in town halls, leverage the “upvote” functionality for periodic and asynchronous way to easy acknowledge feedback
Encourage leaders to be a participant within the Live Pulse model - periodic reflections posted by executives help people to learn more context and develop deeper trust

Team Traits System - How to Build a High Performing Team

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 06:10:53 GMT

Introduction

This article is the second in a series. It presents a practical example of implementing the “problem-tested” approach presented in “ High Performance Culture : Value-Add Focused Strategy ”.

The example is expressed through a Concept document:

You can use this template to introduce and explain the concept
You can also use it as a living and briefing terms of reference for ongoing planning and execution

Template Document: "ABC Team - Team Traits System"

Terms of Reference

Our Team Traits System

The objective of the Traits System is to actively promote and coach following mindsets:

Being able to take a critical look at our behaviors or resulting outcomes, and do this through a systems thinking lens without the need for self-lambasting (Growth Mindset)
Being accountable for self-improvement at all levels (Individually and collectively - Being a highly professional hive)

The how

Will adopt a “dilemmas-tested” model as an alternative strategy to traditional generic statements. It focuses on very specific and iterative improvements that build on each other.
Will take things seriously, but not literally - we will maintain motivation by teaming, being willing to cut team members some slack, and being able to celebrate real changes
Will not “police” individuals, but focus on positive actions and team-level conversations
Will implement traits measurement system that does not break psychological safety foundations

Our Team's Persona and Motivations

Who we are:

<... express your team's size, cultural and neurodiversity background, multi-disciplinary and other professional aspects >

Our initial environment:

<... express the current circumstances of the team>

Our motivations:

<... express what drives your ideal behaviors>

Dilemmas - Cumulative Backlog

Culture is a product. This backlog is a process of discovery and iterative development:

Each backlog items is a big story / mini epic
Each story is linked to few Trait Links

The two way definition helps with ensuring that all stories are small enough. Also, this approach enables easy detection of areas where focused individual or team training may be needed on top of the effort of solving a particular dilemma.

By solving specific dilemmas, we inadvertently fuse / forge / iron-make team traits.

Team Wide Traits

Team wide traits are an expression of attitudes. It is important not to use them as an aptitude score because behaviors are often influenced by factors other than pure personal ability. High performance culture is one where:

The team works together to manage behavior
Everyone feels safe to point out observations where behavior is not triangulating
Being consistent over a period of time is better than being perfect all the time - this means being willing to cut team members some slack
Not controlling, but reflecting on behavior with humour; monitoring motives.

Measurement System

Team-wide traits are different to professional traits:

Absolute individual assessment is an unsafe mechanism in the context of developing a team culture, as it cannot be objective and most likely does not take into account the complexity of an individual’s neurodiversity; A manager and an individual can still have the conversation about traits as needed
Scoring individuals relative to other team members is also unhelpful - not everyone in the team needs to, or in the position to, live through the same depth of experiences

A better approach to implement a self-driven peer review system that measures a state of affairs at team-wide level.

Consider “Get to Know Each Other Tool” that provides:

Low touch peer-to-peer feedback without oversharing
Out of the box infographics for team-level conversations
Out of the box tracking of change across periods

Making It Visible

Avoid the urge to hang traditional posters on the wall. Reserve that space for team humor or conscious, inspiring thoughts.

Neelix offers a variety of possibilities if you adopt a Live Pulse model for your feedback loop:

You can also build own dashboards and reporting by leveraging our REST API .

High Performance Culture : Value-Add Focused Strategy

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Sat, 27 Jul 2024 10:58:13 GMT

The Challenge

Are you passionate about business performance and employee experience? Companies can create culture more effectively by balancing an action-oriented approach with investments in a shared vision.

Workplace culture initiatives that are evidenced through posters and once a year surveys are perceived poorly by employees and deliver little value. Stagnation and increased sarcasm are typical outcomes. " 52% of employees currently believe their company’s efforts to be empathetic toward staff are dishonest " - 2023 Ernst & Young LLP. Below are three reasons for why culture initiatives, even if well-intended, often fail to achieve real outcomes.

Issue #1: Motherly statements

The topic of workplace culture is often amorphous, as it is advertised and viewed through the prism of very general topics - such an approach fails to define tangible outcomes that are easy to achieve in short timeframes.

Issue #2: Lack of buy-in, accountability and democratised transparency

Workplace values are commonly communicated top-down - neither periodic checking nor coaching can win hearts and minds.

Issue #3: Lacklustre approach to evidence

If culture initiative is announced without building psychological safety and creating patterns for critical thinking, then collection and measurement of evidence is going to produce low quality data.
Traditional surveys are a poor mechanism for going-concern initiatives due to the lag time and the fact that up to 50% of people lie when answering surveys.
Survey-based feedback mechanisms fail to account for neurodiverse ways of engaging employees.

Key leadership mistake

Leaders often make a mistake by thinking that culture is not the biggest issue to be tackled, relative to other challenges. This mindset overlooks the fact that culture is behaviours. Behaviours are habits that represent drag and resignation. Many leaders overestimate personal ability , and usefulness of confidants, in measuring the invisible lack of trust.
One cannot achieve higher performance and better outcomes with drag embedded into business as usual. The efficiency coefficient of solving something is low when there is no ability to touch culture and the system. If low performance is the accepted norm, then the process of losing people's hearts and minds is akin to a snowball effect.

How to build workplace culture with real outcomes

Culture development does not need to be boring and can deliver appreciable value within a reasonably short time.

Employees often see culture initiatives through the prism of the three issues outlined above. When people see posters on the walls, they often see the overall challenge because day-to-day challenges are too far removed from good but potentially impotent values.

The alternative to this traditional approach is something called the “dilemma-tested approach” that is explained by Erin Meyer in "Build a Corporate Culture That Works" :

This approach is about incremental and practical changes that people can associate to very specific issues and easily measures the improved outcomes.
The practical changes are not tagged against generic values. Instead they are tagged against a small and specific “dilemma”.

Let's take accountability or trust as an example. "If trust is a must have - get specific. Rather than rambling generally about trustworthiness and using the word trust, we need to point to specific behaviours, we need to point precisely to where the breach lies. The more exact we can be the more likely it is that people can hear us, that we can give feedback on behaviour and stay away form character, and that we can support a real change" - Brené Brown , Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts .

Examples of incremental and practical dilemmas:

When an organisation faces challenges, communicating top-down culture values with the expectation that this improves specific experiences is the wrong approach. This strategy results in poor buy-in and weak overall culture.

The “dilemmas-driven” strategy flips the focus by:

Energising the team(s) to resolve specific issues that improve business process performance, team’s and client’s experience.
Focusing on sustainable outcomes as a capability that are easy to evidence and do not need generic posters on the walls.
Optimising work of management and employees - team-wide traits are purposefully "forged in the fire" of existing processes without new overheads and motherly statements.

The “dilemmas-tested” method to culture development is:

Create a backlog of dilemmas - this is best achieved through an existing continuous process improvement campaign, as most organizations already periodically review what can be improved.
Test each dilemma - if it is too big or complex, break it down into smaller dilemmas.
Prioritise the dilemma backlog and ensure that outcomes are easily measurable and can be experienced by the team in a reasonable timeframe.
Work on each dilemma as part of the continuous improvements drive.
Continuously refine and prioritise the backlog of dilemmas.

To sum up

In the “dilemmas-tested” method, culture is a result of changes and not the other way around. Such strategy achieves five key sustainability outcomes:

Business and decision-making processes are continuously refined for performance and positive experience for all stakeholders (executives, employees, clients, partners).
Team-wide traits are a result of iron-making business processes that achieve performance, as opposed to traits that are communicated top-down.
Managers, as well as grassroots employees, focus their time optimally on performance of the business and teams
Senior leaders and organisational designers are empowered to make value-based decisions because solving each dilemmas is easy to evidence to through specific benefits and outcomes.
The process of discovering and resolving dilemmas provides a stream of insights that, when triangulated, provide a bigger picture that opens paths to larger goals and better strategy.

The secret to orchestrating great culture

There is no need to define a north star vision or generic aspirations. Just focus on practical dilemmas.
Culture is a process of evolution and not a process of adherence to some commandments.
DNA of sustainable culture is formed through teaming when solving specific dilemmas, measuring outcomes honestly and learning.

Leaders sometimes choose to continue shovelling coal into the dirty steam engine under the pretence of “we need to move forward”. This behaviour is based on a view that “yes, I would love to have electrified railway tracks, but it is a bigger challenge for future”. A “specific dilemmas backlog” approach is the bridge between what is practical and the aspirational dream of being exceptional.

The journey towards the “exceptional team” state requires re-invention and maturity growth that never stops.

Next steps

Our next article provides a practical example of implementing a dilemma-tested strategy - read more here .

How to make quality decisions quickly and with high resulting trust

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Fri, 28 Jun 2024 00:36:39 GMT

The best decisions are those that are based on systems thinking and triangulation of all perspectives on the problem to be solved. Traditional approaches to obtaining data rely on surveys or convening meetings of people. Such a lag is incompatible with rapid decision making. Even if you obtain data using traditional approaches, the mechanism for reaching consensus is rarely smooth.

The modern world has evolved and become more complex. The decision-making process must also evolve. A new era of quality decision making can be shaped by these new-age ideas:

Empower real-time availability of data points; These can be obtained from democratised, contextual and measurable Live Pulse feedback loops
Develop hypotheses, solution options or stress test perspectives based on a data lake of contextual experience; These hypotheses or variations can be easily derived from always-on benchmarks; Alternatively, you can ask the AI assistant to suggest what underlying problems might be hidden in the data - Live Pulse feedback data is a genuine source, and the likelihood of AI hallucinations are limited
Make quick decisions by choosing one of the given options using your critical thinking skills. Quick decision making is possible thanks to the “Ask for forgiveness later” principle; This mentality is acceptable because the chosen hypothesis has been proven to be associated with democratized and contextual data

What do you have to lose? Traditional consensus-making process is frequently arduous, leading to decisions that are often authoritative rather than collaborative. Such decisions might work well in some cases, but they are increasingly inadequate in our complex, fast-paced world.

Systems thinking involves looking at the problem holistically. This approach recognizes that problems do not exist in isolation but are part of larger, interconnected systems. At the same time, employee engagement is meant to be about collective intelligence as representation of an interconnected system.

The main hypothesis of this article is that quality decisions have a direct and very strong correlation with employee engagement. If you stop at measuring employee perceptions of the organization's stated strategy, values, or the “net promoter score”, then you may not be doing enough to strategically improve the effectiveness of the organization itself.

A winning strategy is to create a flow system that ensures leaders always have contextual and measurable data. Real-time engagement is the most powerful approach for enabling such flow:

Imagine employees being able to "push" their experience, observations and suggestions without having to run expensive and lagging surveys (up to 50% of respondents to surveys do not tell full truth anyways)
Imagine having partners participating in the same feedback loop
Imagine having feedback from client in the same data lake that improves decision-making

There are other important benefits associated with the real-time experience sharing:

The perspectives of experienced employees can be presented virtually in management decision-making forums; This capability can be achieved at scale and important data points are not going to be suppressed by organisational structures or tribal politics
Junior employees will mature quicker by learning from collective critical thinking
Employee engagement as a process, not just the validation measure via benchmarks, will become more vibrant

Neelix platform empowers organisations to make better decisions quicker, whilst improving employee engagement at the same time. Experience new levels of trust and organizational maturity!

How to improve employee engagement with the help of experienced team members

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 01:34:50 GMT

Leveraging Experienced Team Members to Improve Employee Engagement

Employee engagement lies at the heart of every successful organization. However, the traditional tools employed to gauge this vital metric often fall short. While surveys have their place, they frequently miss nuanced insights that could provide a deeper understanding of organizational dynamics.

A great strategy for improving employee engagement is to enter the experienced team members into the process of benchmarking and reality checking. Experienced employees with mindful character traits are the agents of informal, yet powerful, watercooler conversations that can either be a source of invaluable insights or, unfortunately, toxic groupthink. The strategy is to leverage collective intelligence in a much more innovative way that any survey effort ever could.

The Challenge of Traditional Surveys - Experienced Employee Perspective

Why do traditional surveys fall short? For starters, preset questions limit the scope of responses, narrowing the field of insights employees might share. Even freeform commentary sections are often insufficient for employees to feel completely candid, primarily due to concerns about psychological safety. High-performing employees, who often have the most valuable perspectives, usually participate in these surveys at the shallow level due to their preference for more direct dialogue .

Unlocking Insights through Experienced Employees

A more effective strategy to capture these nuanced insights involves empowering experienced employees to share their pre-meditated and carefully considered commentary on key benchmarks. Critical-thinking and reflective commentary on processes, goals and culture are a bridge into effective dialogue - it improves insights for leaders and triggers deeper conversation.

Thriving system of dialogue is the one that is evidence-based. Experienced employee reflections that are integrated into dashboards creature of system-thinking and authentic employee engagement.

Benefits of this Approach

1. Benchmarks that Tell a Story

When experienced employees contribute to benchmark dashboards, these dashboards transform from mere numbers into rich narratives. The data gets triangulated against the real-world experiences of those who know the organization best. Imagine viewing a sales performance dashboard that not only shows numbers but also includes insights into why certain processes are working—or not—from the people in the trenches.

2. Empowerment Fuels Engagement

Being entrusted with this responsibility of "reality reflection" energizes experienced employees because their intrinsic drive to help organization succeed. This sense of empowerment fosters greater engagement as these team members transform from passive participants into active agents of a mature, collaborative culture. They turn potentially toxic watercooler conversations into ideation sessions, sparking new solutions and innovations rather than perpetuating negativity.

3. Inclusion and Representation

When experienced employees articulate their insights into key benchmarks, other employees see that their daily discussions—their lived experiences—are being acknowledged and analyzed in a meaningful way. This recognition fosters a culture where all employees feel their opinions matter, promoting an environment of inclusiveness and mutual respect.

4. Diversity of Opinions and Success of Change

A "team activist" from one department can offer a reflection on team experience from one perspective, and another "team activist" from a different department is likely to enrich the picture with a different perspective. This diversity is the one that improves business decision-making and the one that trigger meaningful alignment between teams. Optimisation of business processes is often based on trade-offs. Smart transparency through considered reflections is the fuel for successful change or continuous improvement efforts.

5. Lifting the job of HR out of administration to strategic facilitation

Human resources specialists add greatest value when their role is not limited to operations. Some negative sentiment from the employees towards HR is caused by monotonous surveys (even if they are gamified). Imagine an environment where real-time employee feedback drives real-time dashboards and benchmarks. Whilst few surveys might still be necessary, the vibrancy of engagement changes and overheads reduce. This provides HR with space and be strategic psychological safety facilitator. Empowering experienced employees to be a part of benchmark and reality-reflection is more rewarding and impactful than administering surveys.

Neelix Platform: Transforming Employee Engagement

Neelix is an innovative platform designed to harness this very strategy. Unlike traditional employee engagement solutions, Neelix complements its robust workplace analytics and synthetic benchmarking module with capabilities that empower experienced employees to provide valuable commentary. This feature not only enriches the data but also ensures that employee engagement is a dynamic, two-way street.

Neelix is making it possible to transform informal watercooler conversations into formalized, actionable insights. By capturing these valuable dialogues and incorporating them into key performance metrics, organizations can develop a more nuanced, holistic understanding of their internal dynamics. The platform encourages employees to share their thoughts freely and ensures these insights are considered in broader strategic discussions.

To sum up

Unlocking the full potential of employee engagement requires moving beyond traditional methods. By empowering experienced employees to provide thoughtful, pre-meditated commentary on key benchmarks, organizations can not only enrich their data but also foster a culture of engagement, inclusiveness, and continual improvement. Neelix platform is uniquely positioned to enable this transformation, turning everyday conversations into powerful tools for organizational success. With Neelix, companies can build a more engaged, innovative, and resilient workforce, ready to tackle the challenges and opportunities of the future.

Organisational culture and performance - Evidence review

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:40:31 GMT

How does employee engagement increase productivity ?

How to create a sustainable habit of organizational dialogue

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Tue, 14 May 2024 12:58:06 GMT

Introduction

Most professionals agree that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, as said by Peter Drucker.

Workplace culture journey is dependent on the state of dialogue.

Dialogue is critical because it gives rise to organizational self-awareness, which in turn has a multitude very real and positive outcomes - estimated ~2x improvement in decision making, to ~20% increase in profitability, and more ( links tor research ).

This article shares a perspective on:

The challenge of building sustainable team culture
Strategy for building a system of dialogue
Specific recommendations and steps

Challenge of building sustainable team culture

Recent thinking about organizational behavior shows that many well-intentioned initiatives can backfire if approached literally. Examples include:

Standardization of process (how do you know which standard to pick and if one size fits all is actually good?)
Employee recognition
Employee engagement
Management communications

The main cause of problems is the lack of perceived appreciation of real experiences. It is not enough for a leader to say “I feel you and I see what is happening”. People require an immutable mechanism for organizational appreciation of experiences across all teams.

Grassroots can often model their participation in proposed conversations on the basis of these feelings:

Teams want to be able to interface efficiently with other teams, but do not want their ability to innovate be held back by some common denominator
People lose trust when only kudos are managed in a systematic way - this is because kudos ignore the bigger growth mindset picture and do not provide energy to continue the marathon

Appreciating team experiences requires a lot of leadership listening skills , but even then, these skills are not enough due to the fallibility of leaders as humans - neurodiversity, cultural and work experience history biases are a part of life.

In the context when culture requires some repairing, leaders often make the mistake of telling people to “go and build connections”. This statement makes the leader sound weak because the reason why people are not “clicking together” is because differences in their perspectives were not mediated or bridged. It is also a bad practice to firewall the process of making execution related decisions within executive suite forums.

The challenge of a dialogue based culture can be expressed through two questions:

How can a leader (or an Executive group) avoid having to make decisions where people feel overridden or feel that their experiences are ignored?
How does one structure and trigger a chain reaction of conversations that create sustainable alignment?

Strategy for building a system of dialogue

The foundation of a dialogue based workplace culture consist of:

Vibrant and asynchronous dialogue that does not fully depend on managers or HR
Data points that trigger conversations and form a picture of systemic organizational self-awareness

Team culture building has greater chance of success when it is helped by three drivers:

The organization adopted a process for feedback and perspective sharing - this is normally implemented by systems such as Neelix.IO
People are introduced to the process of capturing data points in away that does not require new meetings or overheads
A leader who can modify the habit of commencing conversations, working groups, and even town halls, by openly acknowledging immutable evidence of people’s experiences

These drivers help to solve the age-old problem of people talking at each other, instead of talking to each other.

A system of sustainable dialogue is a continuous process. The key trick is to recognise a wide range of styles, neurodiversity backgrounds, and strength of accumulated feelings (in some cases even trauma). Culture building is not about a “re-introduction” of people to each other with a hope of organic realignment.

Successful culture building strategy can be expressed through two tenets:

Move away from ad hoc solution to differences in opinion - such are normally achieved through lots of talking and a willful decision at the end; This strategy is unproductive and fuels keeping up appearances, or an agreeing to disagree mental model
Update dialogue by injecting a reflective and data driven method for improving joint appreciation of reality ahead the forum (or at least at the start) when some issues are discussed

Recommendations and steps

Choosing the right model for boosting dialogue

Dialogue itself is a human centric interaction. This interaction can be boosted by a system that helps people to triangulate on the same appreciation of reality ahead of or at the beginning of the dialogue. The same system is used for:

mutual accountability
inspecting if prior changes made any difference to real life experiences

The best dialogue system is the one that can provide:

unassuming way of exchanging perspectives
evidence of experience
validation of how changes and decisions work out over time

The model of a “team journal” suits this purpose best because it acts as a data lake of measurable and contextual experiences, opinions, kudos, etc. These data points are pushed via a Live Pulse feedback loop model. The “push” mechanism is critical (surveys are a data “extraction” process).

The solution selected for the team journal and live pulse models must provide psychological safety tools, analytics, benchmark dashboards, and a safe Ai Assistant to distill information at volume. It is important for data points to be pushed by people themselves (as opposed to Ai driven scanning of all emails and other messages). Ai could be a useful and fun assistant, but it should not be the backbone driver when gathering data. Data points must be explicitly expressed by people.

Choosing the right model for boosting dialogue

To ensure feedback sharing is a positive experience of feedback sharing, it is important to recognise the following factors:

Leaders will never find enough time for 1-1s for everyone (especially in scaled organizations, as well as in remote or geo distributed setting)
A skew towards bi-lateral conversions can degrade culture - see pitfalls explained in “Are you a listening leader in the eyes of others?”

A leader can consider two methods to facilitating feedback:

“Discrete Conversations” method:

What it is : Feedback if is exchanged via a series of conversations, planned workshops, management notes and bilateral conversations
Pros: Very personal and a no nonsense method that helps faster decision making
Cons:
Conversations take quite some time to break through differences in perspectives because personal preferences dominate the conversation
It is not easy to combat bias and groupthink via “discreet conversations”; Despite the goodwill of the leader, discreet conversations are often affected by some bias - domineering voices or prior history often result in people holding back what they really think
Cannot measure a commitment to an agreed action leader’s personal opinion or the words “let’s try and have a crack at something”
Leader bears the full load of holding people accountable - escalations and requests to triage overwhelm the leader

“Reflective Conversations” method:

What it is: Same forums as within the “discrete conversations” method - no need to create new types of meetings; Minor modification to the habit of creating an agenda or using evidence during the conversations - data points from team journal are used to set a scene or paint a picture of a landscape that is to be traveled through
Pros:
Same no nonsense approach as with the “Discrete Conversations” method
Avoids venting and results in significantly less time taken to appreciate perspectives
Reduces the need for traditional periodic surveys, and reduces overheads because data points and benchmarks are always available
Writing down opinions ahead of an important conversation is a powerful approach for developing and improving critical thinking for individuals
It is an impactful pattern for coaching people; Same data points can also be used in 1-1s and even performance reviews; Imagine a global leader traveling to some regional outpost being able to easily ascertain the trends and specifics of experiences of those who is being visited
For leaders, it is the best way of communicating thoughts and setting of context for others to align - employees learning how a leader thinks and reflects is part of the employee engagement process; Leadership communications delivered as reflections in organizational journal are significantly more powerful than discrete emails
Best method for avoiding toxic positivity whilst still being able to project optimism that is based on the growth mindset; This method helps to avoid risk-based and hope driven statements when communicating with people
Naturally evidences people’s commitment to agreed action
Team journal harnesses a network effect of holding everyone mutually accountable - this approach makes life of the leader easier because it creates a culture of self-resolvable issues without managerial escalations
Creating a habit of premeditated and written reflection records helps people to train their brain for systems thinking - more stars can be uncovered who can transition from an individual contributor to a leader
Culture building is a part of initiatives your firm is undertaking - it is shame not to have seamless and highly authentic storytelling of the journey; Data points created by the Live Pulse that underpins “Reflective Conversations” method provide the storytelling service completely seamlessly
Cons:
The pattern of considering visualizations of data points obtained from “team journal” is new for most leaders because systems that provide such capability are very new and innovative
Asking grassroots to push data points into the ”team journal” is sometimes resisted if the purpose and process is not explained well, or if the leaders do not evidence supporting this method

How to make Reflective Conversations work

Many leaders employ these patterns for facilitating interaction:

Bi-lateral conversations, with taking down some notes
Regular meetings with groups of people, with the assistance of some document that captures the agenda and discussed points
Formal written communication issued as part of some management update
Delivering a message or an update to teams, sometimes with assistance of a slide deck

Above mentioned cons of “Reflective Conversations” method can be resolved as follows:

Tip #1

Train yourself to overcome the novelty factor of considering data points obtained from “team journal”; Think of this as a slightly deeper enrichment of an agenda

Tip #2

Develop a habit of quickly showcasing the infographics or some other summary of people’s experiences at the start of any team sync up event; Think of this habit in following terms - If you are constantly saying that “we support transparency”, then this how talking the talk and walking the walk is evidenced in the most democratized and bias free way

Tip #3

If you choose the right Live Pulse platforms, capture of reflective data points can be embedded into existing communications that people already accept - such as stand-downs in a communication channel, etc; This flexibility will resolve misunderstanding of the live pulse (e.g. it is not a complaints system), and also will cater for the full spectrum of qualitative and quantitative mindsets of different personalities

To sum up

By adopting the right reflective thinking platform, such ad Neelix.IO, you will uncover multitudes of ways that team member reflections can be used:

Conversations that are more productive and vibrant
Gamification
Reduced ritualism
Serious analysis via advanced infographics and Ai Assistant
Helping teams and even the whole organization re-invent themselves
Lower overheads for facilitating systemic feedback loop

“Reflective Conversations” can uncover one “no” that is worth a thousand of “yes’s” - don’t miss out on this winning capability. "Self-awareness isn’t one truth. It’s a delicate balance of two distinct, even competing, viewpoints" - Tasha Eurich, Haley M. Wozny, Phoenix Van Wagoner, Eric D. Heggestad, Apryl Brodersen ( What Self-Awareness Really Is , and How to Cultivate It )

The ultimate goal is to build organizational self-awareness, but you can always start within one or few teams. Neelix.IO provides a smart transparency capability - sharing of experiences without oversharing.

Are you a listening leader in the eyes of others? How to test yourself

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Thu, 28 Mar 2024 06:00:09 GMT

Introduction

Are you a listening leader? The answer to this question is always going to be nuanced if you were to consider the perspective of others.

One perspective suggests that leadership can be learned . If you agree, then the question is simply about a level of competency. On the other hand, and perhaps as a segway from the competency angle, leadership can be subject to the Peter Principle , which inadvertently suggests that not everyone can be a leader in the first place.

Some people with power navigate the conversation on leadership and engagement on the basis of following perspective:

“I am 80% aware of what is going on, 20% of unknowns I risk-accept; Whilst I check the reality via conversations and a network of confidants, I will always rank quick decision-making over excessive consultation”

What if the 80% of what is claimed to be understood is actually significantly less? As Mark Twain said - “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.“

This blog offers three tests for validating if a leader's 80/20 decision-making opinion is well tested.

In conclusion, I offer my views on a metric that beats all others when assessing the impact of the leadership style.

Just like with a question of “are you a good driver?”, it might be wrong to respond with “I am better than average”. It is not possible for all of us to be better than average. Leaders owe it to their employees and shareholders to stretch themselves. People in leadership positions with poor listening skills are major contributors to the observations that “ a third of global productivity gaps can be attributed to poor management ”.

What is a measure of leadership?

True leader is an authentic master of trust. Whilst best managers are also great leaders, managerial hat itself is about overseeing the process and managing people.

Trust is a credit line. It can never be assumed to exist as a result of authority. “We all want to believe that we are trustworthy, even though ironically many of us struggle to trust others. Most people believe they are completely trustworthy, yet they trust only a handful of their colleagues. The math just does not work - believing that we are trust worthy and being perceived as trustworthy by others are two different things” - Brené Brown , Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts .

Listening tests for leaders

Test 1: Are you creating a culture of conformism, even if inadvertently?

This question is about an ability to embrace variations of thinking styles and methods of communication. A well intended desire to promote consistency of high performance can cause a subliminal command of uniformity. Unchecked, uniformity results in a brew of conformity and silence. Such environments lead to missed opportunities from the perspective of value delivery and risk mitigation.

Symptoms of a leader who is enforcing uniformity:

If the leader favours one type and style of information flow because of personal preference
If the leader believes that his or her standard is golden
If the leader exhibits defensive, emotional reaction and blames employees when management message does not win hearts and minds
If the leader is perceived hard to challenge

Status quo created by conformism:

All wins or failures are a projection of the leader
Overall generated value is less because employee engagement stagnates
Neurodiversity is disrespected
Morale and mental health of teams deteriorate
Culture suffers as people start comparing their “performance” to one golden standard enforced by a leader who is feared or not fully trusted
Environment becomes highly political because one party wins over the other, or people agree to disagree
Ironically, it becomes hard for leaders to remain consistent in what she/he says - leaders are most susceptible to behavior that doesn’t reconcile (leader who instills conformism via fear cannot say at the same time “let’s challenge the status quo”)

Conformism happens when people have no time or desire to learn how to adjust to one another. The style of leaders is a key influencing factor in how that happens.

Instead, one party wins over the other, or people agree to disagree.

Test 2: Are you stifling transparency, even if inadvertently?

The way a leader demonstrates to employees how she or he treats data sources will influence the culture and behaviors that lead to a particular state of transparency.

The essence of this test is to see if a leader may be projecting an unconscious bias towards the carefully managed messaging or the network of “behind the back” conversations.

Context for this test:

Many would agree that human relationships and conversations are very important. As a result, it feels right that when “reserving my opinion” the leader would pursue additional bilateral conversations in order to triage opinions.
If no additional data sources play a part in the fact checking process, then there is a higher risk of the process being biased

If employees see leaders adopting a heavy skew towards bi-lateral conversations, the whole company will adopt the same form of interaction. Resulting culture is often tribal in nature. In organizations that do not experiment with complementary methods of reality checking, a leader might be perceived as a biased listener due to a mere association with a culture of “behind the back” conversations.

Many leaders perceive themselves as champion tennis players. As per the 80/20 decision-making perspective mentioned in the introduction, leaders double down on the speed of the game and the skills they have. The truth is that most of us don’t actually have a truly winning swing. Unlearning bad habits is hard and requires a slow-down before running fast again.

Bi-lateral information finding is within a comfort zone for most. Symptoms of a leader who might be subject to this bias::

When presented with financial or capacity information, the response is “I love data”
When presented with stress testing approach, strategy or opinions, the response is “I don’t need to talk to data, I just need few conversations”

The latter portion of the response is not actually wrong as a statement at a point in time. The ability to counter-balance conversational sources stems from the fact that there is no other data to consider. This situation is subject to this gotcha:

Just as it is the case with any performance data, it is rarely 100% accurate on day one
Data becomes useful only through the investment into continuous capture and experimentation-based fine tuning

By not supporting the journey of “perceptions testing at scale”, leaders cap levels of transparency in the organization. Leaders are perceived as non authentic when they make statements about transparency but lack evidence of supporting what they say.

Test 3: Are you undermining the discovery of great ideas, even if inadvertently?

The background to this test is the proposition that great ideas arise only through intellectual sparring, effective and collegial two-way conversations that transcend differences in perspectives. This test is about a leader's approach to engagement and mediation.

This aspect of the listening skills umbrella is nuanced because people are not looking for “communication appointments”, they are looking for a two-way conversation through which they can add value.

It is easy to undermine the discovery of ideas through patterns such as these two:

Invitations to engagement prefixed with “don’t just raise opinions, provide solutions” - such approach is inherently judgemental
The “open door policy” - in medium or large size teams such policy can backfire by disempowering the quiet majority even further (disengaged high performance minority can also feel disempowered by such policy)

Employee personas who seek a safe two-way conversations can be summarized as follows:

Senior employees who are driven by systems thinking - they would voice their concerns with the expectation of the opportunity to discuss their understanding of constraints before a solution could be proposed
Junior employees with promising capabilities - they quickly learn that some of their ideas are not going to fly without mentoring; they are looking to learn from a leader by observing how a problem is unpacked and be invited to try some of that unpacking themselves

Without an opportunity to have genuine two-way conversation, people fear being judged or would perceive the “communication slot” of limited value. Some leaders pre-empt the sense of fear or the sense of “what’s the point?” by demonstrating various other behaviours (such as never or rarely acknowledging one's own mistakes without the wrapper of excuses, etc.)

The result of the above mentioned symptoms is reduced psychological safety . If you see “acceptable” employee engagement scores in such an environment, don’t trust the scores.

In my experience, there is no single person who would never make mistakes that impact someone’s safety. It is precisely because we are fallible that it is important to create an environment that is impervious to conformity and embraces transparency via the help of a smart but unadulterated flow of information .

Conclusion

The modern workplace is more complex as a result of following factors

remote working
geo distributed teams
intensive pace and expectations
greater risks
generation that is demanding self-actualisation

In order to be a good listener, the good intention of “be free to speak your mind” needs a more sophisticated approach. Patterns that are based on a leader's personal style and habits skewed towards closed room conversations will limit an organization’s ability to mature.

Leaders with developed listening skills exhibit the following mindset and characteristics:

Is continuously curious by adopting a junior learner mentality
Establishes rapport on the basis of “take me seriously but not literally”
Understands that self-reflection is a way of mastering perspectives, and does not need to be a chore with the right approach

The irony of Leadership is that it cannot be measured by achievements attributable to “you”. Instead, people evaluate strengths of a leader based on achievements of the environment the leader creates.

It is common for achievements of people in power to be measured on the basis of crossing a finish line. This event on its own is insufficient to stipulate if someone was a great leader. Using the race driver analogy, even after winning a race the team may not rate the individual favorably if during the race she or he ran over their own team members, burned through all the tyres and blew the engine that was reserved for the follow up race.

Leaders are the ones who make the team successful. Therefore, the single most important metric of leadership style is the count of how many people and disruptive ideas you enabled to be successful.

If you want to be a better leader, follow these principles:

Keep away from the “skillful tennis player” mentality - enterprise success is not a celebrity game, and average player will get the winning swing right only at an average rate (especially if you believe that you cannot afford to slow down)
Adopt the racing team driver mental model in order to maintain deep appreciation of what it means to hold the steering wheel - you are working for the team and not the other way around
Avoid thinking that you are the smartest person
Invest into the system of smart transparency

Be brave and run a periodic anonymous team health check survey with a single question - “Is Mr / Mrs X the leader you would follow voluntarily?” (question suggested by Christian Cunningham )

Hearing The Voice of The Employees

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 08:58:13 GMT

Introduction

The journey of achieving and maintaining a vibrant employee engagement is dominated by a challenge of marrying feedback with action.

Companies invest efforts into periodic employee surveys in attempts to measure the level of psychological investment in the organization - this investment is often referred to as employee engagement. There are varying statistics (for instance Gallup surveys ) on the industry wide results. The status quo is that it is hard to achieve a level of engagement of above 70%. In this article we would like to challenge this status quo and suggest an approach that would allow any firm to achieve engagement levels closer to 100%.

Let's take a critical look at how the voice of employees is heard, interpreted and how it is used. This article proposes an approach to redefining the voice of employees and provides suggestions to recalibrate the approach to engaging the collective intellect of employees.

Introspection on employee engagement surveys

A straightforward definition of the voice of employees states - “it is a systematic process designed to uncover and assess employee concerns or problems that impact the total employer-employee relationship … so that the company can then act on the (employee) feedback, creating a better workplace for their employees with business goals in mind” - Gem Siocon, AHRI .

There are three key challenges with the voice of employees:

The process is pre-conditioned to look at higher level themes only; This is because “the total relationship” is the originating concern - the scope is too big to unpack in a periodic survey;
Discrete surveys always lag and are architected around pre-conditioned questions; It is hard for employees to feel that they are heard in their own words even if there is a box for freeform commentary;
It is common for employees to under-report challenges that affect their everyday lives;

Let’s face it - it is not natural for a significant proportion of people to be transparent. There are three persona groups in each organization:

“Quiet majority” remains quiet because surveys do not provide a way around psychological safety issues; Similarly, feedback is often constrained as a result of toxic positivity behaviors of managers;
“Quiet high performers” feel that their systems thinking perspectives will not matter in the crowded pool of “complaints” or “kudos”;
“Voiceful average performers” skew the voice of employees

In addition, some organizations have a fourth minority group - “Influential unicorns”. This group of people can cause the firm to deviate from the right course (in hindsight) by a few degrees, which can lead to the company missing the target by miles (akin to an aviation concept called the 1-in-60 Rule ). The value of surveys where these people are in unchecked power is negligible.

Doubling down on management communications, surveys or even Ai tools, will not improve matters in a meaningful way. There are two fundamental reasons for this:

Firstly, authentic leaders already know broad themes and sufficient details of what is bothering employees; If data points are not flowing through to management conversations, it is not for the lack of surveys but due to politics;
Secondly, formulation of actions to address feedback is typically a separate stage in which employees are relatively powerless subjects; To make matters worse, strategy setting is a separate process altogether; Only a few bits of employee sentiment filter through to strategy;

Employee engagement that is over-reliant on annual or quarterly surveys does not make enough of a difference:

In organizations with low trust and immature transparency, why would surveys change that status quo? Surveys that do not lead to a fundamental change devalue their usefulness because employees' collective brain “uses experience to determine if It's worth it … after you do something, you learn if it has value” - E. Paul Zehr Ph.D., Psychology Today .
In organizations with healthy transparency and continuous improvement practices, surveys’ value is limited to being a checkpoint; Winning organizations pivot away from annual or quarterly surveys towards a live pulse system complimented with brainstorming sessions.

This statement may seem paradoxical from the perspective of a survey reliant approach - if you don't have to do many employee surveys, it means employees are likely having better experience. However, “research shows that people who report having a positive employee experience have 16 times the engagement level of employees with a negative experience, and that they are eight times more likely to want to stay at a company” - McKinsey, 2021 .

Are surveys useless?

The world around us is complex because products, services and interactions between partners are increasingly based on continuous and incremental changes. The approach to hearing employees should reflect this evolution. Organizations that choose to stick with legacy feedback systems will fall behind due to the effects of Conway's law .

Does this mean that organizations should move away from surveys? A generalist HR professional would have two core concerns:

How would an organization benchmark itself against peers and competitors?
If it is not surveys, what tools and guidelines would be provided to management?

Each of HR concerns can be responded as follows:

The only reliable measures of employee engagement are the attrition rate and what people say about the company once they left;
The need to measure employee sentiment does not go away; However, the approach to building actionable and evidence-based feedback flow needs principles and methods that match the complexity of the outside world;

What is the voice of employees?

Traditional HR approach dictates a waterfall set of activities : “gather feedback > process and examine feedback > represent feedback in management meetings > determine actions > planning of action > communication to employees > implementation > measure the impact of action”. In this system, “the why” is determined by a well-intended desire to identify actions that would improve the total employer-employee relationship.

Feedback systems that are over-reliant on traditional surveys have a fundamental data reliability challenge. Answers to questions might uncover perspective A and B, but true reality might be represented by perspective C that is born only through bridging perspectives and a joint brainstorming. Imagine this scenario:

Group A of employees communicates feedback that we need more of X
Group B or employees communicates feedback that we need more of Y
If management were to triage employee feedback at their offsite and take feedback at face value, they it would try to spread what budgets allow between X and Y
However, a well facilitated brainstorming session might reveal that employees would recommend merging groups A and B in order to do less of both X and Y, and instead invest more into Z

Surveys can relay the heartbeat but not the voice of employees.

We can re-imagine the voice of employees as a continuously maintained backlog of reconciled and ready-to-execute actions that are linked to business goals. It is important to note that managers are an integral part of the brainstorming process - they are employees like everyone else.

By listening to employee feedback via incubated backlog of actions (as opposed to discrete survey answers), organizations can achieve following:

Reduce costs, because there is no need to over-invest into surveys
Reduce effort of management communications, because this conversation path is embedded within the ideation and brainstorming process
Boost capability of management to win hearts and minds of employees as a result of shoulder-to-shoulder participation in incubating ideas
Unlocks opinions of the quiet majority, because thoughtfulness of the brainstorming process is better
Unlock enthusiasm of high performers because the route to action is much more direct

Conclusion - recalibrating your approach to the voice of employees

The answer to why organizations need the voice of employees can be answered as follows:

It is not for the purpose of enabling management to think up actions on the back of discrete data points
Instead, it is for the purpose of having readily-executable backlog actions that promote company goals

Because the mission is to maximize the “total employer-employee relationship” and “psychological investment”, it is necessary to look at the voice of employees as a total package of communications, action and the response back to action.

Three simple steps are needed to upgrade a survey based approach to a conversation focused feedback-and-action system :

Swap out surveys with a Live Pulse system that can channel feedback in real-time in a measurable and contextual form, at scale and at a team and organization-wide level (check out Neelix.IO Voice of Employees features )
Extend existing team conversation pattern (typically retrospectives) with asynchronous ideation and brainstorming capabilities - these would host the backlog of incubated actions that speak what employee truly wish to happen
Ensure a presence of employee activist during management meeting and strategic planning events

It is already the case with the traditional survey based process - that the hardest part is the action. A conversation focused feedback system is going to be subject to the same Pareto principle . The difference, however, is that by pivoting towards a system of conversations it is actually possible to achieve close to 100% of employee engagement. Traditional surveys based approaches can never achieve that.

The voice of employees is synonymous with transparency.

Transparency is significantly less about the “availability of information”. It is much more about the ability to have conversations that can challenge the status quo.

A tongue in cheek question - what does the voice of employees sound like in your company? Is it whispers, echoey sighs, church choir, or perhaps some rock band?

How to resolve top concerns about transparency

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:49:07 GMT

Introduction

Transparency is often perceived as something new that is absent or yet to be introduced. Given its meaning and the perception that there’s something different or extra to deal with, it is therefore normal to encounter emotional resistance to transparency. Sometimes the resistance is fobbed off as “our organization is not ready for it”, or through the concern that people are robbed of the opportunity to form a narrative.

This article, the third in this series , positions transparency as a holistic system and examines the two top sources of resistance you are likely to encounter in its pursuit.

Understanding transparency as a holistic system

Transparency is analogous to the nervous system of any organization, which is designed to carry instantaneous and accurate signals to the brain. The fact that such signals may get dropped or mutated should not exclude discussing transparency; it is a system that already exists. The more important discussion should be about the effectiveness and health of information flows. The fact that organizations already practise open sharing of kudos (for example on internal applications or publicly via LinkedIn) demonstrates that transparency is not a novelty.

Organizational behavior typically follows these norms:

Positive information is unrestricted in its form, narrative, and number of channels. There is minimal mutation of information as it travels between the event trigger and the brain.
Information perceived as negative, however, is vetted and may be suppressed due to disengagement, fear, or simply gets mutated through narrative. The result is that the brain may not receive critical information.

This experience is a result of organizations failing to recognize transparency as a holistic system that already exists. Consequently, they enable development of a stale culture that leads to the loss of hearts and minds . Just as it is illogical for people to claim to be significantly better drivers than the average population, it is dangerous for companies to think they are immune to the evidence that only 33% of employees report being engaged ( Gallup ).

The proposition is that, on average, the health of the organizational nervous system is poor. This is measured by the above mentioned poor employee engagement score and the poor state of governance, as inferred from the statistic that 50% to 70% of executives fail within 18 months of taking on a role (an estimate from the Corporate Executive Board, with one of cited reasons being: "They don’t prioritize listening and learning — and fail at managing change").

The failings in listening and learning are caused by ignoring transparency as a holistic nervous system. Here are three typical mistakes that organizations tend to make:

Surveys, despite their scientific and highly structured nature, are a form of managerialism. The science related benefits of surveys get watered down due to time lag, overheads attributed to good execution, and unavoidable bias (even the requester of the survey automatically instils some bias). It is not surprising that only 22% of surveyed companies obtain meaningful results from their employee engagement surveys (Enodo Global, 2022).
Reporting (status or risk reporting, etc) lacks a fully independent, fail-safe data element that would help the executive to know if presented perspectives reconcile with reality.

Traditional employee engagement tools, intended to generate excitement or to provide employees with a voice, are often limited to gamified awards or escalation channels. Basically “most organisations are incredibly paternalistic” and it feels unnatural to traditional HR and traditional managers to let people express their feelings in their own words. Reluctance to relinquish the controlling tone stifles innovation and prevents culture from becoming everyone’s responsibility.

Top concern about transparency - narrative forming factor

Typically, a frequent argument against transparency goes like this: “Even if I agree that something different needs to happen in regards to communication of challenges, I feel that lack of ability to shape the narrative will cause more damage”. People voicing such concerns prefer investing in surveys and the feedback loop of management messaging.

This viewpoint runs counter to what transparency is really about:

Information discovery already occurred at the source (typically at the grassroots)
Narrative control at the grassroots is not possible as it is after-the-fact. For example, no manager will be quick enough to stop people from forming their own opinions and feelings
It is a mistake to prevent people from sharing information freely. As the saying goes, “your team is always talking, even if they are not saying anything”. Traditional managers miss the trick of why a measurable and contextual Live Pulse feedback model is important; it balances the need to allow free experience reflections vs the need for them to be structured so that the story can be told with evidence.
Information should travel without mutation to the brain
As per the above mentioned Live Pulse model, evidence-driven signals can certainly be enhanced through effective communication skills. It is important to distinguish narrative writing vs evidence-based storytelling. The first is a political exercise because it focuses on events and avoidance of exposing skeletons in the closet. The latter is an act of mindfulness because it is focused on telling the full story and relaying the true sentiment.

First Perspective

These recommendations will go a long way to improving health of the nervous system in your organization:

Empower unadulterated experience sharing at the grassroots level
Coach teams through positive psychology
Do not ask people to be more resilient - asking people to continue dancing with a broken leg is just wrong
Do invest in measurable and contextual Storytelling across the organization in the search for allies and preventative solutions to issues that resulted in the broken leg to begin with
Avoid doing anything that slows down information travelling to the brain as fast it needs to, even if narrative forming needs to be addressed by some other means.

Second Perspective

Recommendations proposed in the first perspective may fall short at bridging competing perspectives on transparency:

One group of people finds it more natural to “ask for forgiveness later”. This means running fast and dealing with messaging as an asynchronous activity. Polishing of the message can be sacrificed if that effort were to impact the timeliness or a perception of appeasement.
The second group believes in avoiding unhelpful triggers that could complicate already complex conversations further. This means that investment into narrative is seen as very important.

In reality, both these perspectives have valid reasons and are often perceived as competing. What is missing is the agreement on the core principle that enables merging of the two mindsets.

The recommended approach to merging competing mindsets is as follows:

Per first perspective above, empower the grassroots to stream contextual and measurable data points
This solves the concern that feedback needs to be structured
Leverage Neelix.IO powered smart transparency to adapt the model of information sharing to your context
The best narrative is the one that is developed jointly with the team. An experienced servant leader would know and live by the view that "No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it." (H.E. Luccock)

Second top concern about transparency - net measure of sentiment

Second most common concern expressed during the conversation about improving transparency is always about net sentiment. It is true that after release of pent-up pressure, the free experience sharing might show a net negative sentiment measure.

Here is the best way of resolving this concern:

Firstly, establish a social contract agreement that the only truly important measure is whether things are better today than they were yesterday
Leaders should help the team and be accountable for practising the growth mindset which focuses on persistent change and not specific events or net measure
People and culture champions need to understand and educate everyone that a healthy nervous system (a.k.a. Healthy transparency) is not about pain avoidance - transparency is simply about signals creating unavoidable conversation triggers
Mature teams embrace the challenge and net measure is somewhat redundant because as soon as they climb to the top of the hill they will disrupt themselves and move on to the next interesting challenge.

The adrenaline rush derived from the excitement of doing interesting things and being able to handle challenges is what will keep people engaged and “happy”. The alternative of preserving the status quo is what has led to an industry wide statistic of poor employee engagement . Only a healthy nervous system will actually result in a positive journey even if you are walking through a desert or a snow storm.

Top mistake when talking about transparency

The top mistake people make when talking about transparency challenges is to take things too seriously and too literally. Yes, transparency means systemic honesty and some may find this confronting at first. As a result of heightened emotions, people tend to talk past each other.

When introducing transparency, remember these two important tips:

“If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh” - George Bernard Shaw
Do actively support anonymous feedback at the beginning of the journey because it is the necessary lubricant. Anonymous feedback will naturally die off as the team matures.

Here is a humorous take on what transparency might feel like.

A typical structured enterprise can feel like an airplane. Everyone is allocated a seat, there is assistance, and there are pilots steering the plane. Different planes and journeys can feel very different; sometimes it can be a well catered affair, sometimes it can be a strapped-down, scary experience, and sometimes you may end up not where promised if people in the cockpit are not really qualified to fly.

As part of that journey, on average, people start becoming disengaged from the perspective of not being able to change anything in reality. Trying to keep the occupants engaged with surveys about how you feel and gamified attempts to keep up the excitement are not going to resolve the fundamentals of the journey.

Eventually people notice that there are others flying around their plane in circles, without any visible parachutes, and actually having fun. Those are the people who reformat their journey not to be a flying tube. Their reality still consists of similar ingredients, but their ingredients interact and behave differently:

They still have an aspirational leader, but he is wearing the same helmet as everyone else and will suffer the same bruises if not skillful enough and if not working with the team
They still have goals and structure - there is no anarchy
Being teachable and responsible is not something one has to police
Performance is measured as the team result, and individuals have an honest conversation about the value they provide
Safety comes through reflective learning and authentic relationships

Transparency feels like jumping off an airplane. A natural fear is the one of hitting the ground and smashing. Answers to this concern will vary from person to person.

Conclusion

Healthy organizations do exist - you do not have to accept the status quo. If you are going to be waiting for evidence (perhaps in the form of some management consultancy publishing a research paper with “authoritative” statistics), then you will be waiting forever. Healthy organizations do not actually need to hire consultants and do not need to go around parading their success - they are too busy doing interesting things with a happy team. The humorous depiction of transparency is not an outright smoke dream - this is how horizontal leadership and truly collegial organizational behavior models operate.

Accepting poor health of the nervous system is the same as continuing to dance with a broken leg - you eventually end up with a Dead Horse scenario . If you want to retain talent, having meaningful transparency is a critical capability. At the same time, transparency is the one tool that can help leaders with keeping organizations sharp and achieving goals.

Embracing Smart Transparency: A Systems Thinking Approach

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 09:17:10 GMT

Introduction

In today's rapidly evolving world, the workplace has become an intricate web of interconnected processes, decisions, and collaborations. Perhaps, it has always been this way. However, the complexity is higher in today's environment due to the distributed nature of teams and engagements with external partners, as well as challenges in shaping team culture within a somewhat transient workforce.

It is easy to fall into the trap of transactional relationships when organizations regiment the approach to information flow, employee engagement, and knowledge development. Despite the investment into surveys and well meaning management communication plans, good intentions are often capped within some form of a “ survey trap ” that focuses on subjective proof of performance as opposed to a proof of value.

While it is popular to talk about transparency and building a great culture, how do you measure if enough is being done in your organization? Relying on one-to-one conversations with key employees is neither fool-proof nor scalable. Similarly, survey related methods are associated with latency of information and confirmation bias.

This article, the second in this series, examines practical approaches to building effective and smart transparency. In the first article , we considered the topic of creating an environment of authentic psychological safety. The proposed solution was in the form of distributed and confidential reflection spaces that could channel measurable and contextual data points into a common systems thinking picture of what is truly going on.

How to Introduce Transparency Concept

Transparency breeds inclusivity and trust in the workplace. It must be nurtured everyday at work, at every level. Introducing transparency should be done in stages; the steps outlined below are from a real world example. Feel free to re-use and adapt them per your context.

Step 1 : Explain the concept to executives and grassroots

Here is an example of a communique or a wiki you can create as part of facilitating the conversation and educating your teams about what transparency means in real terms.

Everything we do in {YOUR ORGANIZATION} is for the purpose of achieving better {OUTCOMES AND SUCCESS MEASURE}. Our knowledge base is a result of learnings; it represents organizational intelligence based on experiential data collated over a period of time.

Your day-to-day experiences and observations are “information” (data points and feelings). A well functioning system of Transparency will convert this “information” into a reusable “knowledge base”. Transparency can help evolve the organization and our culture. As such, the discipline of transparency needs to be introduced as a gentle rain versus a hailstorm. Smart Transparency is about being mindful about the delivery and expression of the experience as measurable and contextual data points. The intent is to create unavoidable conversation triggers that result in positive change.

The flow and principles for cultivating smart transparency and creating an intelligent knowledge base are as follows:

Information you possess
We create a safe environment within our organization where people feel safe to bubble up data points
People are invited to push measurable and contextual reflections directly from Slack or MS Teams into a higher level team wide journal, or confidential spaces per team / project
Psychological safety options exist for people to feel safe when pushing feedback
All feedback is measurable and contextual, and therefore this flow is not a “complaints channel” but rather a feed into the systems thinking brain of your team
The medium for your knowledge
Business-as-usual task management task like information is captured in {YOUR BAU SYSTEM}; Examples
Tasks in Jira for agile teams
Tasks in Salesforce for CRM like activities
etc.
Feedback on challenges and wins is captured in Neelix; Examples
Capture feedback within confidential spaces per team, with ability to aggregate measurable reflections across all spaces
Capture feedback in a team-wide space if the wider team has already matured to accept transparency as the normal expectation
The culture you create
The combination of measurable and contextual reflections on experiences allows your teams to communicate more effectively with clients and internal stakeholders
Evidence-based and real-time information flow enables the team to abort wasteful activities or change tack quickly when it is needed
Experiential data points, truthful reflection and self-optimising continuous improvement initiatives result in a culture of mindfulness (a.k.a. The Systems Thinking mindset)
Crowd-sourced and evidence-based data points assist with challenging the status quo, avoiding group think or individual biases
Authenticity of leadership - caring about true experiences and the journey of teams
Leaders of the organization taking into account the journey and authentic experience data points when developing strategy and the approach to winning hearts and minds of employees
Leaders finding opportunities for engaging employees in strategy development
Knowledge
Bias-free, measurable, and context-aware experience data points result in an always-on measure of Team Morale - escape the survey trap and focus on proof of value
Outputs of our culture and process improvement initiatives result in experiential IQ and an evidence-based knowledge base in the form of
Reusable processes continuously refined through empirical evidence
Reusable templates refined through continuous feedback
Jointly agreed internal social contract/s
Jointly agreed social contract with other teams

Step 2 : Educate and empower teams with the knowledge of when and how to push Live Pulse feedback

Consider which of the three “Transparency Without Oversharing” approaches suit your organization best; this was outlined in part one of this series on transparency:

Small team or project ready for internal transparency
Developing teams capable of individual introspection, but the wider ecosystem (company or large project) is not ready for transparency
Mature organization with strong horizontal leadership and executives who actively promote transparency

As is the case with any change management initiative, you will need these ingredients:

A leader who supports the concept of smart transparency and is willing to sponsor it
A culture champion who can foster the introduction of transparency
A candidate show-case team

To commence your transparency journey, the first two ingredients are mandatory.

The easiest way of introducing transparency is to empower team leads to push reflections on behalf of their teams once a week. Neelix provides rails for ensuring that these posts are contextual and measurable. As a result, the rest of your employees have a useful baseline as to how their experiences will be represented in the team's reflective journal, and how their journey is visualised for management.

The next step is to showcase this pattern and resulting data points in the team's journal to the rest of the team. After this introduction, configure periodic prompts to nudge people into the habit of sharing their experiences. Neelix provides functionality to configure custom prompts per channel in Slack or MS Teams. Feedback can be pushed at any time without awaiting for a prompt. The prompt helps with establishing a pattern. Research shows that best reflections are ones made "in the heat of the moment" because human brain mutates recollection of what really happened.

Life hack about managing confidentiality concerns:

If your organisation needed separate, confidential reflection spaces per team, then channel-specific customised prompts issued by Neelix can also act as a guide in ensuring that people know what experience they push, where.

How to Get the Ball Rolling

It is important to coach people that it is normal for a journey towards transparency to be associated with breaking a few eggs on the way. The life hack that smoothes the journey is to constantly remember George Bernard Shaw’s quote - “If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh”. Healthy humour at the workplace is an underappreciated skill ( Humour at work | Andrew Tarvin | TEDxOhioStateUniversity ).

Mindful, systems thinking culture is dependent on three considerations:

“Good people can disagree” - Russell Pearce
“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool” - Richard P. Feynman
There is no “I” in the word “team”

Neelix platform is a holistic approach to authentic employee engagement and provides a variety of tools besides the Live Pulse feedback flow.

Tools for periodic team conversations

Retrospectives Conversations (per initiative, and scalable to global events)
Confidence Votes
Confidence and Conversations Big Picture Dashboards
Moods Dashboard and Workplace Analytics

Tools for Alignment Between Individuals and Teams

Team’s mirror tool
Real-time Storytelling of your team’s or organization-wide journey based on authentic grassroots reflections
Word cloud game
Gamified experiences “leader” board
Talent retention strength measuring
Buddy system
Get to know each other tool - self-driven peer review

If you need guidance, contact us for a free webinar or consultation.

Conclusion

The journey towards Smart Transparency is not without challenges, but the potential rewards are far-reaching. Winning organizations embark on this transformational path, uncovering how the fusion of systems thinking and transparency can pave the way for a brighter future in the modern workplace. Don’t miss out on opportunities to beat the competition and create a culture that ensures strong talent retention.

Postscriptum

Transparency, mindfulness and systems thinking are ultimately about the culture. Human-centric approach and the necessary investment into relationship building will influence the degree of success. The most important ingredients, however, are the people. Organizations undertaking a transparency journey should also ensure they structure their talent management and internal coaching strategies in a way that ensures people meet your standards for transparency at work. The most complex part of any organization is people.

Six Reasons Live Pulse Feedback Goes Beyond Soft Information Flow

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Sat, 01 Jul 2023 05:50:34 GMT

Live Pulse Employee Feedback:

Why Does it Matter?

Live Pulse employee feedback model, if implemented in a context-aware and measurable way, can lead to 2x improvements in decision making , coordination and better conflict resolution . Simulations and anecdotal evidence suggest that self-aware teams do significantly better ( research ).

Organizational and team-level self-awareness is the direct consequence of the Live Pulse employee feedback model. Empowering employees to push contextual feedback frees organizations from the survey trap and dramatically boosts culture.

"The behaviors of highly engaged business units result in a 23% difference in profitability ". This is why Live Pulse is more than just a soft information exchange.

Six reasons why companies should consider Live Pulse employee feedback

#1. Immediate Insights into culture themes

#2. Immediate Insights into the business processes

#3. Manager Effectiveness and Responsiveness

#4. Employee Empowerment

#5. Continuous Improvement

#6. Proactive Issue Resolution

Summary

Life pulse feedback offers a culture of continuous improvement, employee engagement, and responsiveness. It helps organizations stay connected with their employees and create a positive and productive work environment.

Today, the most successful companies prioritize employee satisfaction to boost employee engagement. Workplace factors such as diversity and inclusion, compensations and benefits, culture and values, and work-life balance play a huge role in loyalty and productivity.

Benefits of Live Pulse employee feedback model:

non-survey (zero-cost) gauge of changes in employee sentiment over time and identify emerging issues or areas of improvement
identify unavoidable conversation triggers
initiate authentic and evidence-based conversations that delve deeper into employee experiences and perceptions of belonging
identify areas where employees can be injected into strategy setting
boost authenticity of leadership forums by referencing data points and trends pushed by employees
management communications
town halls
1-1s with teams
1-1s with employees

Where to next?

Best team culture is not an accident - it is created when leaders and HR focus on continuous feedback and development rather than a once-a-year evaluation. Discreet surveys are the least efficient and least liked approach to employee engagement.

Switch to the Live Pulse employee feedback model!

Get Started

The best way of achieving ongoing awareness is to enable front-line team members to communicate contextual and measurable thoughts directly from daily communication tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams.

Neelix.IO is specifically designed for such real-time transparency and achieves so without oversharing. With added psychological safety and humour-assisted options, Neelix platform can make workplace transparency a reality if leadership of the organization is authentic about connecting with the grassroots.

Empirical Evidence

Airbnb ( reference ):

Feedback Collection Method: Airbnb uses a combination of employee feedback. Anonymous feedback to encourage honest and open feedback, Airbnb may offer employees the option to provide feedback anonymously. This can help employees feel more comfortable sharing their thoughts and experiences, particularly when discussing sensitive topics such as belonging and inclusion. Airbnb conducts regular pulse surveys to collect real-time feedback from employees. The platform allows to gather insights on employee engagement and satisfaction.

Action Taken: In response to feedback, Airbnb implemented a "Belonging and Inclusion" initiative. They established employee resource groups to foster a sense of belonging and launched mandatory unconscious bias training for all employees. Based on the feedback, Airbnb implemented various initiatives to enhance the employee experience. They made changes to their compensation and benefits programs, expanded employee resource groups to foster inclusivity, and launched leadership development programs to support career growth. They also introduced new onboarding practices to improve the employee onboarding experience.

Google ( reference ):

Feedback Collection Method: Google has various channels for collecting feedback, including regular employee surveys, town hall meetings, and internal communication platforms.

Google conducts regular employee surveys to gather feedback on various aspects of the work environment. During town hall meetings where employees have the opportunity to ask questions and provide feedback directly to the manager.

These surveys cover topics such as job satisfaction, leadership, teamwork and workplace culture. The live pulse feedback provides valuable insights into employee experiences and perceptions.

The internal communication platforms encourage collaboration and open discussion among employees and the exchange of ideas. These platforms encourage collaboration and open discussion among employees.

Action Taken: In response to employee feedback, Google has implemented several initiatives. For example, they expanded their family leave policies to provide better work-life balance for employees. They also made changes to their performance review process, focusing on continuous feedback and development rather than a once-a-year evaluation.

Fostering Workplace Transparency

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Tue, 20 Jun 2023 02:07:32 GMT

Introduction

Organizational and team level transparency is critical to achieving healthy culture, best talent retention and higher performance. Workplace transparency is not limited to being a part of "communications" between executives and employees. In fact, the most important aspect of transparency is its role in enabling people within the firm to go beyond individual self-awareness. Organizational and team level self-awareness may lead to 2x improvements in decision making , coordination and conflict resolution (research by Erich C. Dierdorff and Robert S. Rubin ).

In today's fast-paced, GEO-distributed and interconnected work environments, building effective transparency is crucial for promoting trust, enhancing collaboration, and driving organizational success. The reality is that most people want transparency, but organizations often feel they are not ready for transparency because it is perceived as hard to implement.

Neelix Platform is a unique service that offers an innovative Live Pulse Feedback model that is architected to solve the problem of achieving useful and effective workplace transparency. Our solution is designed for distributed confidentiality, contextual and measurable feedback, and human-centric approach.

Transparency Without Oversharing

The most effective approach to achieving transparency is through a live pulse feedback model that does not break safety and confidentiality of individual teams.

Neelix Live Pulse Feedback Model

empowers teams with safe introspection while allowing context-aware data points to be aggregated at the organizational level.

Learn about "Infographics only" access permissions

Three Approaches to Workplace Transparency

Scenario 1 : Small team or project ready for internal transparency

Scenario 2 : Developing teams capable of individual introspection, but the wider ecosystem (company or large project) is not ready for transparency

Scenario 3 : Mature organization with strong horizontal leadership and executives who actively promote transparency

Human-centric Employee Engagement

Neelix empowers each team with their own psychological safety within the bigger ecosystem of the wider firm. At the same time, leaders and culture champions of the organization are able to aggregate measurable and context-aware data points from each confidential team journal, without the need to encroach on the way teams operate.

No lag

Reduce reliance on surveys - embrace the mindset that "people deserve to be heard using their own voice"

One team - One Dream Culture

Create organizational systems thinking culture by embracing reflective and measurable storytelling

Transparency Without Over-Sharing

Create full transparency in multi-partner initiatives without the need for excessive data sharing across different organizations

Always-on

Get much more timely and significantly more authentic data points

Workplace Analytics

Boost insights into what is truly going on in projects, teams, departments, organization-wide

How Neelix Live Pulse Feedback Model Works

Creating Reflection Spaces

The foundation of the live pulse feedback model lies in the creation of reflection spaces for teams. These spaces serve as confidential channels where team members can provide their feedback, share insights, and voice concerns without fear of reprisal or judgment. These confidential spaces encourage open and honest communication via humour assisted, measurable, context-aware and reflective data points..

Confidentiality and Privacy

One of the primary concerns in implementing a feedback system is psychological safety. By using reflection spaces for each team, team members can share their thoughts and experiences without revealing their identity. This confidentiality encourages individuals to provide genuine feedback, leading to more accurate insights and a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities within the organization.

Aggregating Reflective Data

While psychological safety is critical, it is equally important to gather and analyze feedback at the organizational level. Live pulse feedback model on Neelix platform ensures that individual reflections remain private in the team's reflection space. However, our platform also allows data points to be aggregated without compromising the anonymity of participants. By collecting and analyzing this data, organizations can gain valuable insights into patterns, trends, and areas of improvement across different teams and departments.

Empowering Continuous Improvement

Neelix's live pulse feedback model goes beyond kudos and surveys. It encourages real-time feedback, enabling organizations to address issues promptly and make necessary adjustments. This approach fosters a culture of continuous improvement and empowers employees to actively participate in shaping their work environment. It also demonstrates that the organization values the opinions and experiences of its members, leading to increased engagement and satisfaction.

Promoting Trust, Collaboration and Leadership

By implementing a live pulse feedback model, organizations demonstrate their commitment to transparency, trust and collaboration. When people feel safe to share their thoughts and opinions, it paves the way for open dialogue and meaningful conversations. This leads to improved teamwork, innovation, and problem solving, as diverse perspectives and ideas are considered and integrated into decision making processes.

Leaders can boost their authenticity by publishing their reflections in the organizational team journal. In addition, leaders can significantly improve their ability to win hearts and minds by referring to experience insights offered by Neelix dashboards when delivering their message at Town Halls or other engagement channels.

Conclusion

Building transparency in the workplace is essential for fostering a positive and productive organizational culture. The live pulse feedback model offered by Neelix platform is the most innovative solution architected to balance psychological safety of individual teams and promote systems thinking across the firm. By implementing this model, organizations can gain valuable insights, drive continuous improvement, and nurture a culture of trust and collaboration. Embracing transparency not only benefits employees, but also contributes to the overall success of the organization.

If you are still hesitant about the path to transparency, consider this - your organization is already doing half the job by actively promoting kudos. You simply need to learn how to think effectively about challenges without creating a "complaints channel". Neelix platform empowers you to learn transparency at your own pace and with great psychological safety options.

Modern Workforce Connections and Performance Strategies

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Thu, 04 May 2023 00:05:09 GMT

Employee engagement challenges are a reflection of the balancing act between employee buy-in and productivity. The success and failure of engagement are measured by talent retention or quiet quitting, if it were possible to measure it somehow. The elephant in the room affecting the relationship between employees and employers is that productivity growth rate is slowing ( CEPR ). At the same time, the trend of quiet quitting is persistent. In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) related excitement is often perceived as the door into a future where productivity is not constrained by human capacity and employers expect to find better ways of dealing with employee engagement overall.

Some people embrace the proposition of AI promised advancements with open arms, some fear it. In my opinion, there is an important subtlety that is easy to overlook. Irrespective of the opinions on where the future lies, we can fail without dealing with that subtlety. In the guise of a court jester, I would like to offer an opinion on the best way of embracing the revolution happening right now.

Before talking about the future, it is important to acknowledge where we are today. Evidence suggests that the overall state of employee engagement today is mediocre at best. AI related productivity growth does not excuse us from dealing with human-centric root causes that are responsible for the current state of affairs.

Organizational behavior has evolved from autocratic to a blend of autocratic, custodial, and supportive . If the desired state is about embracing a fully collegial organizational behavior model, then this goal is probably hard to achieve for most as of today.

* Read more here on defintion of each organizational behavior model the relationship between Collegial model and Croup Intelligence.

In line with organizational behavior and advances in workplace technology, employees have been hand-held through the journey of "you need to be a good repetitive worker" to today's common career expectation of "you need to be capable of wearing multiple hats". High performing employees are resisting this trend and are saying they want something that allows self-actualisation. The introduction of AI technologies in the workplace merely adds to the pressure that employees are experiencing.

Throughout history, HR's main mission has been skewed towards operational concerns and a “proof of performance”. However, new business models, socio-economic changes, and talent retention pressures are forcing changes to the status quo. Organizations that can transition from “proof of performance” to "proof of value" will succeed where others fail.

Where we are today can be characterized by asking these three questions:

Is the collegial organizational behavior model achievable?
What does innovation in HR look like?
What does employee engagement look like?

Both employees and organizations often find themselves trapped in the status quo and are just not ready for concepts such as radical transparency.

We all know that change is hard. The gotcha, though, is that solutions can be very simple; we just need to stop catastrophizing. In the case of improvements to employee engagement, the solution is lost somewhere in the forest of misdirected expectations of surveys, assessments, and AI driven “Culture Operating System”. In all of these patterns, real conversation takes precedence just below "measurement." The left hemisphere dominates the right hemisphere of the organizational brain, which is why we see poor employee experience today - organizations are not really capable of being mindful. It is possible to argue that we live in a deluded world .

There are three key fears that translate into resistance for change:

Executives' fear of unpredictability affecting business value. Organizations fear elevating high performing employees into positions influencing strategy, and thus miss out on transformative change.
Second fear is rooted in the inability to let go of legacy management practices. This suffocates employee engagement at the root.
The third fear is one of the basic human emotions - the fear of looking vulnerable. This fear fuels the grip of surveys, tightly controlled narratives, and legacy management practices.

It is said that "fears you don't face, become your limitation". Resistance and fears, that I mentioned earlier, translate to the symptoms of poor state of leadership and employee engagement. Organizations that are not brave enough to reconsider their approach to learning how employees really feel will limit their business value potential.

In the absence of transparent and organization-wide reflective thinking, asking employees how they feel is a cynical exercise. Quiet quitting is rooted in this experience.

Symptoms of poor employee engagement can collectively be ascribed to a "Survey Trap" mindset. Your most important employees are turned off by surveys. Yet, most organizations feel that they must run surveys. Hence, we create a vortex of poor employee engagement via a survey trap.

It is typical for leaders to reflect on poor employee engagement through the lens of “I wish we could communicate better and more frequently”. However, what is the point of trying to hammer in a message, or a mantra, that employees fundamentally do not trust? Leaders often misunderstand the subtlety of employees' mistrust relating not to the message itself but the strategy of achieving the stated mission. At the same time, standard operating models do not allow employees to meaningfully influence strategic planning typically accomplished at leadership offsites.

Surveys are the default approach for attempting to give employees some voice and influence. However, given that only 33% of employees report being engaged ( Gallup ) and only 22% of surveyed companies obtain meaningful results from their employee engagement surveys (Enodo Global, 2022), it is fair to deduce that surveys cannot be the mainstay of engagement.

The more complex your challenges are, the less insightful or useful your survey results will be. It is important to be humble in understanding the personas of high, medium, and low level performers in the organization. High-performers expect continuous and adult conversations, as opposed to lagging information extraction exercises (aka surveys).

Organizations need to find a way of receiving context-aware data points without needing to run discreet surveys. Organizations, just like humans, can suffer from dementia. Lagging and cynical communication structures will result in poor outcomes (Conway’s Law).

Left brain influenced love with algorithmic message dissemination is the reason why " humanity lost the first encounter with the 'curating' AI " (Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, The A.I. Dilemma). We need to become mindful, which means we need to embrace complex sense-making models ( Integrating Chaos: Building Resilient Organizations with Chaos Theory by Paul Millerd). Only this way we, as humanity, can be relevant in the future.

Organizations need to stop expecting predictability to arise from message and mantra management. The adherence to perceived safety of legacy patterns, such as lagging discreet surveys, is limiting the ability to remain competitive. What is the value in doubling down on patterns that got us into trouble in the first place? In today’s complex world, the saying that “change is the only constant in life” is more pronounced than ever.

The future of employee engagement belongs to a universe of authentic, human-centric data points wrapped in the systemic honesty mechanisms that result in unavoidable conversation triggers. AI, if supplied with authentic data, can be a useful tool because it does not suffer from the loss of face. However the universe needs to be human-centric and psychologically safe.

There is a serious danger of doubling down on AI without addressing the need for real and continuous conversations. If you end up surrounded by silence and subversive compliance, then you have probably replaced the survey trap with some other trap.

There is a way of escaping the survey trap right now.

The solution is to replace discreet surveys with a Live Pulse model, whilst taking your teams through the journey of transparency. Most people say that "my organization is not ready for transparency". I always respectfully disagree because:

a) it is a lazy way of avoiding the need to face the music

b) actually, people already do half of the transparency job via the broadcasting of "kudos"

Live pulse feedback is a nurturing force that will eventually give rise to horizontal leadership.

Again, people typically fear the redistribution of power. However, a decentralized system is not about tinkering with how your matrix organization looks through the lens of an org chart. It is a mindset and culture that allows ideas and evidence to penetrate any barrier. This capability is key for authentic mutual accountability and alignment of all teams to a common goal.

By replacing the command-and-control system with a decentralized system driven by horizontal leadership, the organization will achieve "proof of value" and collegial organizational behavior.

Conclusion

The future of employee engagement, irrespective of the role of AI, depends on authenticity of data points that represent employee experiences. Winning organizations will be the ones that invest into a highly human centric Live Pulse model for information flow. Organizations that are failing their employees today will not find any magical alternatives through AI, hyper personalisation, or other approaches.

Post Scriptum

Enabling a Live Pulse employee engagement model can be a 5 minute job with the help of Neelix.IO.

Live Pulse does not entail throwing away operational HR processes. It is natural that organizations need to adhere to regulations and have structured approaches to management of employee journeys. Live Pulse is a complementary pattern that reduces reliance on discrete surveys and boosts authenticity of experiential data points, and does so without the need to install “surveillance” systems.

If you aim to establish a psychologically safe culture, steer away from solutions that trawl emails, MS teams posts, calendars in order to algorithmically calculate the Team Morale measure. A better pattern is to leverage the “push” method adopted by Neelix because it builds a data lake of human-centric and humor-assisted reflections of what people truly feel. Interactive infographics from Neelix empower leaders with an easy 30,000 ft view of employee morale, and provide insights into persistent trends, correlations and inter-dependencies between themes.

Overall journey typically consists of two phases:

Phase 1 - The awakening of measurable data points :

Reduce HR overheads by running fewer surveys and assessments; instead, implement a Live Pulse model for employee feedback that goes beyond kudos. Do this right now. This approach is highly human-centric and, in the first phase, specifically targets high and medium performers.
Complement live pulse feedback with humorous "roasting" sessions. Humor and psychological safety are critical; as the saying goes - "if you plan to be honest with someone, make sure they laugh”.

In about a year you will establish rails for effective and alive transparency, and potentially arrest talent retention challenges.

Phase 2 - Storytelling and transformative inspect-and-adapt patterns :

Measurable feedback, discussed openly, will start creating a de-facto decentralized system. For example, horizontal leadership will begin emerging organically without the need to revisit organizational structures
Allow employees to build and maintain a value tree depiction of how an individual team's objectives and perspectives map to the commonly agreed top organizational goal.

Webinar : Effective Transparency at Workplace

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:15:24 GMT

25 Nov - 9 Dec, 2022

Webinar : Paths Towards Effective Transparency

Topics:

How the concept of immutable transparency fits within team vibrancy and talent retention strategies
ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) trends related to transparency
Pathways for introducing “push feedback” whilst achieving psychological safety
Use case about “Live Pulse” achieving systemic positive change
How Neelix.IO capabilities integrate into existing ways of working without creating new overheads
How Neelix.IO complies with modern data security enterprise requirements

At the end of Webinar, we provide a pack that will help your organization with making a fully informed decision about the benefits of “Live Pulse” feedback flow and Neelix.IO offering.

Thank you all who participated!

HR & LD Innovation and Tech Fest

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 11:04:54 GMT

8-9 November, 2022

The Neelix.IO team had an incredible time participating in the HR & LD Innovation Tech Fest, exchanging insights with numerous visitors to our booth about the transformative power of smart workplace transparency. Our conversations delved into the immense opportunities that a real-time employee feedback loop can unlock, fostering a more engaging and responsive workplace environment.

Real-time feedback is a crucial driver for nuanced insights, enhancing not only organizational decisions but also overall performance. This continuous flow of timely feedback ensures that every voice is heard, and insights are swiftly acted upon, leading to a more vibrant culture and improved employee experience. By tapping into real-time sentiment, organizations can make better strategic decisions and develop a more inclusive, enjoyable environment.

Our discussions highlighted that when employees feel valued and understood, their engagement and productivity naturally increase, resulting in a thriving, cohesive organizational culture. We are thrilled to continue exploring and implementing these innovative solutions with our partners and clients, striving to create workplaces where everyone feels truly heard and appreciated.

Thank you to everyone who stopped by our booth—we look forward to future collaborations and continued innovation in the HR space!

Building uncompromising governance

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 08:04:34 GMT

Is it common to discover that organisational performance, culture, or health of specific projects is worse than reported? The opinion expressed below proposes a solution for how individual leaders and boards can deal with both intentional and unintentional distortion of reality.

Problem Statement

As a confirmation of the proverb that "the truth always comes out," it is common for corporations to issue “restatements” (examples are failed projects, or belated realisation of a strategy failing to achieve goals). This form of low corporate governance quality originates at Individual and Group levels of governance activities. Approximately 98% of restatements are linked to unintentional misreporting ( Patrick Velte, 2021 ).

What makes good governance is normally discussed through the lens of board independence, diversity, ownership structure, CEO characteristics, remuneration, and oversight. Given that misreporting and resulting restatements are a domain of poor oversight, let's focus on this perspective.

The trick with restatements is that they “are mainly perceived and applied as a proxy for low corporate governance quality because restatements are often linked with initial undetected misreporting rather than to a subsequent successful detection of misreporting”. Such linkage indicates ineffective audit. Research seems to indicate that audit and oversight alone cannot guarantee prevention of integrity issues. Governance breaches are often reported to be rooted in “overconfidence” of individuals, and sometimes even the Board ( Deloitte, 2016 , Good Governance driving Corporate Performance?)

In the opinion of the writer, governance breaches can be crystallised within two root-causes:

Individual managerial overconfidence driven by politically motivated self-preservation and toxic positivity . Because organisations are social constructs, they are susceptible to the same fallibility as individuals;
Group think and confirmation bias that result in filtered, blocked or mutated information flow.

These root causes negate effectiveness of monitoring via audit. Yet, “corporate governance can be classified as a monitoring tool in line with shareholders’ interests of ethical management behaviour “ ( Patrick Velte, 2021 ). Whilst this definition of the function is true, today’s implementation of audit is a very conflicting approach because the management stack is expected to report on itself via “sponsored” (employed or paid) audit. None of the known C-suite positions are able to resolve this conflict.

It is common for managers to express a view that “we paid for multiple audits over the years, and all reports relayed that our governance was good”. Which begs the question - if multiple audits were reported (or communicated to stakeholders) as “green”, then why the sudden significant restatement. There must have been issues with either scope and / or independence of the audit. Inability to take responsibility for identification, reporting, and steering of core issues early is the ultimate proof of ineffective governance. Bias and toxic positivity prevent some leaders from acting early.

Whilst there is no silver bullet, it is important to be aware of grey areas that can create misguided, over-confidence based gambles:

One of issues deeply embedded into low quality governance is that managerial attitude of “I know better” is prioritised well above systematic and authentic employee engagement. Richard P. Feynman’s warning still has not truly landed - “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool”.

Solution

The solution for preventing governance breaches is the concept of “systemic honesty” where all sources of information are always processed through reflective patterns. “If we want to be leaders of impact, we must learn to reflect” ( Carly Fiorina , 2022, Advice for Independent Thinking).

Shying away from stress-tested reflection on reality only delays the inevitable. How can leaders verify if things are truly as reported?

Here are 9 specific recommendations for building uncompromising governance:

Conclusion

Low quality governance is inexcusable and improvements are achievable today.

“The ‘good’ governance … requires collaboration, objective oversight and empowering alternate views ” - ( Deloitte ).

The solution is to:

treat middle managers and team leads as a horizontal leadership group
give employees an avenue to “push” measurable and context-aware feedback
introduce a virtual role of the “Chief Reality Reflection” Officer to the Board

The Corporate Executive Board (CEB) estimates that 50% to 70% of executives fail within 18 months of taking on a role. One of the key reasons is: "They don’t prioritise listening and learning — and fail at managing change". It is possible that the mirror image of this statistic is that only 48% of employees see their company leadership as high quality ( GLF ).

9 specific recommendations from above are designed to provide a systemically resilient solution for effective transparency:

Transparency is a new transient competitive advantage and should be inward looking as much as it is being considered in terms of societal impact - impact on shareholders and employees is at least as important
Improve ESG disclosures in order to stay ahead of the curve

Sustainable future begins with the capability to prevent restatements and failure.

Building Sharp Organizations

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 12:42:24 GMT

So what exactly does it mean to be sharp? Just like humans, organizations are also susceptible to developing dementia. Organizational effectiveness can drop to unhealthy levels as a result of restricted neural paths needed for communication, decision making, and maturity building.

Here are few examples and symptoms of restricted engagement paths:

As with the human brain, organizations run the risk of memory and intellectual decline when politics or poor culture propagate systemic problems. Organizational dementia is akin to lost connections and neurons. Lost neurons are synonymous with disengaged employees. The result is a dull and lifeless culture and an inefficient business.

Source: sharpbrains.com ; CreditUAB researcher David Vance

Personal enthusiasm of executives can sometimes make it hard to accept the possibility of a simultaneously dull organizational culture. If there are no protective rails outside individual skills and personal traits of managers, then even well-intentioned passion cannot prevent cognitive decline of the organization. As Richard P. Feynman said - “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool”.

Solution

Consider the following guidelines for a lively and energetic culture:

Create an echo system of transparent, unadulterated feedback flows, as opposed to bilateral conversations with “trusted” / “important” employees
Reduce reliance on periodic surveys
Prioritize the trait of being teachable as a key cultural driver for a healthy social contract

If you believe in transparency, you must believe employees can handle transparency. This means allowing spontaneous and reflective feedback at will. Radical transparency is the best method of implementing such a solution because it provides measurable and context-aware data points without the cost and bias of surveys.

Beware Of Fads

It is trendy to include a consideration for psychological safety when talking about employee engagement. You should proceed with caution to avoid suppressing the benefits of radical transparency. The word radical is arguably misleading. A better name for the concept is Systemic Honesty. Psychological safety is simply about being able to reflect on things without fear of reprisal. An effective mechanism for systemic honesty is humor. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, "If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh..."

Implementing Change

Implementing radical transparency is fairly easy:

Step 1 - No change: It is already a common pattern for employees to have threads on Slack or Microsoft Teams where they bottom out important issues and complement the discussion via Giphy. The information flow is already in place - it is simply not being converted into systems thinking and reflective organizational learning.

Step 2 - Plug in a Smart Transparency platform : Empower employees to convert conclusions on threads or watercooler discussions into measurable and context-aware reflections at any point of time; there is no need to wait for surveys.

Benefits

The three key benefits of a transparent organizational journal:

Reflections are authentic because they are not processed by AI - context and impact are stamped by real people
Cultivate and preserve humanized expression of feelings - team humor and culture are important to breed trust
Visualizations of measurable data points enhance conversations and feed innovation

Authentic transparency reduces the need for escalations. It protects against organizational dementia by speeding up communications and short-circuiting reality reflection blockers. Improve people’s lives by reducing the need or effort of “proving the point”. Radical transparency gives data its own voice - you can think of it as an always-on Chief Reality Reflection Officer.

Embrace this real-time and measurable way of engagement to cultivate a fast thinking and adaptable team.

Innovating Employee Engagement

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 03:55:38 GMT

Employee engagement is a crucial health metric of any organization as an ongoing competitive advantage, as well as during stressful times and disruptions such as the pandemic. This space is talked about by most through the lens of employee surveys. However, only 22% of companies get useful results from their surveys. As a leader, you may be missing out on an important data stream.

Surveys, no matter how well intentioned, are a statistical sampling of team morale. Employee engagement, on the other hand, is a continuous behavioral process akin to a radio wave that relays how emotionally invested people are in your organization.

Research into survey challenges provides important food for thought:

Employee engagement surveys should turn talking points into action items and action items into tangible outcomes. However, since surveys are not practical if they are carried out more than once a year, the chances of leaders missing out on key systemic data points is very high.
Any given survey never tells the full story. A timed series of surveys is a prohibitively expensive way of measuring organizational culture; it doesn’t provide the full story and results in skewed data.
Industry wide, only 42% of organizations say they are willing to take action on every single survey question. This resonates with a natural distrust of surveys because they are a form of a top-down communication.
Surveys do not offer true anonymity . If you want a survey to be contextually accurate, then some data will have to be revealed. You cannot trick smart individuals into trusting a survey by being clever with the construction of questions. Remember, survey bias is impossible to avoid because it arises even through the lens of who asks the question.
Silent quitting is a symptom of faulty employee engagement and surveys are an anti-pattern for preventing or measuring employee retention.
Insincerely pretending to care is a big problem. Yes, good senior leaders and HR are predisposed to care, “within constraints”. However, surveys are a part of the escalate-and-act process loop. Intervention patterns are a recipe for a perception of “too little too late”. Even if you mean well, the more you are invested in surveys, the less vibrant the organizational culture becomes.

The ultimate goal of employee engagement is to achieve high talent retention and healthy velocity of change within the organization. The fundamental root cause of poor talent retention is not bad managers, as commonly reported, but stale organizational culture ( read more in this blog ).

The necessary innovation is available today, and it does not require radical change or effort. All you need to do is to reduce reliance on traditional surveys-based approaches and transition to a real-time transparency approach.

There are only two things you need to change, and neither of these require significant effort.

As we all know, nothing replaces face to-face conversation. Implement a real-time, measurable, and context-aware feedback system as a companion. This capability exposes more than just kudos. The data stream provides continuous, factual, and multi-facet data points about what could be done differently across teams and business processes.

Radical transparency makes “ongoing conversation” approach practical at large or fast growing organizations where executives cannot pretend to be truly available to all.

Just as importantly, radical transparency is the best pattern for staying in sync within the remote-first realities of the modern workplace.

Flip your mindset and approach to extracting continuous improvements and social contract realignment. Do not force each employee to tell management what is not working. Instead, facilitate an authentic and regular “team culture” conversation events (not to be confused with team building). During these events employees stress test their own needs and wants, and brainstorm meaningful ideas for change that promote company OKRs. The effort for facilitating such events is significantly less than organizing and processing surveys.

Whilst it is easy for some employees to say what they want in their own context (for instance more training in leadership or other skills), HR and leaders need to be wary of the fact that surveys are biased not only by questions, but also by who requested the survey. Employees will often say what they think management wants to hear / or can tolerate. 75% of responders are generally conformists.

Team culture events , when done well, prevent confirmation bias and unleash the power of creativity and ability to connect the dots as a team. Managers are a team member, like everyone else. Therefore, brainstormed ideas will have much greater connection to grassroots because the action was not a result of “aggregated” survey results.

“90% of good ideas don't come from the executive suite” - Professor Richard Jolly | London Business School .

Surveys are a very poor substitute for daily face-to-face communication. Radical transparency is a data stream that accompanies direct connections between people across the organization.

The benefits of authentic and measurable transparency at workplace are:

Leaders win greater trust by referencing latest unadulterated reflections during town halls or one-to-one meetings, as opposed to “triaged” challenges. Measureable and contextual information boosts the capability to mentor.
It is easier to win the hearts and minds of employees because feedback exchange is stress tested by the grassroots themselves.
Team leads find it easier to communicate the need for change because real-time contextual data speaks for itself and feeds into a uniform interpretation of reality.
Coaches and change managers can monitor in real-time progress and correlations without the need to introduce any overheads on teams or management.
Human Resources benefits from a lower number of escalations because teams embrace self-correcting behavioral patterns, an intrinsic expectation of truly agile environments.
Talent retention boosted by the ability to have team-wide honest conversations, and systems-thinking being the mechanism for achieving company OKRs. Employees rarely have issues with OKRs themselves, but they need to be freed from the constraining factor of the “I know better” attitude exhibited by traditional management practices.

Systems thinking starts with "we should...", and is followed by measurable and context aware reflections that go far beyond kudos. Workplace transparency solution offered by Neelix.IO empowers organizations to leap seamlessly into the age of new age management practices.

Truth to be told, everything new is well-forgotten old. “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so” - Mark Twain.

Network effect of authentic transparency at workplace

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 07:44:55 GMT

The challenge

As a responsible leader, you are probably spending as much time as possible visiting teams or testing the true state of affairs in some other ways. In the context of geo distributed organisations and the remote workforce reality, this is not an easy task.

There is also a very fundamental problem - as the number of teams, the organization structure and the number of projects increase, the complexity of human interaction and the general culture of the company increases as well !

Is your organization spending significant efforts on talent retention, acquisition, and overall performance of teams?

Are you still struggling with the bell-shaped human competency curve superimposed on the complexity of human interactions, feelings, and personal goals?

Do you feel that there are fads when it comes to work culture, and that nothing can replace direct interaction, authenticity and character building?

The solution

Organisations invest into all kinds of pipelines, e.g. continuous delivery and other, for the purpose of simplification, greater agility, and reduction of costs. The work culture is no different.

Grassroots experiences should be thought of as a pipeline. Real-time capture of experiences is not simply about feelings (e.g. expressions of joy or being ticked off). This flow of information is factual and captures both feelings and specific technical / business process effects.

Transparency does not resolve existing issues overnight. Leaders and teams need to work together on breaking through the walls of perspective and mutual accountability challenges.

It is typical to observe varying reaction to transparency:

Some groups of people will remain silent because they may not feel influential enough
Some other groups of people will be significantly louder than others
Someone else, normally at the tip of the bell curve, will choose to stay somewhat quiet - e.g. wait and see

This is normal and expected.

What will happens as you keep investing into the safe transparency pipeline:

Most capable people’s mindset will change as you start plugging in harder data points into the real-time information flow - for instance flaky process (connect CI and capture Red Masters into experiences flow), or anything else that affects velocity, planning, alignment, customer experience, etc.
The loudest people will either find better ways to convince the organization to change, or they will learn to deal with the claim or of less valuable ideas
Quiet underachievers will tag along to specific experiences and build confidence in being more engaging

The trick of authentic transparency benefits is that you can have org structure complex, yet simple cultural and political environment.

Learn more how you can get started .

The Network Effect

The network effect of transparency is such that unidirectional and clustered communications become exposed to each other. The result is a greater relationship between perspectives. This interconnection of perspectives is powerful - common context is the one that combats confirmation bias and Ivory towers.

Command-and-control with limited transparency

Clustered perspectives
Lack of common galvanising context and a sense of journey

Effective transparency with systems thinking network effect

Ability to connect the dots and form a common context
Build the culture of a common journey
Visible cause and effect of mutual accountability
Trusted picture because data points are pushed directly from the grassroots without lag or gate-keeping

How to identify and fix toxic organizational culture

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 06:31:09 GMT

Toxic culture is a misalignment between stated values and principles versus evidenced behaviors and character traits. If a group of people choose a particular set of values and live by them, then their internal culture flourishes. An external observer’s disagreement with a set of stated values however, is a different socio-humanitarian topic.

Typically, three behaviors give rise to a toxic culture:

Politics or lack of maturity, which prevents a transparent acknowledgement of undesirable behaviors
Flouting agreed values and principles
Rigid enforcement rules for promotion of said principles and values

Signs of a toxic organizational culture:

When employees are saying that something is mediocre or outright wrong, yet nothing changes from year to year
When your organization keeps repeating past mistakes with future clients
When there is a mismatch between wants and needs (for instance when people desire collegial behavior model , but the basis of organization is authoritarian);
When strategy discounts external complexity and internal capabilities

How to balance niceness vs reality checking

Simply being pleasant and agreeable, or an environment of ‘niceness’ is a limiting way of regulating organizational culture. Such ‘niceness’ is often just a veneer of civility, a mere nod to psychological safety, which falsely signals inclusion, collaboration and high performance. Team environments need to be mature, which means being open to tough conversations and having effective conflict resolution patterns.

A collegial and respectful environment is an outcome of a healthy culture. It should not result from tolerance of toxic behaviors such as avoidance of difficult conversations, passive-aggressive behaviors, inability to hold people accountable, or keeping the peace through tribalism.

The risk of distorting reality is the primary threat to culture. This occurs when niceness is ranked higher among desirable behaviors. Leaders are the ultimate recipients of reality check issues :

Senior leaders can be misled (if toxic behaviors hinder unadulterated data flow)
Senior leaders may misrepresent factual reality (if the information flow is modeled around avoidance of painful facts)

Anecdotal evidence suggests that niceness can mutate into inability to challenge people, both vertically and horizontally. Managing up is one of the typical negative behaviors, but similar happens within teams also.

“You know you’re in a toxic environment when... People use the word ‘fairness,’ when in reality, managing the appearance of fairness becomes the job.” ― Richie Norton

A necessary safeguard against this toxic pattern is to explore and measure what you do not know, and to test if what you do know is true. Radical transparency and psychological safety are the best patterns for ensuring reality checks are never compromised.

How to build an authentic organizational culture

Manifestation of toxicity through a mismatch between stated values and actual behaviors is not unusual. Let’s face it - humans are fallible by nature. It would be pretentious (inherently toxic) for any individual, team or organization to pretend to be infallible all the time.

Organizations that are prepared to be transparent about rusty or inefficient pipelines earn the badge of being thought of as authentic by both employees and partners.

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self” – Ernest Hemingway.

To think of authenticity as a soft quality is a serious mistake. Authenticity is measurable and therefore can be a real driver for efficiency, as well as cultural change.

Evidence of a healthy organizational culture:

Quiet confidence prevents kudos from disproportionately overshadowing reflections about ongoing challenges. A ratio of kudos vs grassroots-driven reflections on challenges is an easy measure to obtain with Neelix.IO.
“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”– Harry S Truman
Authenticity takes hold only when real-time transparency is embraced. Evidence-based and measurable reflections lead to real-time inspect-and-adapt processes that, in turn, unlock the “ask for forgiveness later” culture where right things are done for the right reasons
Systemic honesty (supported by radical transparency) handles bad apples seamlessly and prevents major breaches of process or values

Conclusion

Reality checking and authenticity are about systematic recognition of issues and timely adjustment. Radical transparency is the best approach because it keeps leaders and teams honest, and helps avoid the Dead Horse scenarios.

Learn more about the measurable and psychologically safe transparency approach provided by the Neelix Employee Engagement platform.

Martin Luther King Jr. said in his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail “…there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.” Don’t cover that up in your efforts to be nice. Channel and manage the tension. That’s real kindness."

Culture Matters: Embracing Authenticity, Systems Thinking and Chaos

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Fri, 27 May 2022 03:34:45 GMT

Are you faced with the challenge of changing organizational culture from an autocratic to collegial model? Do your employees want you to ensure that “we do not become yet another boring collective”?

Read on for an opinion on navigating through these challenges.

Importance of authenticity when thinking about organizational culture goals

Let’s face it - reality is complex. In addition, human beings are the most complex and defining constituents of an organization. Given this complexity, we must adopt a non-linear approach when trying to understand the true challenges of organizational culture.

Beware of superficial application of rituals. It is very tempting to view transformation initiatives through the lens of “we want to achieve an ideal state - let’s work on resolving specific challenges”. However, in complex systems there are more factors at play than state, and all of them are evolving simultaneously.

The goal of the “ideal” state may be unachievable. In this case, worrying too much about the goal may be a misdirection of effort. The simplest example of this trap is evidenced by how some enterprises interpreted the agilist mindset. Many in the industry have made it a mission to be seen as agile, for example, adopting various permutations of agile rituals. However, decision-making behaviors and cultural mindset remained static. The result turned into a colloquial joke between scientific method evangelists that “being agile is different to doing agile”.

A similar lens can be applied to the journey of cultural change. The idea described in “ How We Build Winning Organizations ” proposes that successful culture is about openness to trial multiple strategies (failing and succeeding ones). It is often wasteful to tinker with organizational structure or mandatory organization-wide initiatives.

Tinkering with rules limits options. Instead, “the project” organizational change should be defined by a mission statement “all rules are sacrificable at any point in time - principles, values and spirit always overrule”. Inadvertently, this is the true definition of authenticity.

Here is why authenticity is best approach to aligning everyone to organizational goals:

You start with a self-correcting culture - remember that initially perceived goals may become a red herring over time

You avoid the trap of rules that kill culture - people are empowered to stay true to their own personality, regardless of the pressure that they're under to act otherwise

Due to #1 and #2 - you achieve highest talent retention, and create a positive feedback loop that makes culture stronger

The alternative to an authenticity driven culture is the Dead horse scenario.

Illustration: Kevin Nicole ; Source: Unknown

Inject systems thinking with the principles driven culture

Behaviors are the glue and the signaling mechanisms in any organization. In such a system, organizational change is a process of discovery; principles should not be broken to suit one agenda, but can evolve through a process of self-correction. The process of discovery can be both complex and simple at the same time. This is where system thinking is invaluable.

Organizations need to learn how to operate at the “edge of chaos” - sort of like how the human brain works (which is not necessarily a bad thing ). Here are the two simple recommendations:

Beware of rules-based initiatives because they have an element of an artificial construct. For instance, putting the entire organization through sales training will create stress. Turning up the “sales dial” to the maximum without ensuring adequate “delivery capability” is bad for company goals and bad for culture.

Embrace flexible behaviors and use evidence-driven method for creating a psychologically safe culture where all decisions are reversible.

Put employees in the driving seat - this is the untapped capability to actually manage the complexity. "90% of good ideas don't come from the executive suite" - Handling Complexity , Professor Richard Jolly, London Business School.

What is the alternative to principles based systems thinking? We see business leaders flogging a Dead horse; avoid being that organization.

Read on if you are still worried that packing away rules can lead to chaos.

Put away your worries about chaos

It is fair to ask if lack of rules might lead to chaos. The simple answer is that “eyes on, hands-off” does not lead to lack of direction - this has been explained by the Chaos theory. There is sufficient understanding that chaos does not mean anarchy.

Experienced leaders recognize that “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so“ ( a quote most often attributed to Mark Twain). Having a metric of what you do not know, and discovering early if what you know is not quite so, is critical. The best answer to this conundrum is real-time radical transparency because it reduces reliance on discreet, costly and bias-affected surveys:

Embrace chaos, it provides the impetus for change and actionable data points that help bridge differences in perspectives and align everyone in the organization.

Complement HR operational processes with a fit-for-purpose radical transparency system to inject systems thinking fuel and catalysts.

The alternative to embracing chaos is sticking with timeworn operational processes of broadcasting kudos, callouts and providing channels for complaints. This approach leads us back to the Dead horse scenario.

Managing chaos is the process of continuous design for complexity.

No single leader can force people to change their style, communication skills and behavioral traits overnight. Instead, leaders should provide rails for the organization to ease into a mode where chaos is embraced and managed through systems thinking. Smart transparency is the rails.

Designing for complexity means establishing a system of reversible decisions governed by authenticity and critical self-reflection. Whether this concept is work-able for your organization depends purely on openness to change. The how depends on context and behavioral traits - consider roles and use-cases summarized by Paul Millard in “ Integrating Chaos: Building Resilient Organizations with Chaos Theory ”.

If Chaos were to offer an opinion about the marriage of authenticity and systems thinking, it would probably say: “Thou shalt not believe in ‘isms’, and shalt support each other through anything that life throws at you”.

How to Build Winning Organizations

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Mon, 02 May 2022 10:18:45 GMT

Success velocity of your organization is dependent on the energy mix and how you deliver it. This blog discusses the steering of organizational behavior and its impact on competitive advantage.

Beware of best practices

The "cultural pot" and circumstances of each organization are unique. Scholars have long recognized that "best market practice" is a disservice to management science. Best practice can be addictive because it's easy to follow. However, blindly following best practice formulas can dumb down organizations and increase reaction time when things go wrong.

Despite the widespread dissemination of the systems thinking concept, it hasn’t infected the management community as a whole. The reason is that everyone is too busy following "best practice," which creates a sense of relief by limiting options. True "systems thinking" is about expanding choices to solve a problem.

Beware of copying approaches to OKRs, agile rituals, or even commonly accepted operational HR patterns for employee performance reviews and feedback loops.

How to turn the odds in your favor

Fixing the wrong problem results in high opportunity costs and longer term impact to competitive advantage. In the information age, any organization should be presumed as operating within a continuous cycle of reinvention. Perpetual cash cows being a thing of the past, any successful race (to an IPO, or a major product milestone) is a complex journey that will require continuous organizational evolution.

Odds for success increase dramatically if one is capable of identifying and acknowledging the right problem that requires fixing, and is not constrained to use a single strategy. “Any one strategy is more likely to lose than win, but by alternating effectively between strategies (even losing ones), you can swing the odds in your favor” - David Stark, How to turn the odds in your favor when you are playing a losing game .

The trick lies in the ability to generate several alternative strategies and work with them in a non-destructive way (procedurally and culturally).

Environment where optionality exists

Managing culture is like cooking - you must stir and taste without bias. Mixing too fast may prevent some of the natural gelation processes from completing. Stirring too slow may cause important ingredients to burn to the bottom.

Legacy systems

Management determines how much stirring occurs in an organization. A manager with an industrialized view of the world, is like a carburetor in a car. The carburetor determines how much oxygen is let through into the system. As such, organizations that follow the legacy model of organizational behavior are defined by the network of carburetors.

The optionality for change in command-and-control systems is inherently limited (even if each manager is a brilliant individual). If the organization needs to go faster, a carburetor in the hierarchy is forced to “throw resources” at the problem. This does not change the nature of the problem. Even if a project makes it across the line, the sunk waste and number of kittens drowned in the process is sometimes unconscionable.

Whilst managers demand worst-to-best execution options from subordinates, the system is inherently incapable of generating the right set of options because people, naturally, create safety umbrellas. The resulting componentized operating model offers fewer options.

New age management systems

Stirring of culture and strategy options in new age organizations is way more multi-directional and open to challenge. While there still are people wearing management hats, true leaders drive their teams to constantly move to the next interesting problem, as opposed to being stuck in “more of the same”. In this context, great managers are defined by the ability to manage themselves out and do the same for the best talent in the organization.

Multiple strategy options exist naturally and are being tested continuously, even before the next challenge comes around. This is because the motivation is not just to achieve the next big milestone, but to create rails for a series of opportunities.

The environment where optionality is healthy is undeniably defined by the collegial organizational behavior model - learn more here .

How to generate healthy optionality

What you need is the systematic ability to generate execution options that can be easily implemented at the grassroots level. This means that systems thinking must be built into the DNA of an organization.

Foster a winning team culture by putting employees in the driving seat of radical transparency supported by psychological safety . Organizations should embrace real-time feedback as a natural force for stirring and mixing perspectives, instead of relying on discreet surveys and stale operational HR patterns.

If a good leader can identify problems and make decisions, why do you really need radical transparency? The answer is quite simple: If you want to make the most of alternative strategies, you must engage a team. "90% of good ideas don't come from the executive suite" - Handling Complexity with Professor Richard Jolly, London Business School.

Any seasoned leader must remember "the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool" - Richard Feynman.

The rationale behind putting grassroots at the driving seat of generating options is rooted in the way we test reality. As Mark Twain is often credited to say: “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

Only an unadulterated mix of perspectives can remove the tinted glasses of confirmation bias.

Growth mindset for organizations

It is important to acknowledge one’s limitations. Expecting too much from pseudo teams may be unrealistic. At the same time, this is just a stage. Becoming a real or even an exceptional team, is a journey through the maturity curve .

Winning organizations are built via critical self-reflection; it is a key mechanism for retaining talent and creating alternative strategies.

How to Fix Information Flows and Build a Collegial Culture

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 14:16:11 GMT

The Landscape of Organizational Behavior

The approach to corporate culture depends on the model of organizational behavior sponsored by management. Plenty has been written about the four basic models - autocratic, custodial, supportive, collegial.

A broader view of corporate culture is a shift from command-and-control methods of work to horizontal leadership. Within the horizontal leadership model, a manager is not a traditional boss - management becomes a distributed function within a pool of mutual accountability. This, does not negate the need for great leadership but emphasises the need for systems thinking.

In this article, we describe two critical path steps required to embed systems thinking into the DNA of organizations if you are trying to move away from the command and control structure.

Start How You Intend to Finish

Corporate culture transformation initiatives are intended to deliver an effect of flipping the magnetic field from negative to positive. Most would agree that the bi-polar balancing act only creates stress.

Find yourself on this map off autoctractic vs collegial behavior, and start the transition how you intend to finish:

Benefits of a Collegial Culture

Organizations shaped by autocratic and custodial models are influenced by all the traits of top management - these are copied down, both good and bad.

The nature of a collegial organizational behavior model is about peer-driven mutual accountability - a system where no single individual or agenda can hijack the organization, or a particular team. This does not mean abandoning leadership or failing to set ambitious goals. This is the new age management paradigm whereby the best manager is the one who can manage him/herself out.

The collegial culture is defined by an “environment” with minimal politics and reduced waste on unimportant things. This approach is the secret sauce for resolving all fundamental issues related to culture:

leaders will have more time to develop a deeper vision
employees are enthusiastic because they are treated like adults
the organization is more likely to come up with interesting problems to solve

Operational benefits of a collegial model are the reduced drag coefficient and greater talent retention. Strategically, you are removing limits on competitive advantage by the means of a real-time inspect-and-adapt.

The Single Most Important Change

The worst change strategy is to double-down on patterns that drove you to where you are today. In the context of cultural transformation, such patterns are:

tickering with org structure
top-down messaging intended to deliver transparency
“kudos” systems
employee engagement surveys

Given that the collegial model is defined by partnership and self-actualization, legacy operational HR strategies will not work. Successful transformation requires a new and bolder approach that focuses on three fundamental factors:

authenticity of feedback loops
critical thinking
systems thinking

In an employee-management partnership environment, critical thinking and systems thinking capabilities are a result of a healthy multi-directional, and flat, information flow. For instance, there would be systemic factors preventing mutation of information as it flows from the grassroots, to team leader, to senior executives, and then back. Therefore, the key to successful culture is the higiene of flow information.

By resolving the issue of unadulterated information flow, organizations will find themselves naturally operating within a collegial organizational behavior model.

Leadership Factors Influencing Information Flow

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so” - Mark Twain.

Executives have to triage opinions in order to distill information into factual data points. Key challenge is that teams, more often than not, feel that their perspectives and feelings are mutated (perhaps whilst navigating through some challenging negotiation process).

In a traditional behavior model, executives and HR hold town halls to deliver a crafted message in order to educate and “be transparent”. In a collegial model, leaders hold town halls for the purpose of a celebration, or a joint acknowledgement of inability to affect circumstances - e.g. conversation is a result of executives reporting on the outcome of something that employees are already enthusiastically aware, and trust that their perspective did not get mutated in decision making process.

The reality check on this academic proposition is the fact the world outside company boundaries is far from collegial. Therefore, senior executives will always bring enough surprises to the team. However, internal horizontal partnership culture will ensure that trust between employees and management is never eroded. Under traditional model, trust is always eroded over time, no matter how large the information mutation may be.

Irrespective of the model, leaders will be subject to Richard Feynman’s challenge - "the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."

Leaders need to be armed with context aware information (in the form of major data points and persistent trends)
Leaders must not misinterpret their function of protecting the team - one cannot simply take away the pain if systemic issues are persistent (pain management is not protection)
Leaders should be careful when over-trusting “battle-tested” friends for check and balance - anyone can be wrong
Leaders should remember that a single ‘no’ can be worth thousands of ‘yes’s’ - 75% of people tend to be conformists and won't openly challenge a company's strategy.

How to Resolve Information Flow Issues

Information flow should be comprised of contextually aware, measurable data points that represent unadulterated reflections made by employees. This type of information flow goes well beyond the traditional “kudos” posts. Similarly, surveys are not suitable for facilitating a stream of information - points of view will always be skewed by bias and time-dependent.

The choice of information flow pattern is pre-determined by the acceptance criteria associated with the collegial model - partnership, self-actualization and self-discipline. Radical transparency is the solution for these criteria because it stands for real time and transparent stream of reflections with immutable out of the box insights available to all employees. The only extra consideration is psychological safety .

Start with Authenticity

Modern organizations need to adapt to information flow being multi-directional and asynchronous. This is the result of distributed and remote-first teams. It is a fact of life that no leader can be everywhere at once. Also, it is pretentious to expect that any employee can just knock on the door of the CEO. Yet, the leadership and employees need to experience “the real” each other.

Success of the collegial model is dependent on "the real you":

Managers need to learn how to be vulnerable
Employees need to learn how to relay experience in way that forms actionable data points and revealing trends

Radical transparency is the mechanism for knowing how each party behaves in a stressful situation and deals with complexity. The real gotcha here is that there is no real longer term alternative. If you do not support radical transparency, then employees simply descend into water-cooler, behind-the-back and effectively unmanaged opinion forming groups. Companies with such cultures become dinosaurs - e.g. lose talent and competitive advantage overtime.

Transparency is not an "educational" process. Instead, it is the process of climbing the mountain during which all team members, irrespective of seniority, drop their mask. Earning authenticity credits is much more important than capturing kudos points.

Systemic transparency helps the parts to see the whole. It is important to reduce reliance on discrete surveys because they leave room for bias and a veil of secrecy. This statement is not intended to rubbish surveys as they are useful when used appropriately and sparsely.

Evolve Critical Thinking Together

As a segway from authenticity, employees within the enterprise should be able to question anything. Ritualized agile, periodic surveys and complaints systems are the least effective mechanisms for steering culture.

By choosing the oath of real-time, measurable and immutable feedback exchange organizations create a pattern and culture of critical thinking (as opposed to a periodic hurd-and-shepherd type of event).

Evidence-based change is the holy grail desired in all organizational behavior models. However, only the collegial culture can deliver the full promise. This is due to relatively low bias and the removal of barriers to challenging preconceived notions and scrutinizing with new evidence and understanding.

The Holy Grail of Collective Systems Thinking

Thoughts and feelings, that traveled through the authenticity filter and survived the test of critical thinking, enter the universe of systems thinking - “the process of viewing the world and reality in terms of interconnectivity and synthesis rather than only singling things out and analyzing merely through deduction”.

Only collegial answers the question why “ autonomous, self-organizing teams don’t work ” (Michael K Sahota). Modern organizations and startups should focus on enabling inter-related responsible teams - e.g. focus on how power is shared through decisions.

Learn more about complimenting HR platforms with a turn-key ready transparency solution.

Better Ways of Working - Systems Thinking Lens

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 10:22:11 GMT

Introduction

Organizations are undergoing an accelerated pace of cultural shifts. These changes often affect what drives competitiveness. Whether your company is a success story or is struggling to transform, this blog will give you insight into a long-term vision. In addition, we offer an effective way to adapt to today's changes in order to stay ahead.

The change

Systems Thinking Lens on the `Ways of Working`

The longer-term trajectory of business culture is aimed at re-shape the behaviour of companies as social units in the wider society. Whilst fairness and diversity cover half of the concerns. The `ways of working` are often associated with business-oriented concerns, even if it is work-life balance. Our suggestion is that improving the internal environment is only part of the long-term vision.

Many research publications indicate that businesses have a long way to go towards being voted as ethical by the public. Topics of distrust are often rooted in the `ways of working`. When people express concerns about being left behind, lack of cooperation, or empty words, these are symptoms of a gap in expectations. It's fair to assume that people expect change to be more systemic.

Gallup survey says that “employee engagement decreased globally by two percentage points, from 22% in 2019 to 20% in 2020”. Putting aside the trend, the suggestion that approximately 80% of employees are disengaged is staggering.

At the same time, researchers indicate that "90% of good ideas don't come from the executive suite" - Handling Complexity with Professor Richard Jolly, London Business School .

One can draw two conclusions from this bigger picture:

Businesses are missing out on good ideas
Most popular approaches for improving engagement are ineffective

It is easy to imagine that employees perceive businesses as dancing around and paying lip-service to employee engagement. This could be one of the key subliminal reasons why the public sees businesses as unethical. Surveys have not unpacked this perspective.

Let’s be radical and do something about this. Below we discuss that being radical does no t actually entail any drastic organizational disruptions.

Source : https://www.edelman.com/trust/2020-trust-barometer

Two Big Questions for The `Ways of Working` Change ?

Suppose that ‘ways of working’ are more than a matter of process. The opinions expressed below are formulated on the view that a better environment is evidenced by the state of organizational culture and information flow.

Three separate considerations feed upon each other and affect ‘ways of working’:

Engagement approach
Operating models (Remote first, Geo Distributed Teams, Outsourcing, etc.)
Process methodologies (e.g. software delivery, project management and other)

Irrespective of the considerations and change models, there are two big questions:

What is culture worth?
How do we know that investment into a particular way of doing things will improve company goals?

Perspectives on these questions will influence if the change will go deep enough, and if it happens fast enough.

Measuring what culture is worth

Measuring the value of culture through indices related to "return" is possible. The concept of organizational culture is just as fundamental as the life of an individual. However, it is possible to infer a minimal opportunity cost of not giving this area serious consideration.

The formula:

Take all critical employees and assume they leave within N years as a disruptive event, but before the "normal" turnover (if average employee tenure were 4 years , then you might take 1-2 years as a disruptive staff turnover event)
Calculate the cost of disruption
lost momentum
cost of finding similar people
cost of repeating the cycle every N years

It is well recognised that employees leave for a multitude of reasons. Also, it has become fashionable to single out “bad” managers. In our view, the reasons are more systemic in nature. People leave environments that lack a culture of growth - see our prior blog on this topic. In short, employees in large organizations can actually have a great team leader and direct line manager. However, these leaders are often ineffective to change anything.

The measure of the value of culture will change no more than updates to the company's strategy. The importance of this measure is psychological. It is unlikely to influence the way improvements are made, but it is necessary for demonstrating to employees and shareholders how serious the company is about achieving real outcomes - “put your money where your mouth is” so to speak. If culture is considered as a soft consideration (not measurable), hearts and minds will never be won.

If you can demonstrate the seriousness of the intent, the bulk of the challenge is to “walk the talk”. This is where many organizations fail because investments of effort miss one critical point. Next section explains how to boost organizational culture change.

Invest into right change

So, what should be the first change in pursuit of better ‘ways of working’?

Let’s define key criteria that will reveal the answer:

Lagging indicators and discreet surveys cannot drive systemic changes; More surveys simply lead to more intervention;
Management cannot do the change on their own, and team leads cannot be any more effective without the change to concentration of power;
It is necessary to have capability for a very fast and cheap way of identifying and testing hypotheses. Cultural change is not going to be linear.

Even though the topic may be complex, the answer to “where to begin” is quite simple - the “pipeline”. Examples of pipelines:

In the IT world, it is the automation of the CI/CD pipeline
In Sales that would be leads generation and management
Automation in logistics

Employee feedback management is not any different. This capability provides a real-time view of morale and a concrete practical understanding of what affects people. This is the very first and foundational investment any company should make. If implemented correctly, the feedback pipeline is more than just a channel for thank you’s and reflections on challenges. Value is represented as data points that are used to make decisions based on evidence.

By unlocking the power of direct and genuine feedback from employees, companies gain a critical opportunity- speed and agility in discovering and testing hypotheses. This is what true engagement actually looks like - grassroots need to participate in formulation of hypotheses and work as a collective to prove what works, or not, within the overall system. It is this collective brain power (the “90%” we mentioned in systems thinking lens section) that will ensure that organization is investing into right change.

Coincidentally, this is exactly what horizontal leadership is about. People have been asking for less managerialism. We know that command-and-control is not a path into the future because it is inherently about delegation - it is slow, does not unlock great ideas, and creates brittle structures.

Horizontal leadership is a network of resourceful humans that delivers fast ideas generation and experimentation. It only works, however, if concentration of power is re-aligned to unblock real-time and fearless feedback. Whilst autonomous team may be a myth , the network effect of ideas and evidence-based experimentation are the ones that will ensure that organizations do not fear to experiment, fail fast and try something different.

Setting Up Psychologically Safe Feedback Pipeline

Effective feedback pipeline is the one that embraces two core principles - radical transparency and psychological safety .

This is what you need to consider when choosing the solution:

Choose a solution that gives people the ability to “push” feedback in a psychologically safe way
Solution should be integrated into daily communication tools (for instance Slack or Microsoft Teams)
The stream of feedback posts should be measurable - these data points are key for enabling evidence-based decisions
Chosen solution should be customizable with any context so that people have the ability to classify feedback
Everyone should have exactly the same view and access to infographics
It should be possible to drill-down into data points by theme, team, activity and compare across any time period
It should be possible for people to “push” feedback about future expectations - measuring ongoing or retrospective experiences is not enough to form a complete picture

Neelix Team Engagement solution is designed from ground up to cover all these requirements. It is a turn key solution that avoids the need to re-engineer the wheel. Hit the ground running with transition to horizontal leadership and grassroots driven changes to the ‘ways of working.

Creating Better Information and Collaboration Flow

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 03:53:00 GMT

The scene

Approaches for executing on a strategy or set of goals are shaped by intentions and assumptions. Most would agree that it is hard to execute on aspirational goals. At individual initiatives level, “ only 2.5% of companies successfully complete 100% of their projects ” (PWC, 2014). Similarly, the average fail rate of strategy execution appears to be 50% (numbers vary depending on the research and period).

Reasoning for failures vary. There are plenty of suggestions about what organisations and leaders should be doing to avoid failures. The less explored lens is about what one should not be doing, and the discipline of tracking that as a metric.

The problem statement

When people talk about transformational change, it often means moving towards best practices. Our hypothesis is that the failure to achieve the fastest and most fundamental shift has less to do with tracking how well new patterns are learned, but more with unlearning the bad habits.

The most valuable question one can ask is “what we can do wrong”. This applies to change and any project. Your strategic and project plans should have specific “do not do”measurable criteria.

Measuring and tracking what should not be happening is commonly affected by

psychological safety across teams
strong personalities in management
passive-aggressive relationship between the client and partners / vendors
false sense of safety provided by process, rituals and frameworks
surveys and follow-up intervention way of dealing with sentiment

Your context will differ depending on scope, structure, organisational DNA, environment and decision making style . Traditional surveys, 360 degree peer reviews and performance management routines are not suitable for bringing systemic change. These checkpoints in time cannot increase the feeling of being a real contributor. Therefore, information flow and collaboration levels do not change systemically.

Management and team leads spend a lot of time “managing” differences in perspectives. This is one of the reasons why it has been observed that “management is the least efficient activity in your organisation” - Gary Hamel, First Let’s Fire All The Managers, Harvard Business Review, 2011 .

“Companies are twisting themselves into knots to empower and challenge their employees“ - Paul J. Zak, The Neuroscience of Trust, 2017

Turn problems into a clear goal and opportunity

It is common knowledge that people need less managerialism and greater authentic leadership. Team leads and senior leaders in organisations spend a lot of energy baby-sitting escalations, interventions and other alignment challenges. This work is reactionary and does not bring about systemic change fast enough. As such, this is a symptom of the problem - e.g. leaders and teams constantly have to deal with outcomes of what went wrong.

In this context, the goal is to reduce lag and do away with the interventionist nature of realignment. This goal goes well beyond improving the health of what is happening today. The resulting practice is a transient competitive advantage.

The opportunity is to convert inspect-and-adapt into a vibrant and real-time pattern, as opposed to ritualised false sense of security. The ultimate goal is better information and collaboration flow without ‘isms’ and rules based friction.

The solution and call-outs

Information flow and levels of collaboration are all about the ability to deal with differences in perspectives.

The alternative to survey and intervention method is to employ a safe form of smart transparency. This pattern uses non-emotional data points as the driver for very important systemic changes:

Increased effectiveness of team leads working across the organisation - less energy is wasted on proving the point, and more time is spent on finding collective solutions
Reduced conversation and collaboration blockages - experience trends are impersonal and subliminally force everyone think about the joint journey
Grassroots feel better empowered to make the “exceptional team” maturity curve journey

Effecient transparency counteracts the concentration of power, which is not always premeditated, but it is always a killer for healthy reflection on reality. Transparency goes well beyond managing specific personalities. It also unblocks information flow between a group of relatively less competent people (who are typically more voiceful) and the smaller group at the pinnacle of the skills bell curve. The common challenge for all organisations is when these groups of people talk at each other. Unadulterated and “push” based exchange of sentiment will reformat this relationship.

In essence, workplace transparency provides rails for systemic trust and healthier employee engagement. Avoid fads that overuse the concept of culture. Instead, invest into unadulterated real-time authenticity. Resulting trust will resolve cultural issues.

Yes, there are some challenges when beginning the journey. GitLab experience articulated a few call-outs as - Not everyone likes it, Performance anxiety and Getting bogged down. The proposition, though, is that these challenges are not any more difficult than the status quo issues faced by most organisations. As per research reported by Paul J. Zak (The Neuroscience of Trust, 2017), the benefits of a high-trust environment far outstrip the effort

74% less stress,
50% higher productivity
40% less burnout

Making Smart Transparency Easy

Everyone already has too many tools in their daily lives, and companies are trying to cut down on busy work.

Therefore, it is necessary for transparency flows to:

integrate with daily communication tools
all experiences need to be measurable, psychologically safe and pushed by grassroots in the heat of the moment without lag
ensure data points are authentic and relatable
ensure specificity of context, longevity of learnings, drill down capability

Neelix Team Engagement solution is designed from ground up to cover these requirements.

In the body of your organization, Neelix performs functions of a real-time signalling system and the Chief Morale Officer, which promotes authenticity.

How to keep Agile fresh

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Sun, 19 Sep 2021 02:52:36 GMT

Agile debates are boring. Let’s take a Day Off.

One cannot call Agile new. At the same time, strangely, there is vagueness about what Agile can do. This blog intends to cut through several years worth of debates about Agile, and share our views on the topic through a humorous lens. A tongue in cheek controversy should help with crystallizing concerns. Someone said - “if you want to be honest with somebody, make sure they laugh ... ”

There reflections will help anyone who is touched by the "agile" debate or training - newbies and seasoned individuals.

We acknowledge ideas expressed by following thought provokers in various webcasts

Professor Richard Jolly | London Business School
Pragmatic Dave Thomas, “ Agile is Dead ”
Dave Farley from Continuous Delivery, “ What is Post Agile? ”
Joe Justice, Jeff Maleski, Jeff, Bubolz, “ Agile at Tesla with Joe Justic e”

What is the Agile cultural revolution?

How to achieve Agile transformation success

Keep breaking rules and have fun

One cannot copy success. Develop your own unique set of practices and ideas. Create a culture of thinking and radical transparency.

The rules for creating and capturing value are changing much faster. Neelix Feedback Platform is the reflective companion in creating a culture that embraces complexity and transient competitive advantage.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)

Sentiment analysis is the test of character for leaders and organisations

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Sat, 21 Aug 2021 10:23:00 GMT

"Knowledge will give you power, but character respect " - Bruce Lee

No technology can solve purely human problems. The biggest problem with engaging team members or employees is the authenticity of the feedback. We live in a post-truth society and people don't open up (in fact, some choose to lie). On top of that, it is difficult for a corporate environment to be safe from a feedback perspective. However, there is a way to see through the fog.

We need meaningful sentiment analysis to effectively navigate the maturity curve. This post is a challenge for organizations and executives to test motivation to get employee feedback. This motivation is fundamental to the choice of models and tools. Improving talent retention is an ongoing challenge and requires an innovative approach to sentiment analysis.

Naturally, there is no silver bullet in this or any other complex problem area. So let's get back to the basics of “If you don't want to be fooled, you need to know what you crave” ( Pamela Meyer ).

Consider a hypothetical use case...

Sarah works with a team of eight in a medium-sized organization. A clever, gamified survey is issued to gain insights into well-being of the squad and the department. Sarah finds a way not to participate in the survey. Her motivation is based on the perception that the final survey result will show that she is a whistle-blower about the things that are hiding under the rug. It is equally important that she tried to explain the existing mediocrity to the management, but nothing materially changed.

This use case emphasizes the human dimension of sentiment analysis. Despite scientific advances and efforts to create intelligent and engaging research, this interaction is taking place at a stage where a repair of sorts is already required. Re-engaging emotionally disconnected team members requires more than a catch-me-if-you-can game.

Gotchas of lagging indicators are well known - e.g. response bias from questions, their order and even who issued the survey (Response Biases in Standardised Surveys, Kathrin Bogner & Uta Landrock). If periodic surveys were not the only answer, how can we do better?

Real time grassroots feedback loop can be incredibly powerful. Such an approach can certainly provide extra insights. However, there are also pitfalls. Let's be honest, in larger organizations, personality, generational, and skill diversity can skew results. It takes a little mentoring and leadership maturity to unleash the full value of real-time feedback.

A common feature of any dimension of sentiment is the fact that people can only be understood through real human interactions. There is no way to get rid of the need to read body language, understand perspectives through rough exchange, etc.

The point of sentiment analysis is to achieve a state where people feel safe to be honest. The root of the problem lies somewhere in this question - do the organization and the leader deserve real trust?

The point of this article is to remind us that winning trust is not a transactional exercise. Leaders must constantly prove their authenticity. All prior trust can evaporate if commitment to staying honest loses consistency. Same goes for the motivation of surveys. If team members perceive the intent of feedback to be as just another ‘data mining’ exercise, then the engagement is a non-starter.

If your sentiment analysis lacks character, you are unlikely to fully appreciate the character of your team. The feedback process should be conditional on a prior commitment to accept whatever is submitted in its raw form. Rephrasing and ironing out the opinions of survey participants is just as bad as deleting customer comments on social media.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that employees leave because of poor leadership. Surveys are not only about finding opportunities for improvement and responding to change. Sentiment analysis should be future-oriented - for example, it is an opportunity to demonstrate the power of leadership and mature mindset.

How does one show leadership character and re-energise employee engagement?

Put your money where your mouth is - display raw summary of sentiment analysis on the board behind you when speaking at town halls events.
Be transparent about the current point on the maturity curve (The Wisdom of Teams - Creating the High Performance , by Jon R. Katzenbach, Douglas K. Smith, 1992).
Embrace smart transparency at workplace

Evolve beyond the "I told you so"

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 01:17:54 GMT

Recognizing that certain things could be done better is part of human nature. Teams typically face scenarios where one forward-thinking person can anticipate the wrong direction. Likewise, there are situations where the entire team sees the wrong direction from their leadership.

Mature teams are the ones where "I told you so" / "We told you so" is converted into "He told us so" / "They told me so". This type of honesty is akin to a difference between bravado and bravery. Only a brave person is prepared to fall on his/her sword. Accountability is ineffective if it is a post-fact punishment. A form of inspection needs to be `continuously integrated` into life of teams and organisations. Naturally, this is much easier said than done.

Expecting humans to be perfect is unrealistic. Hence, there is no perfect answer. However, such philosophical predicament should not stop us from setting unreachable goals. "You must always live in love with something unreachable... a person becomes taller because he reaches up" - Maxim Gorky.

What works and what doesn't is always going to be specific to personalities and context. The trick is to avoid being stale. Change is the only constant. Continuous inspection based on systemic transparency will brush away wasteful blame or excuses.

It is best not to be dependent on fixed patterns (a.k.a process dogmas). Agile mindset and cultural change are dependent on radical transparency and Kaizen thinking. There is no place for excuses and being stale.

Promote conversation over process. Unclaimed social contract value from Retrospectives.

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 01:16:53 GMT

Retrospective routines are often under-appreciated because of the focus on “inspect and adapt” magic. The impact of retrospectives can only be maximised through a social contract lens - retrospectives are a training in conversation.

Lean and agilist qualities are the ones where ability to change is burnt into the DNA of the team. Cadence of retrospectives themselves should not prevent the ability to improve undesired processes. The differentiating factor is the way people converse and find common ground.

Teams go off-track when the process is taken too seriously. Over emphasised reliance on procedures and the boss-in-the-middle lead to mediocre communication and relationships.

Relationships, conversation and humour are skills. Hammering at process issues without a true handshake can be a mediocre experience. Retrospectives are not an automatic savior. If you are just following the motions of putting cards on the board, then chances are you are not having a conversation.

“When something goes wrong with a computer, you get an error message. When something goes wrong with a human, you get feelings” - Andrew Tarvin (“The Skill of Humor”). The drag experienced by the team in between retrospectives is rooted in not adjusted priorities, backlog of unresolved issues and differences in perspectives. Retrospective is a chance to fine tune everyone’s perspectives through conversation.

Do not take retrospectives too seriously from the perspectives of registering tasks into the backlog. Instead, one should dive with commitment to have a conversation, and don’t forget to bring humour with you. Most terrible things in the world are done by men with serious faces - paraphrased from Grigori Gorin’s The Very Same Munchhausen.

Organisational behaviour has intrinsic links to systems thinking, as described by Peter Slattery and Stefan Kaufman - make sure to understand the super-problem that is unique to the context of your team and organisation. It pays to invest time into understanding concepts such as "influence, balance, feedback and delay". Avoid the traps of process religion. A mindset of exploration and ability to slow down (take two steps back if necessary) are necessary to achieve real change.

Learn more...

Building up mature teams through systemic transparency

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 11:38:31 GMT

Top performance is a domain of mature teams. Most would agree that key attributes of a mature team are the ability to gel together, top professionalism and having fun together. Kaizen thinking and strong culture are key success factors.

Simplicity is key to defining what team character is about. It is dangerous to decorate foundations with qualifying veneer. For instance, if one were to overlay the "ability to gel together" with too much of EQ, EI, 360-degrees, etc., then there is a danger of suffocating the flow of energy. Vagueness and boring processes damage culture and performance.

It is assumed that mature team models are usually more complex. However, in a hindsight, they are ingeniously simpler than any regulated operating model. This is due to empowered and self organizing ability to change very quickly. Such teams have an invisible team memeber - systemic and radical transparency as the chief moral officer. High productivity can only be achieved when team members do not wait for the "boss" to initiate adjustments. Waiting time is a wasted opportunity. Make sure your team's nervous system is capable of transmitting these signals. Neelix Feedback Platform is designed to perform this function without fads or new processes.

I truly understand why you feel that way. Dealing with misunderstandings.

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Mon, 01 Jul 2019 11:37:25 GMT

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” - George Bernard Shaw.

Our daily lives are filled with many battles, many of which are persistent themes that we accept as part of human nature. Misunderstandings are as old as anything else in this regard. Each of us develops own ways of dealing or surviving with such an unfortunate trait. Does it really have to be as persistent and unsolvable?

It is all about the amplitude of emotions and how different people deal with that.

Our balance is affected by opposing forces - intensity of our lives on the one hand, and resignation to the status quo on the other. Verbalised communication is a lottery that often starts with unintended miscommunications. People deal with this roller coaster in different ways.

Resolving miscommunications is a specific skill that requires patience. The real issue with the whole topic is that building up the skill and emotional bank balance requires taking a few steps back.

Communicating with others can be thought of as an exercise of crossing the river. Currents and rocks will change your final landing point. Truly problematic misunderstandings are the ones where two parties insist on immovable targets.

How does one develop the skill for river-crossing communication gaps? Self-reflective discussion with the opponent is an under-appreciated pattern. The challenge for both parties is to discover differences in perspective. Resolving those differences is not always easy because it requires utmost humility. Facilitated retrospectives are a good way of taking a few steps back.

The secret is to avoid turning retrospective chat into a complaints galore. Instead, the core aim should be the one of achieving a common conclusion. If you focus on conversation, rather than winning the argument, then it is possible to arrive at saying - “I truly understand why you feel that way”.

Misunderstandings do not need to be growing into stalagmites.

Transparency and capability to change

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Mon, 15 Apr 2019 12:41:17 GMT

Experience and research indicate that people will not come around to appreciating your point of view through threats or relentless arguing (How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People, Les Giblin,1956) . On the other hand, anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that capability for systemic improvements is hampered by "deferred hurt".

Deferring necessary decisions prolongs fault lines. It is common enough to observe spinning gears without evident change. Such scenario is a symptom of counterparts living in a set of parallel universes. Resolution is possible only when all parts in the system realign to the same dimension. Building relationship bridges is only a part of the solution. Something extra is needed that can pull parties away from individual interpretation of facts and differences in perspectives.

Best agile teams solve this problem space through real-time inspect-and-adapt and openness for change. Measurable impact and visual stream of experiences is the gravitational force that can pull parties together. Throwing more process, methodologies or tools at issues, that are 'human factor' by nature, is not going to yield sustained changes.

Systemic and smart transparency , based on direct relay of impacts, is the best mechanism for setting inert wheels into motion. It acts as the intermediate gear that can translate the pull of a handle into actual movement. Success of any change is dependent on all parties pulling together in the same direction.

If you are a leader, you need to ask a very honest and reflective question - "is there a Calcutta environment in our organisation?". I recommend watching lecture Handling Complexity with Professor Richard Jolly (London Business School) because it packs a very useful spectrum of management science topics, and builds a story. Transparency is an important element for creating a thriving and self organising environment where employees choose to be engaged.

Be honest about predictability in complex initiatives

services@neelix.io (Neelix IO Pty Ltd) — Mon, 15 Apr 2019 12:40:28 GMT

Success of complex initiatives depends on acknowledging uncertainty. It might be useful to avoid the term of "managing uncertainty" because the tradition is to expect mitigation that would defend "the plan". The proposition is that high certainty plans and managed uncertainty are dichotomous. Instead, one should embrace the uncertainty - understanding and navigating through chaos does not mean accepting anarchy. One simply needs to fully live up to agile manifesto and the cultural principles of the scientific method - “ You must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool ”.

Whichever pattern is adopted for handling complexity, one needs to be informed about the degree of uncertainty. The instinct is to reflect state of affairs through data . Such approach can lead to micro-level tracking and noise. Nuances of "what does the data mean?" are hard to decipher. Teams tend to modify their behaviour in order to adapt to measurement requirements. As a result, real issues can be obfuscated even further. Management runs high risk of inadvertently sponsoring a " TPS report ".

A better alternative does exist. Let teams broadcast raw grass roots experiences. Initial noise will be counteracted by teams themselves, as they travel through the maturity curve. In a short enough time, broadcast experiences will become directly consumable. Engaged and self organising teams will cleanup data way better than any middle management or algorithms. Embrace radical transparency if you want to be truly agile.

Neelix.IO Blog

A New Approach to Coaching: AI-Augmented Feedback for People and Culture Development

The Structural Problem With Traditional Consultancy and Coaching

Why Traditional Models No Longer Scale

The Shift: From “Managing” Individuals to Enabling Collective Intelligence

What Makes Modern Feedback Fundamentally Different

Why This Matters for Leaders and HR

From Feedback to Foresight

The New Mandate for Leadership

Why Critical Thinking Is a Far Better Indicator of Organizational Health Than Engagement Metrics

The Future of Engagement Isn’t Surveys - It’s Critical Thinking

Why traditional employee engagement metrics fall short

Why critical thinking - and structural dialogue - matters more

Collective intelligence outperforms static engagement

Culture, autonomy and avoiding managerial overload

Why “Critical-thinking network” is the modern engagement

How Neelix enables this shift - and makes critical thinking measurable

The payoff - for culture, performance, retention and growth

For real impact, measure critical thinking - not just sentiment

How to Build Democratised Engagement Architecture for Workplace

Workplace engagement challenge

Assumptions and Hypothesis

Trends

Trend 1 - Bloating of approaches and solutions

Trend 2 - Emerging clarity

How to design a modern employee engagement architecture

Where to begin

Leadership traits required for enabling collective intelligence

What collective intelligence can do for modern CEOs and C-Suite executives

Modern environment of CEOs and C-Suite executives

Key reason why executives fail to deliver change

Modern decision-making pattern for successful CEOs or a C-Suite executives

Recognise the unintended threats

Convert Awareness into Opportunity

How to develop collective intelligence in your company

What is collective intelligence?

Why collective intelligence is critical for high performance organizations

What it means to have collective intelligence operating model

Where to get started when developing collective intelligence

Quick Wins and Easy Hanging Fruit

Change Strategy

Change Roadmap

Team Traits System - How to Build a High Performing Team

Introduction

Template Document: "ABC Team - Team Traits System"

Terms of Reference

Our Team Traits System

Our Team's Persona and Motivations

Dilemmas - Cumulative Backlog

Team Wide Traits

Measurement System

Making It Visible

High Performance Culture : Value-Add Focused Strategy

The Challenge

Issue #1: Motherly statements

Issue #2: Lack of buy-in, accountability and democratised transparency

Issue #3: Lacklustre approach to evidence

Key leadership mistake

How to build workplace culture with real outcomes

Examples of incremental and practical dilemmas:

To sum up

﻿ The secret to orchestrating great culture

Next steps

How to make quality decisions quickly and with high resulting trust

How to improve employee engagement with the help of experienced team members

Leveraging Experienced Team Members to Improve Employee Engagement

The Challenge of Traditional Surveys - Experienced Employee Perspective

Unlocking Insights through Experienced Employees

Benefits of this Approach

1. Benchmarks that Tell a Story

2. Empowerment Fuels Engagement

3. Inclusion and Representation

4. Diversity of Opinions and Success of Change

5. Lifting the job of HR out of administration to strategic facilitation

Neelix Platform: Transforming Employee Engagement

To sum up

Organisational culture and performance - Evidence review

How does employee engagement increase productivity ?

How to create a sustainable habit of organizational dialogue

Introduction

The secret to orchestrating great culture

Why Does it Matter?

Introduction