Will there be no hierarchies in the company of the future and everyone will decide their own salary?
No wonder they are returning to the center of the debate words such as self management, understood as overcoming the limits of the hierarchical organization, or OKRs, an acronym that stands for Objective and Key Results. An article in Forbes, last March, questioned the growing interest in the software market linked to OKRs, correlating it with the permanent transition to hybrid or remote working methods. The greater autonomy is fine, but how to verify the alignment on the objectives and therefore the results?
Many companies, also in our country, are probing the tools to map the organizational transformation priorities, the tools to create alignment on objectives and results to be achieved and, more generally, the possibility of redefining the way of working, in the name of greater autonomy that frees the potential existing among employees but crushed, perhaps, by too much formality.
What Can organizations actually do to change? In the case of Objective and Key Results, the whole organization is aligned around priorities, which must be translated into measurable results. The Okr are designed to enhance people's engagement and be adapted to the specific needs of organizations to promote the operational effectiveness of workers and thus amplify the impact of everyone's performance. As the Harvard Business Review explained, this framework is a method for planning and measuring team-wide success but works less if companies try to apply it to individuals.
In other contexts, on the other hand, it is important to test the real adherence to the values that structure the company and to map the practices that work or not, in order to plan effective changes and ensure that the adoption of the company's identifying values is effective and transforms into a real tool to create value.
In these rather complex paths of change, companies therefore need toolboxes, often provided by other players, such as consultancy. And in some cases it is already the consulting reality that uses a model in which there is no established hierarchy but self-organized groups that decide and choose the best options for the business.
An example of this approach is the Holacracy model, certainly not new but which continues to be suggestive (here explains Brian J Robertson, author of the essay '' Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World ' ', released in 2015). Especially for those organizations that do not believe in certain rigidities, such as job titles or fixed duties and compensation. Holacracy is not a single and general model but a sort of toolbox to guide organizations. It is up to the latter to understand how to best exploit the tools of this model (from the circles of responsibilities to roles), to lead the organization to achieve its fundamental objectives. In short, self-organization is the means by which to enhance, on the field, the decision-making power that each employee has, including that of choosing which club to belong to and on which projects to make their know-how available. There is also space for a subjective definition of compensation to adapt it to the efforts, circumstances and salaries of other colleagues.
Among the companies that rely on this model, there is also Kopernicana, which strategically accompanies other companies in the organizational transformation paths, helping them to create organizational and value maps or OKRs projects, adapting them to the objectives but also to the requirements already present in the organization. In 2019 it was born to help organizations that wanted to open up to change and it happened that, in a short time, this commitment would materialize in a very stimulating but also uncertain phase, that of the forced changes induced at work by the pandemic (some were not in progress, but the acceleration was decisive).
The needs for change are different because organizations have their own objectives but also practices, cultures and metrics already in place, on which to eventually act.
Kopernicana is leading a second OKRs trial for the country Italy of one of the most important multinationals in retail for sporting goods: the first involved the value chain team, the second (in progress) IT and e -commerce (always with the aim of identifying actions not probed before, to favor horizontal alignments on different objectives).
In the case of a leading company for image diagnostics, the goal was to involve employees, mobilize them on the group's value platform, shared internally. After probing hundreds of people about their sentiment towards the value platform, in the discover phase, Kopernicana then worked with the company to implement a cartography of the values, identify the obstacles that allow their full adoption and give human resources the right insights. for the still possible priority transformations (map and define).
Governing organizations remains a complex task and new challenges arise in a phase marked by the return to the office: it is not surprising that, at the time of great uncertainty, new ways are being sought to govern the seas.
