The Traditional Workplace is Broken

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1249-the-traditional-workplace-is-broken

by fusionman • 18 years ago

11 9 18 years ago

fusionman2• 18 years ago

I love the thought of improving the workplace for productive and quality individuals. There is nothing worse than stifling creativity and imagination.

That said, I wonder how this model works if you are running a business that employs people that may not be as smart or motivated as say the 37Signals crew or Google, which probably means most businesses.

davidw• 18 years ago

I think this was fairly vacuous. It's easy to say "too much bureaucracy", but harder to implement in the majority of companies. I'll believe it when 37signals starts doing consulting to make your ordinary, average small/mid size business "get real".

fusionman2• 18 years ago

this is my point...great when you have several highly motivated creative people (like 37signals), but what about "most" companies? I have several friends who would absolutely take advantage of this type of atmosphere by not doing sh*t. They would be fired in smaller companies, but lost in the shuffle of larger ones. Now you are focusing on house cleaning.

unalone• 18 years ago

Wait. Are you saying that your friends' being able to get away with not doing shit is a GOOD thing for larger companies?

trickjarrett• 18 years ago

37signals has a high noise to signal ratio for me. A lot of what they post is repackaging of stuff I hear elsewhere, or vacuous self referencing about how awesome they are.

Some of their blog posts are high signal, but I unsubscribed from their feed and wait to see what gets high on HN or the other social news sites.

jcromartie• 18 years ago

There's not a lot of substance here, although I agree. It seems that the reasoning behind the way the workplace functions is: "because I said so."

I work at a job where nearly everyone could work remotely and be just as (or more) productive. This won't happen because it would be too upsetting to the way things are for the conservative people in power.

rw• 18 years ago

Being in power tends to mean one has responsibility to others. To not piss them off, making few or no changes works well.

andreyf• 18 years ago

It's no help to our company to hire someone based on a skill or to get stuff done.

I can see this being hard to justify...

denglish• 18 years ago

I think everyone agrees the status quo for most companies isn't working. The hard question is how do you change it? Simply 'challenging' your workers is not really enough (although a good start). For smaller innovative companies there isn't a lot of bureaucracy yet, and the chances are the founders have had a direct part in hiring all the staff – with a vested interest in picking the top quality people they can. And with top quality staff of course you naturally give them the freedom and flexibility to be as effective as they can.

The problems I believe starts when the company is much larger. The bureaucracy kicks in and each line of management struggles to work out what they ‘control’. Large bands of like minded ‘productive’ workers congregate which is great, but large bands of ‘we don’t do much around here’ workers congregate too.

Ricardo Semler (Semco) had an interesting strategy for dealing with this that I think would be interesting to see IT shops try. He broke his company up into many autonomous cells all less than 100 employees. He also stripped the management and kept a hierarchy of only three layers.

The Traditional Workplace is Broken

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