How many organizations use their "corporate culture" like a cudgel, bludgeoning and cramming every employee into a narrowly defined sense of what fits the executives' idea of success? Its always couched in a way that makes it seem like its the best course of health for the business...but is it? For every Zappos that might get it right, there are countless other organizations that flail about with yet another way to control their employees.

In an organization, nothing starts a mad fit of eyerolling and quizzical looks among employees quite like management decrees. It's not unlike the images we have of royal decrees being issues in olden times. From atop his tower, the king stands before his subjects and issues proclamations that often have little positive bearing on their lives (e.g., your taxes will be increased because I want to fight a war in a land you've never heard of - or - this is your new queen, now bow down and worship her). But hey...he's the king and do any damn thing he likes because he's the king (including repressing the local peasants who disagree with his claim to allmighty power). Management decrees (oh alright, if it makes you feel better we'll call them "decisions") often come from the same thinking: "This is a good decision from my vantage point and employees will just need to accept it." These decisions don't need to be weighed against whether they make sense to the employee, whether they mesh with their day-to-day experience, whether they make their working lives easier. The employee is supposed to follow the orders because the individual proclaiming them is their king boss.

Earlier this week, Michael Arrington at TechCrunch managed to get his mitts on some rather juicy inside information from Google. Turns out that the tech darling isn't the career paradise that it's been made out to be. For all the gushing that us outsiders did over their innovative benefits and employment practices, perhaps it was all just hyperbole. There are some cautionary lessons to be extracted from this if you're not only on the hook for your organization's employer branding but employee engagement.

The modern concept of branding and word-of-mouth-marketing focuses primarily on getting customers to become raving fans and talk positively about a company to their friends and colleagues. In the past few years, this focus has come to also include the value of getting employees to be raving fans of their own company, to speak openly [...]

There’s some spirited debate brewing around the idea of transparency and its benefits to customer service. Is it best to let the customer be ‘blissfully unaware’ of the company’s processes (essentially how it works)? Or is it better to allow them into the kitchen to see how everything is cooked? I argue strongly for the [...]

Isn't now the ideal time to actually redesign the business organization to be both a social and economic enterprise? Isn't it time to recognize that people-systems are every bit as important (if not more) to the health of the business as its decision making, IT, financial, and other systems?

This idea and plan for Endiscouragement is not mine, but I wish it was. It comes from David Donathan at University Business (via LibraryBytes). David’s article is called Stifling Initiative and it proposes ten never-fail ways to kill innovation without actually saying “no.” With tongue firmly planted in cheek, he describes the reason why this [...]

Here’s my latest blogpost over at the Connection Cafe… Yesterday, Lacey wrote about how to engage folks who are interested in volunteering for organizations. It’s a great segue into another area that I find lacking in most nonprofit websites: staff and organizational employees. What do they both have in common? Your volunteers and paid staff [...]

The modern concept of branding and word-of-mouth-marketing focuses primarily on getting customers to become raving fans and talk positively about a company to their friends and colleagues. In the past few years, this focus has come to also include the value of getting employees to be raving fans of their own company, to speak openly [...]

What if your organization applied the same degree of focus on the internal retention of employees as it does on the external retention of customers?