Consider the complexity of some of the decisions faced by today’s organization:
- Choosing what to include in new or existing services or products
- Resolving expectations of a different shareholders
- Selecting optimal employee-benefit packages
- Prioritizing which projects to focus on for long-term prosperity
These decisions matter, and the people they involve matter, too: Engaged stakeholders give more of themselves, treat customers better, and are healthier. A recent Gallup study with over 230,000 in 142 countries revealed that companies with high employee engagement in the workplace experienced 147% higher earnings per share.
Real-time interactions. Few organizations truly have caught up with the interactive revolution that has been expanding since the arrival of the Web 2.0. Moving away from one-way inputs, the Internet’s evolution has led to real-time interactions that foster mutuality and transparency. According to Weber Shandwick/KRC Research, already 44 percent of sustainability managers, for instance, are using crowdsourcing to advance their objectives.
Wired for smallness and proximity. Social science and neurologists tell us that we are still catching up with the fact that our brains slowly have evolved to maintain interactions with a rather small bunch of people. Quite literally, our neurological configuration has wired us for smallness.
In today’s hyper-globalized community, however, the close bond between individuals has been stretched to the breaking point, creating increasing gaps of relational distance. The distance between decision-makers, team members, and customers is, quite literally, kilometric. A call center in India can be monitored in Brazil and accounted for in New York. And while business intelligence tools have allowed space for surveys, emails and blogging forums, the gigantic scale of organizations is such that the engagement and consultation process often can be costly, opaque, slow or disjointed.
Streamlining engagement, a là 2.0. The Web, however, certainly can assist in reversing at least some of these difficulties characteristic of today’s organizational gigantism. We all flourish when our voices are heard and when we have a stake in what goes on around us.
Clear about this trend, CSR International founder Wayne Visser is convinced that the time is ripe for embedding “crowd-storming” into a company’s DNA. “Broadcast is out; dialogue in,” he affirms. Interactive technologies have opened the possibility of creating complementary modes of more personalized human interaction. This helps a company in effective decision making that minimize resistance and increase stakeholder buy-in.
All Thrive. Reacting to the impersonal scale of the modern firm, German economist E.F. Schumacher once argued that “small is beautiful,” advocating for what he called “technologies with a human face.” Given the recent iterations of the Web, one suspects that Schumacher would have given his kudos to these personalized innovations because, having put on a more human face, these technologies, in fact, can be beautiful too.
When leaders and team-members come together around forms of dialogue that are strong enough to substitute face-to-face interactions, the relational distance is shortened, making it easier for people to thrive. And when people thrive, organizations thrive too.
Check out an interactive example of what this looks like.