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The birth of new approaches to business behavior

There is always a course or a book that stays with us forever after we graduate from college. For me, it has always been “Organizational Behavior” by Steven L. McShane. An avid fan of ethics and philosophy, this was a book that I read for my only business course during my college years, and in it, all the theories and notions that I learned in my arts classes were put into practice in a single Text book. – it all applies to business laws.

Years later, I worked for a marketing company with the worst organizational culture; Or as my book defines: the basic pattern of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs that are considered the right way to think and act on the problems and opportunities facing an organization. If an organization is groups of people working interdependently towards a purpose, my first experience in a marketing company represented everything that is wrong with the organizational culture. In fact, it was a deteriorating culture, with holes opening at every turn, mainly due to a lack of sound business planning, an encouraging support structure, and a desire to make money before understanding the right way to do it.

You see, as my book explains, the evolution of creating successful work environments is not a new curiosity. In fact, it goes back to Plato and the human desire to achieve personal and collective goals, which another of my favorites, Stephen R. Covey, talks about in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Creating mission statements and end goals helps individuals and organizations map clear paths to guide them toward achieving whatever it is they set out to accomplish.

I am writing this article in an effort to review the nature of behavior and organizational structure as it applies to today’s online marketing industry. For those in the world of online marketing, the discussion about productivity and its relation to time is probably a topic that you have come across before. We’ve all heard and read about Timothy Ferris’s bestseller “The Four-Hour Workweek.” You may have also found the great collection of courses, podcasts, and videos on the nature of productivity; one that comes to mind right now is Wake Up Productivity by Eben Pagan. Famous blogger and author of “Blog Profits Blueprint” Yaro Starak also teaches “The Real Secret of a 2 Hour Work Day”. What I intend to do here is delve into why the productivity / time ratio is a constant theme among academics and researchers, and why many successful online marketing enthusiasts are fascinated with working smart rather than hard.

And so I begin.

It all starts with … personalities and individual value systems.

Experts and researchers who have attempted to catalog and evaluate the nature of personality are responsible for dominant theories such as the “Big Five Dimensions of Personality” and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. These are two that you are probably already familiar with. How personality relates to different value systems is another topic that fascinates people. Values, as defined by my book, are stable evaluative beliefs that guide our preferences for outcomes or courses of action in a variety of situations. So when you combine personality with values, it is clearer to understand why human makeup is so different and why it makes us all so unique. Things we value like security, power, hedonism, universalism, tradition, achievement, all exist in each of us in different proportions. The question that arises is how is it possible to reconcile the idea that in an organization we are supposed to come together to achieve a common goal, when we are so individually different.

Organizational structure, in my textbook, refers to the “division of labor, as well as the patterns of coordination, communication, work flow, and formal power that direct organizational activities.” Or as Stephen Covey explains in detail in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, how the levels of dependency, independence and interdependence work between people in an organization and, in addition, how a company can achieve organizational success when people They are so different, all with their unique sets of personality and values.

There are two elements of the organizational structure that you are already familiar with: a centralized organization and a decentralized organization. I would like to focus on decentralization because it is becoming eminently clear that the online marketing industry is becoming increasingly decentralized as company structures flatten out and red tape is eliminated with changes like open concept office spaces. . My good book, Organizational Behavior defines decentralization as the means of dispersing authority and decision-making power throughout the organization, eliminating micromanagement and allowing people the freedom to set their own work ethics and strategies, all in agreement. with their own personal and value systems.

How do I know that the organizational structure is decentralizing?

Write a job description on craigslist, as a web developer or graphic designer, and see the number of companies that have posted freelance job openings and outsourcing alternatives. Freelancing, whether for design or SEO, is becoming the most prominent way corporations assign work. Today, business owners are even picking up on the trend of outsourcing administrative work to virtual secretaries.

Take Google, for example. I invite you to watch this video to see what is really happening within the organizational structure of Google. Basically, Google is giving its employees the freedom to take care of their basic needs, their own household needs, and personal desires at work, all in an effort to be more productive at work. I’m not arguing that organizations should start thinking about bringing gourmet chefs to their coffee shops, but I’m saying that Google is finding a way to let workers own their own productivity. In turn, Google is considered one of the best places to work for http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/bestcompanies/2009/index.html, and I confidently say they are one of the most innovative and advanced companies today.

Now, you can say that when a company is a young company with no years of experience, it is important to closely monitor everyone’s work and allow the bureaucracy to reign as an element and catalyst of “true” productivity, also known as a workday. 9 to 5. You can also say that productivity accelerates with experience. These are elements that I am by no means ignoring: there are absolute truths in both factors.

However, I’m talking about stepping out of the rigid values ​​of our Western society that dictate that “time is money,” and working a 12-hour shift is what will reap the rewards of “real” success. financial success. Another philosophy you’ve probably heard of before is that constant movement is the route to true happiness (closely related to ideas like “The Secret”). But if you look at success stories, like Yaro Starak’s, you will see that he speaks exactly of incorporating elements of balance and the desire for well-being as priorities that override the hunger for money.

In no way am I advocating giving up worldly needs, but I am trying to incorporate the need for inner well-being and fulfillment into the strategy, which is a factor not reflected in the 9-5 shift, and the only 2- week of vacations once a year.

So why is everyone in the online marketing industry interested in reducing the work week? Why is everyone trying to find other means of productivity?

Those who see great success in this industry have the freedom to travel the world and work from their laptops from whatever country they are in and whatever beach they are on. Pursuing a lifestyle like this is not unique to the online marketing industry, but with the advent of web technologies, this is increasingly becoming a reality for others in different industries.

The organizational structure should allow employees to experience the lifestyle they see themselves living (of course, while being productive and contributing to your organization). While personality and values ​​are different from person to person, our desire to live our lives without restrictions is probably a universal desire.

Organizational culture should be changing to create employees who work smart, not hard. Generating profit is the ultimate goal of any organization, and the validity of this need will never be questioned, but the understanding that producing happy employees (such as Google employees) and the freedom to work in an environment more suited to our individual’s preferences they are something that we see prevailing as online marketing companies see more value in outsourcing. The importance of pursuing happiness and well-being is a complex goal in itself, but by understanding more about what employees need and giving them the freedom to meet those needs, we may be moving toward a more successful formula of organizational culture and structure. .

In closing, I’ll mention another term that my textbook explores: organizational engagement. What this term refers to is the employee’s emotional bond, identification and participation in a particular organization. Scholars of organizational behavior call this effective engagement because it refers to the individual’s feelings toward the organization. Perhaps the goal of companies should shift from producing hard workers to developing employees who get satisfaction working where they do. Happy employees are productive employees, and if flexibility is the answer, then organizational structures that move toward the freedom to work productively under a set of principles that one dictates to oneself is something to rejoice in and capture momentum.

Anna in Toronto

AKA happily productive

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