People are Messy

I recently facilitated a conference for the Forum for People Performance Management, and one of the livelier discussions was on the theme, "People are Messy." We were grappling with the idea that businesses have a wish for employees to be entirely predictable and dependable in their behavior. By this we mean they're never absent at inconvenient times; they never make a mistake, especially when it really matters; they don't bring personal concerns with them when they show up for work, whether it's broken pipes or sick children; the list goes on.

But in reality, people are messy, and we're messy because we're human. Things go wrong in our lives, mistakes are made and companies are impacted. However, instead of creating policies with the intent of limiting or controling the messiness, what if we simply accepted the reality of it, and designed organizations that acknowledged it?

For example, what if you abandoned the idea of set office hours, and instead told everyone to establish their own work schedule? That's what Best Buy did. Or what if you enacted the belief that productive work can happen anytime and anywhere, and rather than assign everyone a dedicated cube, you had them check out a desk to work at (assuming they needed to be in the office that day.) This practice is called hoteling, and IBM and Microsoft are among the many that use this strategy.

These are simple examples, but the idea is that when you take actions that are designed to reign in the messiness, you're probably going to fall short of your vision. And you also end up with unintended consequences. In the end, you're better off creating a system that can be easily adapted to the needs of many. The result will be an environment that ultimately brings out the best in people, even when they're being messy.

Jennifer