In this piece, Daniel Pink, author and expert on making workplaces more awesome, discusses how we might cater to millenials' desire for constant feedback by providing workers with more than the annual performance review. How much can meeting once a year or even every six months really help someone? Now that I'm not in the organizing world, getting feedback on the regs, I totally sympathize with this notion. Academia, I'm finding, is pretty weak on feedback, accountability, idea sharing, and pretty much all the things that I learned were important in my organizational development classes in college.
In this other article, Pink addresses the benefits of giving employees time to do what they want. Google and others have proven that allowing employees to be creative can lead to great ideas like G-mail, so why haven't more companies caught on? This is something Wyatt and I have been talking about a lot. It seems like a no-brainer.
As a former solider of the non-profit world myself, I wonder how organizations can make space for their employees to do some creative thinking, without the incentive of bottom-line payback. Given the chance and the space to be more creative, non-profit workers might come up with brilliant new campaign strategies, reporting software and fundraising tools. The problem is, most people have too much work to set aside time for non-essential work. They need the management to mandate creative time, and even then, I've known folks who would probably keep working on their regular work. It's so lame! We're missing out on so much potential. Let's democratize the workplace. Creative time and regular feedback for all!
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