Think of your workforce as customers

It's interesting to see what people in a workplace come up with when given a glass of wine and the opportunity to speak freely and it amazes me just how different people are. I am a member of The Hub coworking space and at the Town Hall meeting yesterday in Melbourne there were fifty odd small to medium size business owners. Each person acts as a small corporation, and the word 'odd' would pretty much sum us up. Odd in an interesting way, as opposed to strange, as we are an inspired and creative bunch.

It's interesting to see what people in a workplace come up with when given a glass of wine and the opportunity to speak freely and it amazes me just how different people are. I am a member of The Hub coworking space and at the Town Hall meeting yesterday in Melbourne there were fifty odd small to medium size business owners. Each person acts as a small corporation, and the word 'odd' would pretty much sum us up. Odd in an interesting way, as opposed to strange, as we are an inspired and creative bunch.

Much of the time, communication in the formal corporate workplace is top down - this is what is happening and why, but there are a few models of workplaces like co-working where it has to be more of an open democracy. In a co-working space, the 'workers' are actually customers. When the business owner takes the stage, there is a great opportunity for eveyone to learn from one another.

Would it be interesting to look at people in a more standard workplace as a gathering of small and medium size enterprises, systems of work in their own right? I think that the assumption that any business has a workforce that has similar characteristics, similar experiences of life lived at the moment, is a significant barrier to business. Instead of managing the average, I believe that we are managing by exception each and every time. The more a middle manager or an executive tries to 'address the masses', the more the message will get lost. Every person's story is essentially different and always will be. We all just need to accept that and work out how to pull the themes together and rethink how we can keep up with each other.