Lateral Insight – on company afterwork, yoga sessions, financial rewards

Where I beg to differ –Company weekend gateway, in-house wellness sessions, incentives, are missing the point

While crossing books lately from Good to Great (Jim Collins), 6 Simple Rules (Yves Morieux), Drive (Dan Pink) and a couple of others, a general principle have surfaced:

You change the way people work by changing the work itself or the work context
Introducing external, non-work related elements don’t really improves how people work

This dismisses many mainstream company practices such as

organised afterwork to build trust between coworkers
in-house yoga and giant floor pillows to improve personal wellness
financial incentive to motivate employees
This connects to a more general idea : most of the time the best solutions are the one you find within the problem (strong guiding principle in my coaching). It’s a reminder to look further into a situation in order to improve it instead of looking outside of it or looking to adding more external things to it.

What I‘m busy with –

working while traveling a bit in the philippines
finding my pace with blogging
reshaping my session “How to do your transformation right” in a more natural fashion, eventually split in “what doesn’t work ; what works”

Question in my head –

Why I can’t find any “Agile Transformation team” example that got a transformation done well? Is this inherently a false good idea? Good to Great has some brutal findings on this topic. My feeling is that the way to have such a team makes it practically not a team but more of a “chapter” (topic-oriented network going across the organisation structure).

This was Lateral Insight, your weekly dose of lateral thinking by Giom
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Tags: company afterwork, company benefits, financial rewards, lateral insight, yoga sessions