One of the rising trends with the silicon valley based industries has been to create a fun ‘anything-goes’ type workplace to encourage its (usually) young teams to feel relaxed, see work as fun and generally hang out with the guys in a cool, happening place.
That’s great, and I’m all for making workplaces fun and enjoyable places to be, except when this is done as a shortcut to managing people well and giving them the skills and setting them up to succeed.
But the iPhone generation is getting wise to the all bells and no whistles approach to employment and starting to realize that work stops being fun and cool when you are just not getting the nuts and bolts support to do your job.
Google, despite its reputation for being an employer of choice has an average tenure of 1.1years according to a survey last year by Payscale. Others are not far behind, with many of the high-tech companies failing to get an average tenure above 2 years. This compares to an all-sectory average of at least 4 years. Even factoring age into the equation, (under 25’s being the most mobile workforce), we still see that something is turning more people off than on in these high-octane environments, so what is it?
The fact remains that there is no shortcut to good employment practices. Yes of course offering employees a free iPad and an unlimited supply of Mars Bars sounds amazing. But if that goes with unlimited work hours, unmanageable workloads and poor or just plain absent managers, then reaching for another candy bar rarely fills the gaping hole that is left.
In an era where everything needs to be cut down to 144 characters or less, management has become a cliché. But like all industries that are on the rise in their trajectory, the plateau and the inevitable decline will come at somepoint. And when organisations don’t have a bottom-less pit of resources, the lack of stability will hurt and cost more than can be sustained.
So as high octane as the party might feel, far better to wean off the party poppers now and start to build more sustainable, grounded organisations, that can still be agile, creative and be motivating for everyone involved.
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