It becomes clearer when we recognise that autonomy here is a desired attribute of a team and not of the individual. Exactly what leads us to the desire for team autonomy in the New Organising is the desire to eliminate the separation between thinking and doing and compartmentalisation. Persistent specialisation, separation between thinking and doing (between management and ‘the floor’), and standardisation have shaped our organisational thinking for decades. The principles were conceived and propagated by great organisational thinkers such as Adam Smith, Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford. Their principles propelled the industrial revolution and brought us the welfare society.
However, in today's market and world full of uncertainty, volatility, and rapid change, these principles collide with their limitations. We can no longer think of our employees as performers with specialised and limited tasks to leave the thinking to management. In fact, everyone in the organisation faces increasing complexity and continuous change. We need to work together to maximise our brainpower. Our teams of employees need to be able to solve problems quickly themselves, and to do so without lengthy escalations through different layers of management. They also need to be able to respond quickly to all kinds of changes and variations in their assignments, without always relying on the help of support services or management .
So we need teams that can respond quickly and appropriately to change. We can only achieve this by increasing the autonomy of teams. This includes:
- Striving to minimise the team's dependencies vis-à-vis other teams, support services and hierarchy.
- Ensuring that the team has as complete a range of tasks as possible, and this by integrating not only ‘doing’ (executive tasks) but also ‘thinking’ (preparatory, organisational, & support tasks) into the team.
- Being vigilant about the fact that people need to have the necessary competences to respond flexibly to changing needs in the team. The use of a competency matrix can help in this regard. Flexibility in task content is perceived as normal.
- Ensure that teams have a rounded work domain with high coherence of activities. Preferably, they have a recognisable contribution to our primary process and/or the (internal) customer.
- Clear and fast information flow to the team. Visual management is an important tool here. This allows employees to independently monitor their results, determine improvements and implement them.
Stanwick has built up extensive expertise in designing organisations and developing autonomous. Moreover, we have ‘Senior Consultants in Innovative Work Organisations’, certified through UAMS and Flanders Synergy vzw, where as ambassadors we also continuously exchange knowledge and expertise with other organisations active in this field. With all the recent new insights, we also recently updated our TAO model (Teamwork - Autonomy - Organisation) into the new TAO 2.0. With this tool, we can quickly make an analysis of your organisation and together find out where opportunities for improvement lie.
