Organizational Dynamics

The future of every organization is built around continuous development and improvement as most people are already aware. However, there are some who forget that one of the most valuable assets in a company are the people who are involved in everyday operations. This includes every person no matter what position they might hold within the company, whether it is the president or frontline service personnel. Each individual brings forward unique skill sets and abilities that can impact the development and direction of a company. Their individual development and well-being are important considerations in any change in organizational dynamics. Many people still believe that businesses operate in an employer’s market, though I would tend to disagree with that assessment, particularly when looking at the real state of hiring even in tight markets.

I tend to side with individuals like Laura Butler, former Vice President of Talent Acquisition for TeleTech (now TTEC). While it is true that finding the right role can be difficult for job seekers, employers are also constantly scrambling to find qualified team members. Even once employers have successfully found people to add to their teams, the task of keeping those people has become an ever more complicated task. As an employee, you are naturally concerned with your personal perspectives and the effects that change may ultimately have on your personal stability. This is a very important consideration for members of management when they begin to evaluate change initiatives, which are a key part of maintaining a competitive edge in shifting markets. In order to make sure that a company can sustain itself now and in the future, it must be ready to invest in its workforce. That includes continuing education and employee retention as well as a big picture view of future operations.

I would personally like to pull a page from Google’s operational philosophy, originally laid out by Eric Schmidt and Hal Varian, which I have adapted below to include my thoughts and reflect what people have learned over the years.

1. Hire by Committee: Make sure your new recruits talk to their future colleagues

I believe that this is an important part of continued organizational development. Ensuring that new hires and existing members of your team can work well together will make sure that the projects they work on can be performed efficiently and quickly. It is important to remember that the morale and performance of your workforce hinges on the way team members communicate and interact. To keep this practical today, you do not need an endless series of interviews. Research and practice have shown that four or five well-structured conversations with peers and managers give you the best picture of a candidate without burning out your team or losing great talent before they ever set foot in the door.

2. Cater to their every need: Make sure it is not hard for them to perform

Making sure that your employees have the tools and resources they need to perform their jobs also ensures that they meet your expectations. If you fail to manage resources effectively, operations can quickly grind to a halt and employee morale will quickly slip as they fail to meet not only your expectations of performance but their own. Today, catering to their needs is less about fancy office perks and much more about stripping away daily friction. That means providing reliable hardware, modern software, solid support tooling, and cutting through unnecessary administrative red tape so people can focus on doing meaningful work.

3. Pack them in: Put people to work close to one another

This has always been a debatable concept. While the original thinking was that putting people within arm’s reach would make communication effortless, real-world experience often shows the opposite. In an open office space, I rarely got much of my own work done because I spent so much of my day being pulled in every direction, working and supporting everyone else. Having worked remotely outside of a physical office for more than 15 years, I know firsthand that remote work is functional, effective, and practical. It certainly varies by person, role, and circumstance, but physical proximity is by no means a requirement for high performance. Today, packing people in should be about connection density and easy reach rather than cramming desks together. We need to protect quiet environments where people can actually focus and get work done, while being intentional about bringing team members together, whether virtually or in person, when collaborating on complex problems or building team relationships.

4. Make coordination easy: Use technology to keep people talking together

Large organizations need to effectively communicate important information among themselves. In the past, this meant email, shared calendars, CRM, ERP, and basic internal intranets. Today, the challenge is often that we have too many disconnected systems. Making coordination easy now means unifying our knowledge so people can actually find what they need on demand. Having centralized search, clear documentation, and connected communication platforms allows your workforce to stay on the same page and adapt quickly to unexpected shifts in project development.

5. Eat your own dog food: Make use of company products

This is another important one. Make sure that the products you produce and sell are also available and actively used by your workforce. This is an effective method of quality control. Nobody wants to buy or use products of poor quality, and your workforce is no different. If you make your products easily accessible to your team, they will surface bugs, point out rough edges, and make sure the product meets or exceeds real-world expectations. For this to actually work, development teams need to be genuinely open and receptive to this feedback. They need to treat internal reports with the same seriousness as external customer issues, if not with even greater urgency, so problems get resolved before customers ever encounter them. At the same time, we have to remember that our own internal teams are often power users, so we must always pair our internal feedback with real customer feedback and frontline support data to avoid living in our own bubble.

6. Encourage creativity: Allow freedom to come up with new ideas

Environments that stifle innovation and creativity often lose their ability to support a competitive edge in today’s rapidly changing business environment. Organizations that allow their employees to give feedback on processes and bring forward new ideas achieve higher performance standards and higher workforce productivity. Google’s concept of 20 percent time was a brilliant way to give people the freedom to experiment, and it proved that giving employees autonomy leads to breakthrough ideas. We can build on that positive foundation today by combining personal exploration with structured collaborative opportunities, such as focused hackathons, innovation sprints, or dedicated project days where employees have protected time to build tools, test ideas, and improve processes.

7. Strive for consensus: Remember “many are better than the few”

Strive to move forward as a group rather than individually, ensuring that everyone from the bottom up is on the same page with what you want to achieve. Making changes in a vacuum without the input of those who have to carry out those changes almost always results in failure. In his classic work on change management, John Kotter noted that more than 70 percent of major change initiatives fail, largely because the people tasked with execution did not understand, support, or see a reason for the change. However, striving for consensus should not mean that a single disagreement paralyzes the entire team or that it should unnecessarily lead to lower morale and dissension.

To prevent this, leaders and team members need to be genuinely open and receptive to input from across the team, especially from people who have been through similar changes or improvement processes before. They are often trying to steer initiatives in the right direction and avoid predictable pitfalls. Real consensus comes down to respecting the people on the ground enough to listen to them and bring them along with you.

8. Don’t be evil: Live tolerance and respect

This is one of the tougher aspects of normal operation, extending into ethical behavior as well as how your business interacts with its community and customers. It is important to remember that a business is much like a living, breathing person, and the impact it has can reach quite far. Google later reframed this principle as “do the right thing,” which is an even better way to look at it. Rather than just avoiding bad behavior, leadership should actively cultivate an environment of integrity, respect, and psychological safety where employees feel comfortable speaking up when something does not seem right.

9. Data drive decisions: Do analysis and stay on track

This comes back to using systems effectively. While I personally tend to focus heavily on qualitative information and frontline realities, tracking performance quantitatively ensures that progress and roadblocks can be evaluated objectively. Today, we have far more sophisticated analytics and telemetry than we had years ago. The key is to be data-informed rather than blindly data-driven. We should use metrics, spreadsheets, and system dashboards to track project health and identify trends, but we must always combine those numbers with practical experience, direct human feedback, and sound judgment.

10. Communicate effectively: Hold meaningful stay-in-touch meetings

One of the most important things you can do when managing change or continued development is to make sure that everyone is heard. Whether it is a frontline support specialist or the president of the company, everyone should feel involved. While meetings allow people to give feedback and align on direction, holding too many meetings quickly burns people out and cuts into focus time. Today, effective communication means using asynchronous updates, written briefs, and clear ticketing for routine status checks, while reserving live meetings for interactive discussions, brainstorming, and complex decision-making.

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