We.Org: Moving Their Company Beyond Bureaucracy

The Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge, Part Two of the Harvard Business Review/McKindsey M-Prize for Management Innovation, seeks to advance progress on making organizations genuinely fit for human beings—more inspiring, open, and free. Management innovators from around the world in every realm of endeavor were invited to share the most progressive practices and disruptive ideas around. After receiving an abundance of big ideas and game-changing initiatives and experiences from management innovators in all kinds of organizations worldwide, seven finalists were selected. We are proud to announce that We.org:The Freedom to Choose, by Dan Bean, Robert Musson and Chermaine Li, was chosen as one of the seven winners.

To increase employee satisfaction, build trust and retain talent during a post-product cycle reorganization (reorg), the Microsoft Lync Test management team offered its employees the freedom to choose what they wanted to work on during the next product cycle. The result was We.Org.

The We.Org experiment encompassed 85 people in the Microsoft Lync Test team at four different organizational levels. While perhaps less efficient than a manager-directed reorganization, the more collaborative We.Org process resulted in higher employee satisfaction and lower attrition within the Lync Test team. Employees feel more like collaborators in the reorganization effort and this helped to bond the Test team and increase organizational trust. Click here to read about the We.Org: The Freedom to Choose and the other winners of The Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge.