3 Ways to Make Your Organization More Open and Connected

Sustainability: Work from anywhere

Employees aren’t connecting over ping pong tables, and open floorplans aren’t making teams any more open with one another. Organizations become more open and connected simply through employee happiness. In a world with a population surpassing 7.5 billion people, with approximately 200,000 people moving into the world’s cities every day, building remote teams that work from anywhere is more important than ever in order to sidestep the pollution of dysfunctional daily travel that has spun out of control in virtually every city across America.

Inclusion: Listen to everyone

Diversity awareness is on the rise, not only because we have put a human face to it, but also because diverse teams that collaborate closely are proven to be more innovative in the workplace. Today, success in business at all levels is innovation-driven and relationship-driven, not task-driven. A lack of diversity results in hivemind and group-think, which is ultimately counterproductive. Opening your doors to inclusion can make your organization more open and connected by considering -- and acting on -- fresh-faced perspectives from a larger and more diverse pool of minds, experience and worldviews. Besides bonding over victories, nothing builds trust and connection among teams quite like people feeling that their own unique voices are being heard in a consistent and successful way.

Transparency: Learn from anyone

Today’s business world is flattening out, with a focus on meritocracy, and a distaste for the Industrial Era top-down hierarchy that defined the workplace for the Baby Boomer generation. One of the main reasons why key employees can become disconnected and demotivated is because they feel like they are out of the communications loop, or that communicating is too complex -- they may feel a lack of ownership, because they may not feel a sense of transparency about where they are headed and why. Task-wise, miscommunications happen (an enemy of openness) all the time because of a lack of transparency in a number of workflow scenarios. More transparency, by simplifying communications and the flow of information, can make your organization more open and connected because people will feel like they have all of the information they need, at all points in time, to make the right decisions for the company.

SOURCE:entrepreneur.com