Employer-Centered Community

Is there a place for lifetime relationships between employers and employees?

I found a recent post by Steve Prokesch, senior editor at Harvard Business Review, suggesting some employers may be rediscovering the advantages of longer relationships with their employees.

There are benefits for the company: there is value in people’s experience and expertise; there is value in people’s networks.

There are benefits for the people: companies can provide training and clearly defined career paths for growth.

At the heart of the question is the issue of the chemistry of innovation.

There’s substantial evidence that innovation requires (among other things) a solid foundation of trust and lot of passion. After all, innovation is messy and made up of a lot of failed attempts.

Trust requires time to develop. The larger the problem, the larger the team required to crack it, and the more time required to develop trust…

Steve and his readers don’t quite get there, but I think the construct they’re trying to articulate is an employer-centered community.

It sounds a bit farfetched, and doesn’t jive with the independence thing we’ve been talking about, but then several of the independents I know are already banding together or are talking about banding together into larger organizations. They are building employer-centered communities from the ground up. Established companies have to tackle the problem from the top down.

Can these companies pull it off? I don’t know.

Steve says:

My cynical suspicion is that the vast majority of corporate leaders these days know a lot more about cost cutting and outsourcing than building and nurturing communities. Maybe that’s not surprising given the job hopping that goes on in executive suites. To build and nurture communities, leaders must understand and passionately care about the essence of their organizations…

Change needs to start at the top, boys.

Get to it.

- Bandit