Creating the Best Workplace on Earth

Reprint: R1305H

No organization can fulfill every hope and desire of its employees, so it helps to know which matter most to people. Goffee and Jones have identified the six most essential imperatives for creating an ideal work environment. Their insights come from surveys and interviews of hundreds of executives from all over the world.

Few organizations embody all six attributes of the dream organization, many are difficult to achieve, and some even conflict with one another. But they nonetheless stand as an agenda for executives who wish to create the most productive, most rewarding workplace imaginable.

Agenda
1. Let people be themselves.
2. Unleash the flow of information.
3. Magnify people’s strengths.
4. Stand for more than shareholder value.
5. Show how the daily work makes sense.
6. Have rules people can believe in.

This list contains no surprises, but implementing the elements is no easy task. Almost all of them require leaders to carefully balance competing interests and to reallocate their time and attention. Companies like Arup, LVMH, Waitrose, and even McDonald’s are doing it to varying degrees. Your challenge is to match—and then to exceed—what they have managed to accomplish.