Strong company cultures

• Assign tasks that demand interdependence among team members to complete, so that they rely on each other to succeed.
• Set clear goals. Formalizing the team’s vision, roles, norms, work processes, and strategies can help keep a team on track.
• Awarding teamwork is crucial to encourage them to work together and discourage an individual from going off the rails.
• Be patient. Teams often overcome problems of virtuality over time.

Leadership must first trust that employees understand the organization's context and goals enough to make decisions on their own. 

To get to a point where you trust almost anyone to make decisions on their own because you believe they have the same information and objectives you do.

For many of us, the office becomes a fun place due to a sense of community, purpose and fun interactions that make up an office day. To try and mimic your office culture virtually:

1. Set up Slack channels for water cooler conversation
2. Schedule virtual movie days, when the same movie is streamed with the chat option on.
3. Try to recreate virtual versions of what employees miss the most in office, like a coffee break, for instance.

Being social at office lubricates official conversations and the work itself. The more we spend time with colleagues having non-essential chatter, the easier our work becomes with them.

It helps to be creative and infuse fun into a virtual interaction. Any official conversation, like a manager meeting his subordinates in a one-on-one meeting, can start by asking about the person’s life (something unrelated to work), so that a connection is built.

The pace and scale that technology disrupts is a social, political and business challenge.
Employers are best placed to make a positive societal impact, for example, by upgrading the abilities of their employees and equipping them with new skills. Employers will also reap the greatest benefit if they can successfully transform the workforce in this way.

Talent is the largest barrier to the successful implementation of new strategies.

Many leading businesses realize that it is quicker and more financially prudent to look internally and develop the talent they already have. Yet only a third of global executives report that their organizations have launched any new reskilling programs.

Talent may be evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. It could take some time and cumulative action to build a more diverse workforce, but sometimes the simplest of measures can add up to major changes.

At Shopify, for example, the company rethought the requirements on their job descriptions. On each job post, it encourages job seekers to apply even if they don’t necessarily meet all the requirements that are listed.

One of the most helpful things you can do for your employer brand at the moment is to help employees and those interested in joining your company see beyond just your value proposition, to your actual values.

In the future, this will become even more important as companies continue to recognize the importance of taking a more empathetic, human tone in their messaging and telling authentic stories that reveal their company’s values and purpose.

• Work together, complement each other, and function as a team.
• Able to operate on and enable environments that are more dynamic, team-centric, and connected.
• Lead and build teams and partner with the broader ecosystems, keep people connected and engaged, and drive a culture of innovation, learning, and continuous improvement.
• Lead a workforce that includes contractors, the contingent workforce, and crowd talent.
• Understand how different business functions, industries, and technologies come together to form solutions.
• Comfortable and competent with risk-taking.

Millennials expect to be developed via opportunities, mentoring, and stretch assignments. However that is hard to come by in top-heavy companies. 

Most millennials think their roles provide little development while most companies report they have excellent or adequate programs for Millennials.

It provides a framework for a group to arrive at a shared decision around one direction. 

While many resources offer frameworks for brainstorming, divergence of thinking, and effectively whiteboarding, this is a framework and a method to make decision-making, and tough choices with a team, so that convergence happens.

The surveys provide the input you need to plan and manage your change initiatives, your cultural transformation programs, your diversity interventions, your talent management and leadership development initiatives, and your customer feedback. 

Extensive Data studies have found a link between the health of an organization and its performance.

Robust health is crucial to an organization's long term success.

Companies aligned with one of these four organizational recipes are more likely to be healthy and to deliver strong, sustained performance than those following random management styles:

• Leader Driven
• Market Focused
• Execution Expertise
• Talent and Knowledge-based

• Epic meaning and calling to finish a mission.
• Development and accomplishment inspires us to finish the game.
• Empowerment of creativity to bring imagination to life.
• Ownership and possession of rewards.
• Social influence and relatedness or envy.
• Scarcity and impatience to have things we don't have.
• Undpredictability and curiosity of what the next challenges are.
• Loss coins and chances and avoidance of failure.

• Reward yourself for fulfilling one or several tasks

Use surprise rewards.

• Determine a reward by chance.

Engage in time-based challenges

Make a deal with your friend.

• Challenge and motivate each other to finish a task

• Centers on the customer process or journey and supports a clear business target.
• Involves employees from all relevant areas to find different ways of working a problem. 
• Challenge participants to reimagine an existing method to try to find the most efficient way to improve the customer experience.
• Sessions start with ideas but end with a working prototype.
• Output includes a clear development path that highlights all the steps needed to accelerate production and implementation.
• The hackathon concludes with a presentation to senior leaders, including a real-life demonstration of the new prototype and a roadmap of IT and other capabilities needed to bring the final version to market.
• Once the teams agree on what to do, those responsible for execution create a virtual model that the group vets, refines and re-releases in continual cycles until the new process or app meets the desired experience criteria.
• Management prevents the dissipation of enthusiasm and energy created on the hackathon by placing new processes to sustain it.