Is it ok to let employees out of their cubicles?

So the industry experts of corporate culture are putting out a lot of buzzwords like collaboration and integration and team work. Companies go to many conferences a year to learn about these same concepts and when they come back, nothing actually changes.

For some reason, people are afraid to let employees have freedom. Freedom to work together and foster ideas to solve problems sounds amazing but it hides behind the way that  things have always been done.

The Rules of the Game

Employees hide behind their cubicles because they are afraid to take chances. Their managers and executives never follow through on these great ideas to change and so they feel that if they take initiative, it will be smothered and ignored. They don’t want to stand out because that makes them vulnerable and who knows if the boss is feeling upset and takes it out on the first person they see?

If the rules of the game are dictated to mean follow the boss and behave at all costs, that’s what employees will do. No amount of conferences and fancy new books with fancy new ideas will change that unless the leaders back it up with action.

What does freedom cost?

Lots of bosses think that giving additional freedom will create a circus out of their company. They may be right, if their employees can’t be trusted and the type of work expected has to be forced out of them. It might surprise you that trusting your employees and taking a small step towards freedom might be rewarding. It might be worth the cost just to see what happens. If it doesn’t work, you can go right back to how things were, no questions asked.

Employees Need Room to Grow

The new trends and culture changes are great ideas, but require great initiative. They won’t happen by maintaining the same practices and rules, because that’s not how it works. Companies have to make big changes in order to get the results they want.

Want to Change Your Customer’s View of you?

To manage the change and let employees share information freely requires trust and cooperation. Managers have to be willing to trust their teams and the teams have to cooperate and demonstrate they can be trusted. If an executive is so eager to create a new company image that lets their true personality shine, they have to be willing to give up some barriers and control to the employees they felt qualified enough to hire.

Once you let the barriers down, the right knowledge and information gets shared and your company becomes something worth talking about.