Niken Ardiyanti Adam F Amru : Value Creation In Embracing Identity
Niken Ardiyanti — Industrial & Organizational Psychologist at LM FEB UI &
Adam F Amru — Strategic Management Consultant at LM FEB UI
EMBRACING IDENTITY
Company– ALL companies are trying their best to differentiate themselves from their competitors. The difference can be found in almost every touch-point the company has, from the logo design, the color of choice, the name of the brand, the products, and services. The idea in differentiation is the recognizability of the company’s identity. The main goal of this ‘spare-no-effort’ will and attention is the identity and how the value proposition captured and well-understood by the customers are two main reasons why one company achieves such tremendous success while others have to struggle to survive. The company’s identity is artificial. It was designed by the people within the organization. The brand resembles the values they expect when they use the products and services from the company. On the other hand, the individual identity is not an artificial one — it is an authentic identity and an evolving personal brand in which each individual as a member of the organization carries throughout their lives. The company’s way of treating its employees is quickly reflected by the feedbacks and efforts the employees put into — the invaluable extra care the employees made to the company’s future.
Large companies didn’t become large by the means of incentive alone, the key feature of growing and sustainable businesses is retaining outstanding individuals and the possibility of doing so lies in the organization’s culture. Growth takes time and so earning the trust of customers and employees.
The value of products and services today is based more and more on creativity — the innovative ways that they take advantage of new materials, technologies, and processes (Hughes, 2013, What Value Creation Will Look Like in the Future, Harvard Business Review). Value creation in the past was a function of economies of industrial-scale: mass production and the high efficiency of repeatable tasks.
VALUE CREATION-ISM
Value creation in the future will be based on economies of creativity: mass customization and the high value of bringing a new product or service improvement to market; the ability to find a solution to a vexing customer problem; or, the way a new product or service is sold and delivered. Some people might stay in the organization for the benefit, but people settle for the comfort that makes a job become a dream job and –again–it’s the organization’s culture.
The new organization will include structures that support innovation and at increasing scale. It should be more organic and fluid to allow dynamism rather than a rigid structure that often cemented a machine-like mechanism. Being structurally fluid means attract individuals together in creative networks designed to adapt to the ever-changing landscape of customer needs and desires, often at a moment’s notice.
Management will be the job of those who oversee creative economies, ecosystems, and communities; it will be the job of managing innovation continuously where scale is used to create differentiated products and services to solve problems and meet needs on a customer by real-time customer basis.
FIVE WAYS WE CAN DO IT
As it becomes clear, there is no silver bullet. No single solution. Yet, in pushing ourselves to think outside the box and draw on the best empirical evidence that exists, the convening participants identified promising areas where investment, focus, and experimentation can serve as remarkable engines of change that identified what Work evidence-based ideas to Increase Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion in the Workplace. Christensen (2006) and Pedulla (2020) identified strategies to optimizing D&I in the organization:
1 — COLLECT, COUNT, AND COMPARE
Talent is the engine behind the creation of all value. Understanding and accepting this principle is fundamental to strategic human capital. Products and services are conceived, designed, and manufactured and sold by the people. The effective management of people which is a talent base represents the source of creating value. Organizations set goals, collect data, and examine change over time and in comparison, to other organizations: When it comes to maximizing profits and effectiveness, many businesses deploy this set of strategies. By collecting and analyzing data on diversity over time, comparing those numbers linear with the value of creation and productivity and revenue for the company/organization, and sharing them with key stakeholders, companies can also increase accountability and transparency around diversity issues.
2 — DEPLOY AN ALTERNATIVE COMPLAINT SYSTEM
Approximately half of all discrimination and harassment complaints lead to some type of retaliation, which are more likely to end up facing career challenges or experiencing worse mental and physical health compared to similar workers who were harassed, but did not complain about it then something is not working. Employee Assistance Plans (EAPs), ombudsman offices, and transformative dispute resolution systems can play a critical role in not only reducing retaliation but also provide fuel for organizational change. By expanding their scope to provide valuable support and guidance to employees on strategies and tactics to deploy around harassment and discrimination, EAPs can serve as an important resource for employees, although they do not generally intervene in organizations. The key to this type of shift is changing leadership mindsets from seeing complaints as threats to valuing them as insights that can spark positive organizational change.
3 — TEST FOR BIASED TECHNOLOGY
Technology in the VUCA era has become a necessity now in the workplace. While holding the powerful potential to increase efficiency, there is also significant concern that technologies can reproduce and even exacerbate group-based inequalities. The use of technologies in the company had already deployed for corporate screening, hiring, and performance evaluation processes that have to be built on data. This also fair to socio-demographic groups as the aggregate and that is relevant as a predictive of success or failure of the use of and what the particular role being evaluated, and also equipped with a set of relevant test new technologies for disparate impacts on workers before they go in the field. This also helps organizational leaders sharpen their understanding of what does or what does not work in our current system.
4 — BEWARE OF THE SMALL-N PROBLEM IS A SYMPTOM ASSOCIATED WITH ORGANIZATIONAL ISSUES
The ways we think about and perceive others can also hamper progress. Behind this principle is an assumption the most business leaders spend much of their time dealing with a wide range of important business symptoms. The symptoms can vary. It might be that sales are off, or that profitability is getting down, or perhaps the product quality is bad. The risks of ignoring diversity and inclusivity are the organization’s inability to connect with its stakeholders, to listen to the employee’s voices, and to reach the heart of the clients and customers. The action to change requires virtually zero dollars but the fact that we’re still facing the inclusivity problem today should represent the invisible difficulties when it comes to change. Whatever the symptom is, there is always a human or organizational solution at its core. They present a subtle, yet important, factor that can contribute to biased decision-making: group size. When individuals belong to groups that are seriously underrepresented in the context of the organization, they may be subjected to stereotype-based evaluations. Companies need not focused on the small numbers problem. Besides, Companies can also shift how assessments are run to counteract the impact of bias. One of the strategies is using simultaneous evaluation processes, rather than evaluating individuals one by one. When possible, for example, instead of hiring for a sales associate position three times in a year into one time. This type of architecture for decision-making has been linked to less bias and also effective.
5 — INVOLVE LINE MANAGEMENT FROM THE START AS A MANAGER OF CHANGE
Organizations are complex and have different internal logics, cultures, and dynamics. There is no one-size-fits-all policy and graft it on to different organizations. The organizational context does matter. And, it should be accounted that talent will be the resource of scarcity in the future. Finding and retaining future leaders over the next two decades will be one of the greatest challenges that organizational leaders will face. They will find it much more difficult to find who is the best candidate with clearly bring the right competencies (knowledge, skills, and attitudes), better than to find capital and technical resources for the organization. Because talents are vitally needed to fulfill the business strategy. Line management not only need to attract and maintain, but they also have to retain the group of employees who do a good solid job — those who are mediocre but who make the organization function. At this point, the line management role is to ensure that the process must be integrally connected with the business strategy. For when companies are deciding how to increase diversity, equity, and inclusion should account for the context of the cycle of change, especially the particular role of change agents: get line management and other leaders involved from the start. Involving line management in the design process can make the implementation smoother, making interventions more sustainable and long-lasting relations. It is about managing the organization’s needs for value creation.
CHANGING HERE & NOW
As the common goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion become even more challenging widespread, companies have the daunting task of figuring out what works. It is an integral component. Diversity is a complex debate, others believe it is more of a mindset or a way of approaching human issues, but it is the actual work process. The organization leaders and including all of us should not be trapped in pessimism and skepticism on the amount of impact that we can make. The place is here and the time to make that change is now. Because when everyone is determined to make this fundamental change, the impact should affect billions — not billions in terms of money, but billions in terms of people. From the coronavirus pandemic period we have experienced and hopefully learned the unmistaken value of digital transformation in the organizational communication, information, and operational processing which are reshaping many people’s mindset on how business can be done with today’s technological advancement. Nevertheless, technological advancement alone cannot answer the challenges we’re going to face in the future, cultural advancement is what we desperately need. Let this change in our culture to be ‘NEW’ and the inclusivity it preserves becomes our ‘NORMAL’.