Kara Baskin spoke with MIT Sloan associate professor of work and organization studies Catherine Turco for an article about her new book The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media, in which she found a “new way of communicating across old management structures” by “leveraging today’s communication technologies.”
Turco believes that the “conversational” approach she discovered after a 10-month stint in the field at “TechCo”—an anonymous software firm—is indicative of a larger shift in workplace culture. “It’s the idea that organizations can have far more open dialogue across the corporate hierarchy than we ever before thought possible.”
She discovered that instead of a conventional chain of command, TechCo leveraged “a wide range of social media tools [to respond to] its millennial workforce’s expectations for voice rights.” Turco explains that based on conversations with millennial-age employees, she “came to see that what they wanted most were voice and access. In reality, I think that’s what almost all of us want.”
Turco explains that employees were encouraged “to speak up and weigh in on major business issues, not just those that concerned an individual’s specific job.” While “voice rights were delegated broadly, decision rights were organized in a more conventional, hierarchical fashion.”
“Openness is a slippery concept because it’s so multi-faceted. Even though TechCo’s executives talked in terms of openness, “conversation” was more apt.”
Turco believes it’s clear that the “conversational” model is emerging as a “central mechanism for confronting business challenges [through] cross-hierarchical conversation.”
Like many other companies, TechCo employs a corporate wiki, which enables employees and executives to foster dialogue. TechCo employees and executives also work in wide-open spaces with “no cubicle walls to separate them.” Turco says that creating a conversational firm takes more than an online platform and a ping-pong table.
“You need corporate leaders who really mean it when they say that they’re delegating voice rights and want to hear employees’ opinions. You need leaders who appreciate that the whole point of having a conversation is to surface a range of opinions.