A marketing agency that creates creative videos and posters have been having a really bad year. The manager of the production division found that the employees aren’t working as motivated and quick as before. So in the next quarter the manager tried to have a weekly performance review in order to rev up the performance. It did work for a while but later on the manager found out that you can’t last a marathon with a sprint.  Later on the management team tried to focus on what drives the people to work. The team found out that people were gaining praise for doing new things even if they were not delivering their promised results. They thought that short-term results were more important than satisfying the consumer. And when the time came to choose, they felt that their individual goals were bigger than the company’s. All this was limiting them from participating wholeheartedly in the transformation underway. Mindsets needed to be flipped through a set of targeted initiatives. The people came to realize that satisfying the consumer is what will bring the short-term results. There won't be any success for the individual if the company is not doing well. They started to be recognized for executing with discipline focusing on our full potential to deliver challenging goals. Sharing the story of why the transformation was necessary and addressing these mindsets engaged the employees with a whole new level of energy, and only a few months later the organization was able to deliver its first quarter back on track and continue the trend. Companies that take the time to identify and shift deep-seated mindsets were 4 times more likely to rate their change programs as successful, according to the McKinsey Quarterly transformational change survey 2010. mindset shifts are linked to the highest impact behaviors a person wants to change.

When your company or organization is trying to implement a new culture or formulating one, it should hold a unique point. Because KG is trying to implement the new learning culture where learning doesn’t have to be in a class but you can learn through other media such as reading, videos and podcasts. By unique it can have a range of things, the unique approach, the unique ritual to make it more sticky, the unique culture and many more unique approaches. This unique point will bring out the stickiness factor more for everyone in the company. The author of The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell, defines the Stickiness Factor as the quality that compels people to pay close, sustained attention to a product, concept, or idea. The stickiness will depend on the context.  Bola, one of KG’s business units, had a really interesting ritual and requirement to work there. The requirement is that you can’t just like sports, you have to love it and be crazy about it. You can’t just know the surface or basic knowledge of the sport that you are into, you have to know facts about it. For example, if you are into Formula 1, you have to know the fact of the champion in 1997, which drivers use which car and so on. The unique ritual is that every Friday at 3 PM, either you have work to do or meetings, it would be stopped and everyone has to play soccer. Larisin and Corporate HRD have a common practice in implementing the learning culture. Once a week an employee has to do a “Ted Talk” where they share the knowledge they know to everyone there. This knowledge can be your expertise or something that you know or do for fun. In order to have the learning culture mindset by doing this kind of knowledge sharing can strengthen the need of learning culture. Since you have to share your knowledge you have to at least learn something. The unique approach talked in Harvard Business Review is “shocking rules”, in other words, rituals and practices that are memorable, so “bizarre,” that people inside the organization “encounter almost daily” and that people who hear about them wonder why they are necessary. There are many examples of this “shocking rules” such as Amazon where Jeff Bezos insisted that the office furniture are built or bought by buying cheap materials, especially the desk where they bought cheap doors and nail the legs to it. This shocking rule reminds everyone that even though they are one of the biggest online marketplaces with billions in revenue, they should look at every opportunity to save money so they can deliver the best products at the lowest cost. In the end, not every lock can be opened with every key. This unique approach may work at your business or company, but at times it wouldn’t. It could because of the previous culture was too great of a difference with the one you want to implement now. Shocking rules are worth the try.  

Remote working has been on the rise over the past decade, and now it’s becoming more mainstream than ever. Remote working is a working style which allows someone to work outside of their corporate office. Remote working is closely linked with freelancers, as they don’t have to come to the office for the whole week, only if they need to. There are two types of remote working which are working-from-home (WFH) and working-from-anywhere (WFA). Both WFH and WFA speak for itself from the place of work. The precedent is WFH, but since a number of research and statements by managers said that working-from-home is not increasing productivity but instead it reduces it. Employees feel too comfortable when they are in their house, thus it has shifted to WFH now. The current trend in Indonesia, with the rise of start-ups, remote working is becoming a mainstream alternative to work without or outside of the office. Remote working doesn’t have to be in one city, it could scale up as working with someone on the other side of the world. There are cases like that where the start-up is in a different country and each country head has to set the best time for a conference call. Although remote working seems like the future of working for everyone, not every job position and every individual is right for remote working. The ideal positions that would fit best with remote working are jobs that only involve individual work such as web or graphic designer, freelance writers, translator, and programmer. If the work requires teamwork and/or collaboration with other people, then it is believed to be inefficient to be remote working. Before you propose for a remote working position or ask your superior for a work-from-home job, you should consider some of the benefits and things to look out for. The advantages of remote working might be tempting such as working at a more comfortable space, you can work in your pajamas, no transportation cost to the office, you can find a cheaper place to live, autonomy over your work, and you might be more productive because of those things. What you should look out for in remote working is that first you’ll be lonely, there won’t be anyone to chat with and it could be quite stressful. Beside being lonely, a research by HBR found that most remote workers tend to leave the company they work for. The stress of no one that looks after you and you don’t see your colleagues for a long time affects the commitment of work in a company.