Cooperation in the Workplace

Cooperation, unlike compromise, is a state wherein two or more parties behave in a way that achieves mutual gains.

In this follow-up paper, we go back to the basics and look at cooperation between the workers of an industrial organization: within teams, between departments or among the overall workforce of a company.

From Theory #

In his The Evolution of Cooperation, Robert Axelrod presents a number of ways to foster cooperation.

  1. Enlarge the shadow of the future: mutual cooperation can be stable if the future is sufficiently important relative to the present.
  2. Change the payoff: effectively making the choice of defection less attractive.
  3. Foster the perception of social or cultural relatedness.
  4. Teach people to care about each other: winning is not a matter of doing better than the other player, but of eliciting cooperation from him.
  5. Teach reciprocity and the benefits of tit-for-tat: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
  6. Improve recognition abilities: the ability to recognize the other player from past interactions.

To Industry #

Those all sound like common sense precepts. But can we apply these theoretical criteria to the world of business?

The following are a few suggestions to get you started.

  1. Ban internal mobility to positions that are unrelated to a worker’s current job: It is better to move from equipment procurement to logistic support for the same equipment than to a completely unrelated position in accounting, where the person does not interact with any of the same people.
  2. Apply religiously the advice of the CEO of The Lego Group, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp: Blame is not for failure; blame is for failing to help or failing to ask for help. Make it a silver rule of your organization. (The golden rule is down in number five.)
  3. Make sure that your employees share a unified culture: Working language and vocabulary, dress code or uniform, symbols and logos, and habits, behaviors and protocols. Here’s an example of a simple habit that is easy to spread in a company: never use email when you can discuss a topic in person.
  4. Direct your people’s attention to external threats and competitors: We can’t be fighting one another when we need to be focused on overcoming a staunch rival in the marketplace.
  5. Remove middle management: Not because it is made up of bad individuals, but because it dampens reciprocity. Removing middle management forces people to talk to one another in order to resolve their issues, instead of escalating every topic in team meetings and risk reviews. So instead of empowerment, go for abrogation.
  6. Make sure that, in the course of their duties, your people don’t interact with more than one hundred different colleagues: The person in your IT department who is in charge of handing company phones to thousands of employees will unlikely start to spontaneously cooperate with all of them.

Win-Win-Win #

Cooperation can be a significant asset for a business. It is not hard to see the cost to an organization when teams are divided, departments are acting in silos, and the overall workforce is not pushing in the same direction.

Fostering cooperation has the potential to turn these difficult situations around.

And when it is used in the right way, win-win can become win-win-win—situations where both employees and the business achieve mutual gains.

Author: E. Dib #
Further Reading #
 
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