You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!

You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!

Every workplace has the problem of unequal division of workload. We perform differently, our abilities vary, and personal situations affect our effectiveness. If one individual is accomplishing 80% of everything, what the heck are the rest doing? How do we level out the workload? We’re willing to do charity in our free time, so why not at work? A transparent workbench provides the boss with an understanding of what’s going on. Leveling out the workload is a management issue, but it also makes it possible for co-workers to help each other out. You’ve got a lot on your hands so let me help you out! “You scratch my back back” includes the understanding of me scratching yours in return.

Social decision-making is a work culture and an attitude. It’s transparent and requires exposing yourself. It demands openness from everyone, values the diversity of opinions, builds on collaboration and accountability. In order to be able to level out the workload by transparency, accountability, and reciprocity it’s elementary to understand that your colleague needs a helping hand. This again calls for an open work culture and the understanding of what each of us is coping with. Raising a hand when in need of help can in the worst case be considered a sign of weakness. Therefor in order to avoid bottlenecks and problems being hidden it’s important to build a culture that honors asking for help.

Reciprocity is a powerful engine for motivating, creating, maintaining, and controlling the attitude and behavior that is needed for a decision-centric organization. We expect people to react nicely to each other by returning favors for favors and benefits for benefits.

Responsibility lies with the one who has the insight, in good and bad. We must be able to trust one another to tackle the difficult and hard decisions. The point is to have an open attitude toward sharing and to encourage and reward it. Collaboration produces awareness through a shared purpose. When collaboration is adopted as a work habit, we end up sharing proactively and can expect sharing in return through reciprocity. These together with the opportunity to influence, increase early buy-in and commitment in decision-making and later on contribute to better execution and outcomes.

Our era of cloud services, the variety of possibilities to connect information and people, easy-to-use one solution apps and shared workspaces offer something for everyone and every organization. But none of these tools will work productively unless the right attitude is adopted.

What we are really talking about is leadership and culture. We are not stopping at management; we want to make leadership more decision-oriented. We want to make workplaces more transparent and trustworthy towards decision-making. The willingness to share and collaborate need to be in our DNA. Reciprocity has to become a natural basis for work.

Sharing

Accountability

Transparency

Reciprocity, and

…the belief that people will do their best when given a true chance.

These are the values Fingertip and social decision-making are built on. We at Fingertip share our work and demand decision-centricity from day one from all joining in, offering the possibility of constant learning and becoming everyday a bit better at what we do.