By DAVID WESSEL
Motivating Workers By Giving Them a VoteAugust 25, 2005; Page A2
SourceIn the last century, corporate success often meant moving things around. Think Henry Ford's assembly line. Today, much corporate success, indeed much economic progress, depends on successfully moving knowledge around.
Smart companies devote energy, money and consultants to "knowledge management." The tricky part isn't creating Web sites to bridge distance and time zones, though they help, but finding ways to motivate proud, skilled professionals to share expertise and to cooperate to advance the frontiers of knowledge for the benefit of shareholders and society.
To that end, several companies have created "communities of practice," groups of employees of similar professional or other interests that cross the boundaries of corporate fiefs. Schlumberger Ltd., an oil-field-services company with 52,000 employees spread over 80 countries, is one such company. It has 23 communities ranging from chemistry to well engineering, with about 140 special-interest subgroups, and counts more than 11,750 employees as members.
Schlumberger does one thing that few, if any, others do: It allows its communities to govern themselves and choose their own leaders, often in contested elections.
"It is the only organization that I know of that has formal elections," says Richard McDermott, a Boulder, Colo., consultant who has worked with Schlumberger and others. "People...see it as a real democratic institution in what is otherwise an authoritarian institution, a business." Other companies, apparently, are scared of that.
John Afilaka, a geological engineer who is a Schlumberger business-development manager in Nigeria, last September stood for the leadership of the company's rock-characterization community, a group of more than 1,000 people expert in determining what might be in an underground reservoir. He beat an opponent -- he says he doesn't remember by how wide a margin -- and now spends 15% to 20% of his time organizing an annual conference and occasional workshops, overseeing the group's Web site, coordinating subgroups and the like.
Mr. Afilaka campaigned to increase technical professionals' influence on top management's research-and-development priorities and to forge better links among various communities. He claims progress on both. He says proudly that his community helped shape the research agenda of a new carbonate research facility in Saudi Arabia.
Schlumberger is no worker-run kibbutz. The creation of islands of democracy in a hierarchical capitalist sea was the solution to a business problem of significance to a company that primarily sells not things but services and expertise: managing and motivating technical professionals. In the late 1990s, then-Chief Executive Euan Baird "felt almost everything that had been tried had failed," says Schlumberger veteran Henry Edmundson.
Engineers, physicists, geologists worked well on individual projects, but the company hadn't a clue how to help them develop the professional sides of their lives. "If you can't manage these people," Mr. Baird decided, "let them manage themselves," recalls Mr. Edmundson. He was ordered to implement the idea.
With no reliable roster to consult, Mr. Edmundson eventually asked people to register themselves as members of one of 20 groups without regard to experience, education or title. Within a month, he had more than 3,000 names.
"Because we didn't know too much about these people -- and their personnel files were locked away by human resources in a secure Web site -- we decided to let them create online CVs," he says. The prospect of unverified postings frightened some, but proved an enormous success: "It was the first time employees had been given a chance to stand up and say, 'This is who I am,' " he says. The company embraced the practice. More than 50,000 such self-created CVs are now posted on Schlumberger's internal Web site.
After six months, the embryonic communities were told to elect leaders. There was one condition: Each nominee had to be backed by at least one other community member and by his or her manager, who was consenting to let the subordinate devote a chunk of time to the endeavor. Turnout in early elections was an impressive 60%, but it since has fallen to 30%. Leaders are elected to a one-year term and can be re-elected only once. In all, more than 275 employees serve as elected leaders of communities or subgroups.
Schlumberger, which had revenue last year of $11.48 billion, spends about $1 million a year on the Eureka communities, as they are known. "Compared with other knowledge initiatives, it's a cheapie," Mr. Edmundson says.
The company's current chief executive, Andrew Gould, says the self-governing feature is crucial to the communities' success. Technical professionals often are motivated by peer review and peer esteem, he says. (He might have added, though he didn't, that stock options and corner offices aren't sufficient.) The election of leaders "ensures the integrity of peer judgments," he says.
Or, as Mr. Afilaka puts it, "The best guys to decide who leads them are the guys who really work together."
Write to David Wessel at
capital@wsj.com