The degree to which work helps a worker improve according to their personal beliefs and values. Jobs with low personal growth potential may require a worker to do something that is in conflict with their values or hold them back from achieving their personal potential. 

 

Improvement Action: Allow workers the flexibility to pursue personal interests and/or work later in life

Source:

Semler, Ricardo, Out of this world: Doing things the Semco way, Global Business and Organizational Excellence, July/August 2007, p 17

  • GWT Analysts Summary:  One of Semco's more innovative approaches to retaining the best talent is to allow flexibility in the structure of one's career with the company. The Retire-A-Little policy allows employees to take time off during their early career to pursue personal interests and trade that time for the option to work later in their career. This program is intended to allow workers the time to seek personal growth while they are young and their health is good, rather than waiting until retirement age to engage in fulfilling activities.
  • Excerpt from text: “Like many of our approaches, Semco’s Retire-a-Little program sounds a little off-the-wall at first. However, it’s carefully constructed to take life cycles and the curve of human health into account. Few people would argue that the peak of physical capability typically occurs during one’s 20s and 30s. Likewise, one’s health tends to take a downturn once someone passes the age of 60. At the same time, one’s financial independence usually reaches its zenith between the age of 50 and 60, while idle time naturally peaks after 70. Basically, then, we can conclude that you don’t have the money or leisure time to realize your dreams when you are most physically fit to pursue them. Conversely, you no longer have the required physical stamina for such pursuits when you have the most time and money to spare. Isn’t that ironic? At Semco, we believe the current system of work and retirement should be replaced with one that allows employees to better square their life cycle with their career cycle. Under our Retire-a-Little program, people are allowed to acquire from the company as much early retirement as they wish - provided they repay that time later. An employee may take Wednesday afternoons off, for example, to pursue those interests that would ordinarily be reserved for retirement. The company “sells” the employee that time by reducing take-home pay by a small amount. In turn, the employee receives a voucher for work to be performed after retirement.” p 17

 

Improvement Action: Avoid security searches or personal intrusions that could be considered demeaning

Source:

Managing without managers. Harvard Business Review. Sept-Oct 1989, p.80

  • GWT Analysts Summary:  The leadership of Semco believes that enforcing harsh policies of security searches and personal audits humiliates the entire work force, and ultimately does not return the savings intended by preventing every possible type of theft.
  • Excerpt from text: “We have done away with security searches, store-room padlocks, and audits of the petty-cash accounts of veteran employees. Not that we wouldn’t prosecute a genuinely criminal violation of our trust. We just refuse to humiliate 97% of the work force to get our hands on the occasional thief or two-bit embezzler.”