Drew Jones

Drew Jones, PhD, is an anthropologist, former business school professor, and practicing management consultant. He is a founding partner of Experient, a workplace culture and strategy consultancy. Over the past 20 years he has worked on culture, leadership, and workplace design projects with clients throughout the US, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. He is published widely in academic management journals and magazines, and has published three previous books on design thinking and innovation, coworking, and activity based working (ABW). His new book is Open Culture Handbook: Five Questions to Drive Engagement and Innovation (Amplify Publishing, Oct. 3, 2023). Learn more at DrewJones.co

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Drew Jones's Guest Appearances

Employee Autonomy and Accountability Can Go Hand in Hand, With Drew Jones

Filed in Podcasts, Previous Episodes on February 6, 2024

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Companies continue to struggle to fully understand and manage their cultural potential. As a result, employee engagement in American firms has hovered at around only 30 percent for decades. Yet leaders who move from abstractions and ideals to tangible and employee-centric facets will create conditions that allow their teams to build culture organically from the bottom up.

Contemporary managers too often adhere to the misbegotten idea that people are inherently incapable and untrustworthy, and therefore need managerial control. Yet when employees and teams are empowered to make important decisions, self-organize, and work autonomously to achieve their project goals, such self-management not only improves employee engagement but generates more productive and adaptive teams. Organizations can experiment with elements of self-management that, once in place, will reveal how employee autonomy is equaled by accountability.

Drew Jones focuses on aligning management practices to ways that enable employees to innovate, adapt, and outcompete the competition.

Tune in to hear Drew’s thoughts on:

  • How does your approach to managing corporate culture different from the many other approaches out there?
  • What do you mean when you say that Microsoft’s financial turnaround under Satya Nadella began as a cultural turnaround?
  • What do you think companies need to do to stem the tide of quiet quitting and the Great Resignation?
  • What is Activity Based Working (ABW), and why do you think it is such an effective solution for companies’ hybrid working challenge?
  • Why do you say that innovation is as much an HR issue as it is a business growth issue?
  • Why do you think employee engagement levels in American companies have remained so low for so long?
  • You refer to Nike’s former CEO, Mark Parker, as an anthropological leader with a high level of cultural intelligence (CQ). What do you mean by that?
  • What do you mean when you talk about ‘the natural company?’
  • And much, much more!