When Katy George was an office manager at consulting firm McKinsey & Co. more than a decade ago, she and her colleagues created an informal system to help diverse teams improve how they collaborated in the workplace to boost their clients’ operations and business while also boosting the team’s wellbeing.
Today, George is McKinsey’s chief people officer, and the workplace collaboration system that she and her colleagues developed is a formal and recognized framework at McKinsey. It’s called the Way We Work, and it is a set of rituals and best practices for coming together around a scope of work and objectives, continually evaluating how the team is performing and changing the team as needed to stay focused on the objectives.
Since launching two years ago, many McKinsey teams have adopted the Way We Work rituals, says George, estimating the number as between 30% and 70% of all company teams. These teams are much more positive than other teams on two significant topics: whether they have a sustainable lifestyle and whether they received development, apprenticeships or leadership effectiveness coaching that helped them grow.
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The Way We Work teams rank 23 percentage points higher on the Net Promoter Score index on the first question and 15 percentage points higher on the second compared to teams that don’t use the rituals, George tells HRE.
See George discuss the challenge and solution in more detail below.
