I have solved one of the age-old dilemmas of office politics: who should make the tea. Gone are the days of Mad Men's Don Draper sending the sole female team member - Peggy Olsen - off to make the refreshments. No, today we have equality in the form of social media.

I am talking about Makethetea.com, a fantastic website brought to you by those clever marketers over at Cravendale. Constantly arguing over whose turn it is to make the tea? Well, sign up to Makethetea.com, enter your number of sugars and preferred shade, add extra comments such as 'I will only have tea made with tea leaves in a pot' and then create your drinks group. Hit the 'brew now' button and the site randomly selects one of your office colleagues to make the next cuppa.

If only other office issues were as easy to solve. How about Answerthephone.com, where you are randomly selected to answer that constantly ringing phone? I would certainly sign up for a Yourturntobuytheleaving/birthday/newbaby/present.com.

While Makethetea is just a bit of fun, it does put the spotlight on the tensions that exist in workplaces. It also addresses that other mainstay of office politics: hierarchy. Your manager is just as likely to be picked as the office junior. In its small way, it is a stab in the heart of the old organisational structure, urging on the death of the command-and-control style of management. Research last year for HR magazine found that just a third of HR directors thought the old approach would be prevalent in their organisation in five years and nearly a quarter envisaged decentralised power by 2014.

So will the future be more like the social media model on which Makethetea is based? Will companies be collaborative structures made up of networks of people empowered to put forward their views and take decisions? Well, the command-and-control model is still prevalent in 85% of organisations today and a whopping 95% of issues are escalated up the hierarchical ladder. But there are compelling reasons for change.

Last month the Work Foundation announced results of a two-year study into leadership, which included interviews with Unilever and Tesco, among others. Its conclusion is clear: it is a people-centred approach to leadership, rather than a controlling one, that results in outstanding company performance.

Gladstone once said: "If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are too heated, it will cool you. If you are depressed, it will cheer you. If you are excited, it will calm you." I suggest for workers in the future we can now add 'it will empower you' while for business performance 'it will improve you'.

Siân Harrington is editor of Human Resources magazine
 
.

Topics