Reducing invisible costs and facing the Energy Challenge at Work in Brazil

Begin of January, when I came to work on Monday morning, I had a good surprise. Shell was distributing to all employees a customized cup as part of the Energy Challenge at Work program. The main aim is to reduce the usage of plastic cups, reducing the trash we generate, reducing the cost for Shell to replace it and, why not, make people happier of having a Shell cup, a nice one by the way.

I don’t know how many plastic cups everyone of us uses a day but considering a 7 floors building with around 100 people by floor, drinking water and coffee, it should be a very high value of $$$ going to trash literally.

As soon as I see more examples of how we are facing the Energy Challenge at Work here in Brazil I post again.

Regards,

Alex Lopes

Mapping informal relations inside of the company

Every time I go to a presentation in this Interactive Group of Knowledge Management and Innovation I come back with more ideas. This time the main topic was about different usage for Organization Relations Analysis graphs. Using simple questionnaire you can find out the informal relations in your area, or your company.

Imagine you have a formal process to follow, formal SME’s (Subject Matter Experts), people you and the leadership consider as focal points for some specific topics or subjects. Are they really the ones when people need help? What is the informal path the information flows in your team or area? Who are the informal references for specific topics? Don’t you think would be interesting to find out?

Using simple questions like: If you have a new project in hands, with whom would you discuss it? Then, each time a person is referenced he/she receives an amount of “points”. Each person this person references, receives also an amount of “points”. Then you can check who are the people more accessed and if this person access also other, to make the information and knowledge flow.

At the presentation some real cases in Oil companies and Mining companies showed they found that 10% of the people in your team is responsible to connect around 75% of your network if you don’t have the informal organization in mind and don’t act to try to use this powerfully.

Using this technique you can even map how is your informal coach network, informal motivational network (people who motivates and demotivate others), informal decision flow network, etc. Informal networks exist, having or not formal processes and workflows in place, we just need to understand how it works, and use it in benefit of the company and the team itself.

Regards,
Alex Lopes