KNOWLEDGE BASE FOR HR PROFESSIONALS
Author of the summary: Olga Alejandra VELZQUEZ ARENAS
FOCUS
Future Workplace
This study
describes an effort
to meaningfully
engage employees
of a global high-tech
organization in an
Template inspired from GetAbstract.
Crowd deliberations as an organizational tool for ideation and
problem solving in manufacturing and development
D. Passig, , N. Cohen, L. Bareket & O. Morgenstern
MIT Sloan Management Review
23 Pages
TAKE AWAYS
Companies can benefit from technology to implement new
ways of gathering information from their employees to
adapt to their needs.
The workplace is moving to have the work adapted to life
instead of life adapted to work.
RATING OF THE BOOK
(from 0 to 10, 10 is best)
Overall Applicability Innovation Style
9 9 9 9
RELEVANCE
What you will learn from this article
1) How can a company benefit from crowdsourcing to
gather feedback directly from the employees?
2) What do employees from a high tech company expect
from the future of work?
Review
The article is interesting to read because it is an applicable
case study, the methodology used to gather and summarize
information is very clear and suitable to most of the problems
an organization might have. I would like to know more about
the specific statements they got at the end of the
deliberations; it feels like it is missing.
SUMMARY
The article is a study made with 145 employees of Intel Israel,
from different departments, functions and locations, to
determine their preferences in terms of the future workplace.
The methodology used to gather information was an online
resource based on the traditional Delphi method called Real-
1
 online crowd
discussion aimed at
identifying a
preferable future
workplace in
manufacturing and
development
This fairly new form
of multi-directional
communication
allows organizations
to engage
employees as
partners by offering
them the
opportunity to
actively participate
in the process of
ideation and/or
decision making.
although the
participants were
not familiar with the
concept of fractal
organization and
the previous
attempts by HR
professionals to
clarify the pros and
cons of the concept
for organizations,
they were able not
only to arrive at the
concept
independently, but
were also clearly
able to define it as
their preferred
future of their work
space at Intel. reducing bureaucracy and communication gaps.
Template inspired from GetAbstract.
Time-Imen-Delphi, which works similar to a forum. The RTID
consisted In four stages:
1. Question formulation: All participants generate only
questions about the subject that the steering
committee would categorize and convert into well-
organized questions. Participants generated 689
questions that ended up in a short list of 90.
2. Suggested mission statement composition:
Participants answer to the questions in the form of a
mission statement; these answers are commented by
other participants as pro, con or neutral. 258
mission statements were produced.
3. Mission statement evaluation: The statements with
more pro comments are rated by the participants in
terms of importance, priority and likelihood of
implementation. A list of 114 statements were selected,
and then classified in 8 categories: Innovation and
creativity, computers and systems, corporate social
responsibility, diversity, employee development, talent
acquisition, employee involvement, management and
leadership.
4. Proposal of implementable ideas: Participants are
given a compilation of the top-rated mission
statements by category and are asked to generate
ideas for implementation in each category.
In this study the authors analyzed the proposals and
statements looking for repeated words, subjects and ideas
across categories, finding that the participants were
expressing concerns about the current work space not giving
enough opportunities to use and develop their talents and
interests, and that they would like to use them even if theyre
not involved directly to their job. They also speak about the
balance between work and life and the need for mobility and
networking.
This study represents a way of actively engage employees of
an organization to identify their ideal future workplace, which
involves the fractal model organization were employees do
not have one job description but they are assigned to projects
based in their set of aspirations, knowledge, capability; a
model which contributes with the participation of the
employee in the decision- making process of the organization,
2
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Passig is an Israeli futurist who received his Ph.D. in
Anticipatory Anthropology from the University of Minnesota.
He specializes in technological futures, as well as social and
educational futures. He is an Associate Professor at the Bar-
Ilan University in Israel. He heads the Graduate Program in
Information and Communication Technology and the Virtual
Reality Laboratory at the School of Education.
Nirit Cohen: Senior HR Director at Intel Corporation.
Currently managing a regional HR team in the EMEA region.
24 years career with Intel Corporation with a vast experience
in Finance and Human Resources roles, in Israel, EMEA, US
and Global roles including relocation to the US and work out
of Europe.
Liad Bareket: Organizational researcher and organizational
consultant. Combination of academic and business
experience in varied human resources management fields:
Organizational development, Employee communications,
Workplace of the future, Motivation at work.
Morgenstern, Ofer: Lecturer. There is no information
available.

Template inspired from GetAbstract. 3