Revolt: Revolutionizing How Organizations Work
A few days ago we launched 'Revolt by Corporate Rebels – a brand new company. Revolt supports companies who want to unleash employee engagement.
With Revolt, we turn the inspiration we gained from the world’s most progressive organizations into practice. It reinforces our purpose—to make work more fun. In this post, we dive into Revolt’s unconventional approach.
Learn from the best
Changing how organizations work is not easy. It requires skill, expertise, passion and perseverance. Luckily, we’ve had an opportunity to learn from the best. We’ve researched in detail what progressive organizations do differently. We learned how they work, how they replace out-dated command-and-control practices, and how they successfully transform into inspiring workplaces.
We’ve learned how these companies make employee engagement skyrocket—and how they bust bureaucracy, boost productivity and unleash entrepreneurship. All this led to being selected in the “Top 30 Emergent Management Thinkers” by the Thinkers50 institute. It’s an award we are proud of. But researching how it’s done doesn’t necessarily make you good at it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
The approach
For the past two years, we’ve put ourselves to the test in client engagements. We’ve turned many of our ideas into reality. In particular, Freek and Catelijne have been active in making this come to life. Recently, Joyce and Florine joined them to boost our skills, expertise and passion to make work more fun.
As a company, Revolt will scale these activities so we can help more companies to revolutionize the way they work. It aims to do this around the world.
So how do we go about this? What did we learn about making change come to life in organizations? In a moment, we’ll share the fundamentals of our approach. But first, an important warning.
We don’t believe in a one-size-fits-all solution. That shit just doesn’t work. Having a single solution to a huge variety of problems doesn’t just sound like it’s too good to be true – it is! We’ve seen it with our own eyes. Of course you can learn from others and be inspired. It’s what we do all the time. But in the end, it’s about listening to employees, figuring out their real issues, and turning inspiration from others into your own, unique reality. If you’re looking for a one-size-fits-all solution, please look somewhere else. Revolt can’t help you. Simply, we would be a bad fit.
So, what do we actually believe? Here are the underlying principles in Revolt’s approach.
1. We invite people to change
We don’t believe in forced change. It’s not just annoying—it’s also ineffective. It’s the key reason many change initiatives fail.
Instead of forcing people to change, we believe in inspiring them to do so. Find the pioneers, the front-runners and the rebels. Inspire them with what’s possible and how work could be vastly better. Then, give them the support they need to get there.
“Sounds nice, but what does it look like?” Well, here’s one of the various examples of how we put this into practice: in certain projects, we let client employees vote for change. If less than 80% vote “YES”, we walk away. It means we haven’t done a good job of inspiring them. If more than 80% vote “YES”, we get to work!
2. We believe in action
We focus on real change, not fancy reports. We challenge employees to run small change experiments. We’re there to inspire, to challenge and to support them.
All experiments are measured and evaluated. It’s how we build on what works and discard the stuff that doesn’t. We experiment, learn, and adapt.
It’s how we show our added value to clients. We want to prove that what we do works. If engagement doesn’t go up, we shouldn’t be there in the first place.
3. True change happens virally
We aim to create a workplace revolution, not a change program. What starts with pioneers transforms into a movement—a movement that goes viral.
It’s why we communicate ruthlessly. Through blog posts, videos, meet-ups, events, and guerrilla style communication approaches, we create excitement. We draw more people into the transformation.
We aim to ignite a change movement that lasts.
The revolution
So far, we’ve been working with companies around the globe to test and fine-tune our approach. Revolt will expand our activities to a wider audience and increase our impact.
Are you interested in increasing employee engagement in your organization? Contact the Revolt team through their website.
