The way we work at GOJO is unique and intentional. Our ways of working and organizational design are essential to achieving our Purpose of Saving Lives and Making Life Better Through Well-Being Solutions and to leading with our GOJO Values. Throughout our 76-year history, there have been critical periods when we innovated how we work – GOJO Transformation in the mid-1990s, GOJO Workplaces in the late 1990s, and, in the early 2020s, with our GOJO Work Ecosystem of the Future efforts.
GOJO Transformation
By the early 1990s, GOJO was 40 years in business and moved into new markets. We extended product development beyond GOJO® Heavy Duty Hand Cleaner and mild lotion soaps to FDA-regulated over-the-counter "drug products" that helped to eliminate germs, such as PURELL® Hand Sanitizer and antibacterial germ-killing soaps. We evolved our company into a professional skin care and hand hygiene company for multiple away-from-home settings with various product offerings. Changes occurring in the industry and the world meant that we needed to work and organize in a more networked and collaborative way and to develop new technical, business, and leadership competencies.
To innovate our work processes and competencies, a small team at GOJO looked for ideas and research about post-modern organizations from unlikely sources like quantum physics, microbiology, and social and behavioral sciences experts. That team attended conferences and learned from diverse, leading-edge thinkers. For instance, a conference at Sundance in Utah on self-organizing systems with biologist Margaret Wheatley significantly impacted the team's mental models. Similarly, Peter Senge's work on the Learning Organization influenced us because Learning Organizations value the ability to learn to succeed in rapidly changing conditions. The rich scouting for ideas provided the science-based stimulus for evolving our ways of working. We systematically undertook Transformation with a whole-systems audit of our work processes to better understand our strengths and weaknesses. Audits of our major work processes covered quality, safety, security, communications, leadership, development, and culture.
GOJO Workplaces
We eventually organized GOJO as a living system (adaptable) versus a mechanistic (highly structured, less flexible) organization. We wanted to be fast, fluid, and flexible in our work at GOJO. We modeled ourselves after the human brain – as a neural network able to forge new connections in service of high resilience. We came to view our Family Enterprise as networked rather than hierarchical. While we maintained a supervisory organization chart, far more essential to our success is a collaborative network with strong nodes (people and teams) and strong information signals between the nodes. Our networked organization facilitates continuous learning, which leads to the strategic agility and adaptation required to respond successfully to new threats and opportunities with greater speed and ease.
Inspired by Wheatley's concept of self-organizing systems, we developed work processes that manifested the essentials in thriving living systems: Shared Identity, Abundant Information Flow, and Frequent and Rich Interaction (the 3i’s) for our culture of team-based collaboration, rich dialogue, smart use of physical spaces, and a commitment to our GOJO Purpose, Vision, and Values. How we work led to the market-making inventions of GOJO Touch-Free Dispensing, PURELL® Hand Sanitizer, our PURELL® Surface Spray, SMARTLINK®, our electronic compliance monitoring system, and the list goes on and on.
These new ways of working have enabled us to navigate the rapidly changing external business environment that requires high collaboration competencies. Being so collaborative helps ensure we bring diverse perspectives to facilitate good whole-system thinking and decision-making, innovate, and solve complex business problems in ways that help us achieve our GOJO Purpose.
Working during the pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic reaffirmed our strength as a networked living system, which has given us the ability and agility to move fast and be fluid and flexible during unprecedented pressure on our systems, processes, and people.
With infinite demand for PURELL® products, GOJO had a wild ride in 2020 and 2021. Even as we went into overdrive to keep up with immeasurable demand for our products – running our operations 24/7 and sourcing new raw materials – we were also undertaking a comprehensive effort to reimagine our workplace. We had a meeting intensive “in person” culture, and suddenly we had to move all the work that didn’t require on-site to virtual/remote modalities without missing a beat.
We rapidly implemented Microsoft tools like MS Teams and, at the same time, a small group of team members began to study how the digital revolution, changing demographics and expectations of the workforce, the global sourcing of talent, and public health could be changing the ways work gets done more fundamentally and permanently (not just in response to this pandemic). We were on the cutting edge in the 1990s by embracing emerging management science; we perceived another opportunity to get ahead of the curve so we could robustly pursue our Purpose in alignment with our Values which has People at the Core.
GOJO Work Ecosystem of the Future
In January 2022, we launched the GOJO Work Ecosystem of the Future, an interconnected system of our ways of working, physical spaces, digital tools, and enabling competencies to ensure team members, teams, and the organization flourish. We drew on the four elements necessary during Transformation – smart design of physical spaces, technology, people, and culture. We have found that everything we were striving for many years ago during GOJO Transformation, in terms of being an adaptable learning organization that relies on Shared Identity, Abundant Information Flow, and Frequent and Rich Interaction, still holds today.
We developed this model over 12 months, during which we surveyed employees, consulted with industry thought leaders, and researched and tested different approaches through pilot projects involving hundreds of participants.
Our Work Ecosystem of the Future divides this work into four categories: individual focus time, site-specific work, daily teamwork, and milestone moments. Based on the categories of work that each team member's job requires, we've identified four role types: mostly virtual, blended monthly, blended weekly, and mostly on-site. Within these role types, we've created room for flexibility based on individual team members' needs and circumstances.
To ensure that this new work environment is successful, we've invested in new technologies and practices to support seamless hybrid work, and we reinvented our office spaces to foster 
the kind of collaboration that happens best in person. To read more about our Work Ecosystem of the Future, read my blog post “GOJO Latest Innovation: A New Model of Work that Balances Flexibility and Productivity.” To learn more about our GOJO Work Ecosystem, please email WorkEcosystem@GOJO.com.
We are excited to continue innovating our ways of working and using our GOJO Value of Always Learning to guide our work.