How Great Place To Work Implemented Self-Management Using Holaspirit

The road to self-management isn’t really a walk in the park. However, when you get it right, it can bring a myriad of benefits, such as improved transparency, autonomy and decision-making. That’s what motivated Great Place To Work Netherlands to implement self-management in the first place. 

Great Place To Work helps organizations improve employee experience and retain talents, through certification programs, coaching and engagement surveys. The company is owned by UKG, an American HR software provider that has about 15,000 employees. However, all its offices are locally owned and run.

Here are some key data about Great Place To Work:

• 10 million employees surveyed around the world
• 18,000 companies supported in 170 countries
• 50 offices around the world

René Brouwers is circle lead and co-owner of Great Place To Work’s Dutch office. He implemented Holaspirit in his organization a year and a half ago, in order to support self-management practices. In this article, he reveals why he decided to make the switch, how he implemented Holaspirit and the holacracy framework, and how his team is benefiting today.

A long road to change

From a self-managing team…

Rene Brouwers: Seven years ago, Great Place To Work was bought by new owners that practiced self-management. At that point they hired me as a CEO of a self-managing team, for the Netherlands office. I had no idea what self-management meant, and neither did my team since they were used to having a hierarchical structure. But I was eager to find out more about it.

Creating a great place to work for all is our core product, so we want to practice what we preach and build a business based around trust ourselves. We were doing great on that. However, the biggest challenge was that people in this self-managing setup had no idea what they were responsible for, and what their KPIs were. They had autonomy, but there were missing structure, guidance and clarity. 

After two years, some colleagues came up to me and said: “You know what, this self-management thing just doesn't work. We need someone to tell us what the strategy is, how to get there and what we’re doing good and not, aka we want a real CEO.”

…to a traditional hierarchy…

Since we were a self-managed team, I said “great idea, but you need to fire me from my current  role, and you need to rehire me in this new role. Otherwise this major change won’t work”.

So I quit my job. We changed the system. And I reapplied for the new  job. They rehired me as a CEO of a traditional team, and not a self-managed team.

At that time, we just needed hierarchical leadership to make decisions, bring direction and guidance. It was the best thing to do. And it worked very well.

…to an holacratic organization

About three years ago, we decided to slowly move back to self-management and took various  steps to do that. One of the first was our decision-making process - moving from consensus to consent. Next was radical transparency on things like salaries. Then came the meeting structure. 

Also read: Integrative Decision-Making VS Consensus

However, to get self-management really going and future-proof, we had to formalize things. In order to do this, we needed both a model and a tool. We did some research about the various governance models that were able to support self-management, and ended up choosing holacracy.

We asked Energized.org, a Dutch-base consulting firm, to help us implement holacracy and find a self-management tool. We looked at Glassfrog first, very well focused on holacracy, and then at Holaspirit, which had a broader scope that extended beyond holacracy, as well as a good user experience. Based on this, we decided to move on with Holaspirit.

Implementing holacracy and Holaspirit

We had some people take courses on holacracy—who we now call “holacracy heroes.” Then we started the implementation of holacracy and Holaspirit within the marketing team. We got acquainted with the different features, such as roles, meetings and KPIs. And after three months, we decided to add the rest of the company on Holaspirit.

From having the first discussions about formalizing things to getting the first team up and running, it took us about 8 months, and then about a year to get up to speed with holacracy in the whole team. 

Now that everybody is on board, we’ve witnessed really positive change within the team. 

Challenges that come with implementing self-management

Of course, implementing self-management comes with many challenges, especially if you’re used to having someone telling you what to do every day.

The impact of traditional hierarchy

What many people find difficult to learn is that it’s not about you, it’s about the role that you represent at a certain point in time. We’re not here to tell you you’re not doing your work. Rather, we say that a role isn’t doing what’s expected of it. That can be difficult for people to dissociate, especially for those who have an extensive background in traditional organizations.

To help those people, you can do various practices, for example stand behind your chair to represent a role that's sitting in the chair (instead of you sitting in a chair). That can help people to shift their mindset.

The impact of culture

Your culture can also have an impact on the way you view things. For example, in the Netherlands, we’re more used to having a shared decision-making process, which has both positive and negative effects. The good side is that people are OK with speaking up. The downside is that sometimes, it doesn’t get to decision-making. And that’s exactly what happened to us in the past. You try to get consensus but it doesn’t work, so no decision is made.

The importance of following the guidelines

Practicing constantly and following the guidelines can be a great help to face these challenges. During tough times, you tend to find easy ways out, like using workarounds, but that’s not the right way to go about it. Just like any other change, you need to play the game in order to make it work.

That’s why we try to be fully compliant with the constitution. However, that doesn’t mean that things can’t change. We once had a situation where we needed to clarify things such as: who’s responsible for firing people? Who decides what salary somebody is going to get? In that case we can make suggestions and have discussions about it.

Sometimes, we also do things that are not fully compliant with the Constitution, because it’s what’s the best fit for us. For example, we still hold quarterly meetings in Holaspirit, even though it’s not part of holacracy.

How we use Holaspirit

Roles, meetings, projects and OKRs

Holaspirit helps us bring clarity in the team. We use the organizational chart to clarify who’s responsible for which role, as well as define the purpose and responsibilities of each role. 

‍Holaspirit also brings structure to our meetings. It allows us to hold strategy meetings, work meetings, as well as non-official governance meetings (where we get four circle leads to discuss together).

The Projects app helps us organize our projects and tasks, and make sure everyone is aware of what needs to be done.

This year, we also started to use the OKR (Objective and Key Results) framework. This should help us get more alignment on strategy, but also understand which projects are linked to which objectives.

Performance development

We also use Holaspirit to bring transparency to our performance development process, which is based on a 360° feedback setup.

Every year, we ask people to evaluate each other’s performance based on a fixed questionnaire that depends on our role and salary level. Based on that performance review, we get a profile (leader, professional, all-rounder, expert, etc.) and a level (junior, middle, senior, extraordinary) that are then added to Holaspirit.

We’ve created some custom fields on our platform to know where people scored and what’s expected of them not only based on their role, but also based on their performance and experience level. That translates to more clarity, but also to a more suitable salary.

Better clarity and autonomy at work

Implementing holacracy has helped us get a combination of both autonomy and clarity at work. Since people now know what’s expected of them, they can work autonomously and make decisions related to their role, without having to constantly get everyone’s approval.

In the last two years where we did engagement surveys within the team, we’ve seen improvements in two areas: freedom and clarity. As a result, our trust index is now 96 over 100! 

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Holaspirit has also improved the way we conduct meetings. Being able to access the meeting reports of the different circles helps us know what’s going on and make informed decisions. Moreover, since all meeting minutes are in Holaspirit, we don't need to have somebody write up a report after. 

This is quite convenient when we have ISO 27001 auditors coming in. We can just give them the reports of our quarterly meetings to show them what we discussed, which helps the audit process.

To conclude

Daniel H. Pink states in his book, “Drive”, that people are driven by mastery, autonomy and purpose. This means that salary isn’t what makes them thrive, it’s knowing that their job has a meaning and an impact, and that they’re getting better at it every day. 

Implementing self-management using a tool like Holaspirit is a great way to create purpose and support employees’ development. Indeed, with holacracy, people aren’t bound by job descriptions. They can take on a new role based on their skills, experiences and knowledge, and continue to evolve in the organization. This flexibility, coupled with transparency and autonomy, is a good lever for attracting and retaining talent in the organization. 

This is something that Great Place To Work is very aware of. As of now, other European offices (for example, Great Place To Work Austria) are also experimenting with Holaspirit, so we’re hopeful that more teams will benefit from it. 

If you too are looking to implement self-management using holacracy, or any other framework, then get in touch with us!