Why did you try to implement a decentralised programme?
Finding happiness can be tricky and we wanted to be happier. We also wanted to feel a part of a community more than having a typical centre where there are bosses and owners that lead. We wanted to get rid of the divide between owners and employees. It’s a family, it was a family-founded company.
There was also a lot of academic research that a culture of transparency in the workplace pays off. For example, one piece of research studied 320 small businesses in the UK, half of which granted workers more autonomy to work and more input with top band decisions and direction. The businesses with more autonomy had more productivity than those companies without – so there are real KPIs that demonstrate these kinds of cultures will bring in the return. If you want to look at it purely from a profit perspective, a more meritocratic culture will pay.
How do you think digital has changed the working environment of today?
This is a very big question. The changes in digitisation are standing up to bad bosses and managers, because remote working is making it more possible to have freelance work. It’s been made possible to work remotely from home or different places, and it’s allowed people to be freelancers. Big companies are now competing against digital start-ups and this trend, so I hope this will make it easier to stop bad bosses, because normally people leave companies for this reason. That creates an argument to introduce self-management and less hierarchy in the organisation. This is why we’ve introduced transparency in management because we really think we can counteract the idea of people leaving companies, or wanting to have autonomy or working from remote locations.
You have 110 employees (known as rebels). How do you involve them all in your monthly meetings?
We try to keep it short because it’s quite difficult to get the attention of five different locations. So we have everybody in the same office in the same room and if they’re working from home they can also connect remotely. We use Google Chrome box, it’s the hardware associated with Google Meet, it makes it very easy to set up the meeting and then we try to stick to an agenda, where we encourage participants from different offices to take the lead and explain different projects and different aspects of that. We allow some questions but they don’t ask too many because they know we upload all the content and presentations to our internal network (what we call rebel reign).
We have further interaction with the team online. There are also other kinds of meetings where participation is much more encouraged, because with smaller groups it’s easier to ensure everyone isn’t talking at the same time.
With offices in different parts of the world, do time zones play a problem in communicating internally?
When we decided how to expand as a company, we decided to have different locations. The partners in the local offices are not partners in the local company but the central company. We try to enforce collaboration with people working on the same project from different places. So for example, we can have people from Latin America leading a project because they’re industry experts and this person is able to connect collaboratively and remotely – and this is what led the big decision in operating from various locations.
We encourage this to happen in the company, people are encouraged to have as many interactions (mostly online). We’ve been very specific and we’ve worked hard to have good connections in every office – good connections, good hardware and good software.
Do employee ratings and allocating each other’s salaries cause ill-feeling and arguments?
Yes. We’ve had open salaries for the past three years now but this was the first pilot for setting salaries. It’s caused a lot of ill-feeling. It became quite clear to everyone that what they voted for would affect people’s salary. But the most important point here is that we were having conversations about this process before setting it up.
We asked everybody, and it’s important that everyone buys into the idea. Everybody said they thought there should be a difference in salary basis, it meant that we could be a meritocratic company and every year those that had a better performance were rewarded. The vast majority of people also wanted to have a voice in terms of salary basis.
So every time we have people complain about salary basis, we will always refer to that first decision. There will be people that year after year will have a better salary rate and people who have a lower salary rate, and we have to accept this because these were the game rules that we decided together.
How do you handle any ill-feeling in the company?
Firstly by reminding everybody that this is the group’s decision, and secondly by holding lots of conversations. It’s about investing time in having one-to-one and group conversations. That’s important, because otherwise people will talk in corridors and they won’t have a good group dynamic.
How do you counteract any feeling of deflation that team members might feel in light of ratings and salary decisions?
People have a lot of chats with colleagues because they know who graded them higher or lower. They try to explain to each other the reasons behind the grading, and it’s quite transparent. We also try to tell stories of people who were up in the rankings one year and down another year. If we find a particular patch of low morale, we identify and implement short-term programmes to counteract these kinds of feelings.
For example, right now in Madrid, we’ve detected a bit of a feeling of deflation for the past two months. We’ve set up a number of things that we’re implementing which include internal workshops, training, socialising and team building activities in order to understand, to talk, and to be part of a single vision again. Our purpose and vision is to inspire companies to become more human-centric. It’s very important our team feel they’re a part of something bigger than just their day-to-day work.
How do you avoid salary evaluation becoming a popularity contest?
That’s very important but it happens. This is not a management system everybody could implement, but we’ve been introducing this radical measure for six years now. So the team have developed a level of maturity to understand the benefits of a meritocratic system. They know it’s important to be objective when it comes to evaluating peers, they know they have a lot to lose if it becomes about popularity.
We did do some statistical research on how people vote and it’s not just about friends, if people work in project teams they’re more inclined to vote for them. So one thing we try to do is to get people to work in different projects, in order to receive different ratings from different people in different teams. So statistically you can detect when people are influencing each other or when people are voting as a group and it’s not too fair. We’ve learned from this particular research, it’s introduced corrections to our formulas, that link your evaluation to your salary base.
One thing we’ve detected is that it’s quite difficult to vote for different teams in different offices. People in Brighton will vote for colleagues in Brighton, and sometimes they cannot vote because they don’t know other people. So for example, our Mexican office doesn’t have too much connection because they don’t speak the language; even if they try to speak more English there are people who aren’t fluent. So it’s not easy to have close relationships with all the base camps but more and more people are working from different offices. Columbia has worked on a project where people from Brighton and Barcelona were involved, so they’ve started rating colleagues that aren’t in the same office.
Does a decentralised decision-making prolong the process?
Yes, definitely. In the case of salaries, I hope that as we evolve we find processes improve. Every time you decentralise a decision process, you have one thing that is positive which is people feel involved and stick to the decision because they feel a part of the decision. But at the same time, it can prolong the decision process time.
So for example, we fire people in a decentralised way based on peer-to-peer evaluations. The worst thing you would do in a company is fire someone, or write an evaluation that will put someone at risk. So of course the process becomes much slower. It’s a negative thing that we have to balance against the positive aspect of being part of the decision.
What are the basic mistakes you made when setting up this process?
We’ve made lots of mistakes. Firstly, you can’t rush these things especially when it involves salaries, you have to be kind, you have to give time to the team to accept this and be a part of this. One of the mistakes we did here was rush the process to initiate the pilot and I think it didn’t help.
The second mistake we made was having public rankings. I thought if we’re doing evaluations and communicating these to everybody, we could build a ranking. But it was a big failure and it created a lot of distress. So now we just publish the numbers and if someone wants to make a ranking they can make it on their own, but we don’t do it in a collective way.
How do you ensure communication is strong while taking a step back as a leader?
It’s a process that takes a long time, we started introducing this management structure and measures a long time ago. I’ve had to learn to tackle this idea of being part of all the important decisions. On the one hand I felt I had to adapt because it was better for the company, but on the other hand I felt left out. You have to get used to not being in the centre with key decisions.
It’s a step-by-step process, we have a culture team who are specifically dedicated to foster and use these methods to get a lot of feedback. They promote planning, so they have meetings and check deadlines. In the end, people all feel they are part of the decision and they’re willing to invest time in communicating because they feel their opinion matters, it’s not just for show, it’s really going to be taken into account.
Do you think that this kind of open or self-setting salaries will spread in the world of B2B?
I’m optimistic. As I said before, digitisation forces companies to introduce more democracies inside the walls. Firstly it’s about introducing a culture where failure is accepted and failure is even encouraged because innovation is about failing. Once you start having open conversations in your internal network, people will start to feel like they can say what they really think about corporate measures. You can start introducing more transparency by allowing people to get access to you.
Starting to play with salaries is usually a bit trickier. It depends on the culture and country, because there are cultures where people talk about money in public and there are countries where they don’t. I’m not saying all companies will have these kinds of systems but I would predict that it will slowly grow strong.
