Last week we had a lovely visit from Traci and Miranda from Worldblu at NixonMcInnes HQ. Worldblu run the ‘List of most democratic workplaces in the world’ which NixonMcInnes has been awarded a place on two years in a row. We had a really fun and inspiring discussion with the whole team here about democracy in the workplace.
Here’s a video of Traci and I having a chat about democracy at NixonMcInnes. I was comically awkward and look like a right tool for the first bit of the video, and I make a beautifully ironic faux pas describing the team as ’staff’(!!) but it’s a good conversation once we get into the flow. At least my shirt is nicely co-ordinated with the NixonMcInnes corporate blue wall behind us.
If you’re interested in making your own organisation more resilient, profitable, and happy then I cannot recommend Worldblu enough. They’re passionate about this stuff and can help your organisation to change to become more democratic and realise these benefits.
When we talk about our democratic principles and working practices at NixonMcInnes, the common misconception is that we do this at some kind of traditional business cost.
The logic is that involving people in the whole management and direction of the business must be slower and poorer, but somehow ‘nicer’.
Kinda..’That’s nice dear – how much did it cost?’….
Yet we believe that we can win at the traditional business game, and reinvent that game, AND do all of this our way – having fun and being fulfilled at work.
Quick recap on some of the ways we work
With open book accounting – everyone knows the bank balance, the performance against budget, and what everyone else earns
With decentralised decision-making – a Rewards Team assess and approve all rewards proposals (including mine), when we moved into our new office the first time I saw it was the day we moved in because a team to manage the move had successfully owned and managed it, there are two guest seats for team members at every board meeting, we vote on all ethical decisions including new client opportunities, lots of people get involved in each hiring process, we set and agree objectives for the year as a team (not as a board)
With personal development – we believe hugely in the development of our people and selves, and invest in these, especially in listening and communication skills, which we feel can unlock huge potential
With the whole person – we don’t expect people to leave their soul and personality at home every day, and we expect and work with the challenges that life throws up, in HR speak this means totally flexible working, and lots more authenticity
And more – and the above are merely the outcomes, powered by much-more powerful principles that we hold dear
It’s not always easy, nor is it for everyone
We’ve had many bumps in the road as a young developing company – we’ve changed and learnt along the way, going through a round of redundancies as the company fundamentally shifted from one generation and focus to another, being involved in unhappy projects, had many tough times.
We’ve also found that our approach and culture isn’t for everyone – it is demanding and can be uncomfortable, and for some people the fit is not good.
And finally, there’s a risk of becoming a tall poppy – putting ourselves on a pedestal of our own making, being perceived as arrogant, self-loving positive hype-rs. I’m very conscious of this, which limits how and where I talk about ‘us’ in terms of approach and culture.
But I do believe passionately in the power and inevitability of democractic principles in the workplace.
And I do believe that it can be a competitive edge, not a quaint ‘nice to have’.
So here’s a raised glass for the sceptics:
We grew turnover by 23% in the financial year just closed
We created healthy six-figure profits
We shared £10,000 as a team in the form of profit-related pay
Tomorrow we are celebrating our 10th birthday as a team with some of our clients, partners and friends.
With that in mind, I celebrate my co-founder and the only guy to have been involved for the full ten years Tom Nixon, and the team of smart, decent, real and talented NM people – a great, great team that I am delighted to be able to work with :)
We believe the future needs different ways of working; all we’re doing is trying to find our own.
There are no universal answers! That said sometimes I find the apparent simplicity of models helpful :)
So I created this ‘10 tensions’ model after percolating a while on recurrent themes or ‘tensions’ that we and our clients bump up against when designing plans and strategies to make sense of the social web.
The same tensions seem to come up time and time again.
And the interesting thing to me is that there is no right or wrong answer, which is why I describe them as ‘tensions’ – each end of each spectrum has very clear strengths and weaknesses.
You may also be able to operate at both ends of a spectrum (and often our work will try to), but my experience is that usually something will be compromised in doing so.
So I designed the model just to raise my own awareness of these oft-present forks in the planning road.
Click on the image for a bigger viewpoint!
A quick guide to the 10 tensions:
Mass social spaces vs Niche social spaces – will we try and engage with vast crowds of people in a generic social spaces (where ‘everybody’ is) or will we try to identify the significant clusters of niches that together make up a big ol’ bunch of the people we want to interact with?
Platform-oriented vs Tribe oriented – will we define our strategy by the social platforms where we believe our potential community hang out, or by a more people-centred definition and then try to find where they are? Is the plan about ‘parents’ or about ‘Twitter’?
Centralised vs Decentralised – one of the biggest tensions and probably the first I became aware of as a recurrent theme. Firstly, do we attempt to manage and co-ordinate this strategy centrally, and possibly therefore top down, or do we try to empower the organisation within a set of reasonable boundaries? Secondly, is our presence and personality in social spaces ‘the singular brand entity’ or do we have the inherent strengths and risks of having many personalities, presences and identities? A biggy that I may return to another time!
Externally focused vs. Internally focused – is this strategy concentrating on relationships between our organisation and the rest of the world, or is it centred around bringing our organisation together to understand, address and evolve with the social web? Our work oftens starts with the former but quickly moves to address both – but where is the emphasis and what is the stated overall goal?
Transaction topics vs Passion points – is the scope of the strategy a topic that the target audience can only ever feel a transactional relationship with or is this a genuine passion point for the people we wish to interact with? Kinda matters to how the strategy will be shaped!
Short-term or Long-term – pretty obvious really, but what is the term of plan – how long do we have, how explicit can we be about that, what are the expectations and investments we reasonably plan for? (Most strategies will of course go for both, but my feeling is that even so there is usually an emphasis.)
Campaigns vs Communities – another biggy, and probably well covered elsewhere on great blogs by clever people, but still worth including – does the strategy plan to launch a series of focuses on stuff or a sustained effort on developing relationships with communities?
Gaming vs Growing – at a recent search conference I was reminded on the ingenuity of the search community to make sense of new web developments and then ‘game’ them in very powerful and tangible ways; I guess this tension is a bit more colourful, and its tries to capture the question of ‘do we game and exploit social media for what it can do for us or do we somehow contribute to it and both benefit from it and give to it in order to add something and therefore grow it’ kinda thing!
Distributing vs. Conversing – is our intent to harness the social web as a conduit for our messages or are we resourcing and committing to the conversations, feedback and work generated that may well come back?
Relevance vs Resonance – are we engineering a strategy that carefully matches content to people and being present in the logical spaces or are we seeking to create relationships and tell stories that resonate more deeply, and if so how?
If I do find the time, I may well explore some of the tensions I feel have rich nuances to tease out in future blog posts.
And this is very incomplete. I haven’t even tested the model and terminology of trusted clever colleague. So please – I would love your feedback, but work with me – it’s a work in progress! Thanks.
