Adaptive Organizations Part 3: How Holacracy Enabled our Pandemic Pivot
How non-hierarchical, distributed structures enable agile organizations in VUCA conditions
When I look back to February 2020, I remember having so much hope and spring in my step (and the same for my colleagues). I’d just come back from a restful vacation in Tulum and the team was looking ahead to our 2020 plans with excitement and energy, (SXSW anyone?). Fast forward to today, and we’ve collectively aged about 40 years and gained more life experience in the ensuing two years than anyone ever needed (or wanted).
The pandemic obviously had disastrous and heartbreaking impacts on teams and families alike. We’ve lost some dear friends and leaders and witnessed long-repressed issues rip and tear at the edges of social cohesion. Covid certainly exposed many inequalities that were always there, just below the surface, and forced us to face them without excuses.
But was it all bad?
The perennial cynic in me would like to lie and say “Absolutely” and “I told you so”, but rationally I don’t think that is the case. In fact, I’d even go one step further and posit that the pandemic, the “White Swan” event of our lifetimes, presented an opportunity for long-term, meaningful change. It also selectively privileged organizations with agile, distributed governance systems and cultures of flexibility.
At MistyWest, our distributed governance system (which we’ve affectionately dubbed MistyOS,) actually enabled us to pivot, adapt and grow while we watched other players in our field falter and sometimes even fall apart (RIP).
(Read more about MistyOS here.)
Hybrid Remote Transition
MistyOS positioned us to resiliently adapt in a few different ways–the most immediate and visible being our transition to a hybrid remote work model.
While we’ve always had a portion of our team part-time remote (specifically sales and business development, who travelled regularly pre-covid), our team for the most part had built a “Brick-and-Mortar” culture. Our HQ — a beautiful, light-filled open-concept office in one of the hippest Vancouver neighbourhoods (Mount Pleasant) has been not only a lively workplace, but a social and creative hub for our community. Not going into the office every day was a weird change, and one that definitely impacted team cohesion, creativity and engagement.
Culturally, Westies value their teammates and genuinely enjoy being together, with fun and sociability a top priority. Collaboration and spontaneous discovery were side-effects of this cultural value and a critical ingredient to our innovative technical work. It was one area that we had to work a bit more intentionally towards during this time and we didn’t always succeed (although we certainly had some fun times trying).
And of course, we were still hiring new talent and onboarding them during this time. Remote recruiting and onboarding were very challenging, but the People & Culture team developed some great strategies and tactics for ensuring positive end-to-end candidate experiences. New hires still report high levels of satisfaction even with the added barrier of not seeing them sometimes for many months after onboarding, and I credit a large part of that to the flexibility and distributed nature of MistyOS.
Collaboration, Meetings & Workflow
We already had strong digital collaboration tools and workflow practices in place as part of MistyOS, but Covid made us invest in these more and iterate them to suit different business units and their unique needs. We developed better integrations and efficiencies between said tools and platforms, as well as scaled strategies for reducing siloing and notification overload.
Shifting to 100% virtual meetings was not nearly as difficult as it was for some companies, as we already had a ritual of folks dialling in remotely to Google Meet rooms. With a bit of investing in our team’s hardware and home office setups, we were able to get all our team on high-quality audio and video streaming within the first few weeks. We did this by offering a $400 home office stipend for each year of the pandemic, and in 2022 it’s now a regular benefit as we look forward to a permanently hybrid Future of Work.
Impacts to Leadership
MistyOS allowed us to agilely adapt our workforce and leadership strategies according to the changes of a highly fluid situation. We scaled up and down certain activities like hiring, 1–1’s, reviews and wellness check-ins as our leadership team’s availability, health, energy and engagement waxed and waned during the last two years. Understanding that your leaders are employees too, and they will not always be able to give 110% was a major takeaway for us. MistyOS allowed us to develop contingencies quickly and move Westies fluidly out of roles (or into roles) as our organizational needs changed week-to-week (or even sometimes day-to-day).
Our “Navigating by Tensions” communication strategy also enabled us to detect and respond to issues that cropped up in the wider team more actively, rather than letting conflicts fester under the surface, unaddressed. Having a team that was already comfortable with letting each other know when things weren’t going well was a huge advantage, and facilitated some beautiful moments of radical vulnerability among the team (especially powerful coming from our senior Westies).
Challenges and Lessons Learned
These critical wins are not the whole story, by any means. As an organization, there are still tons of pressure points to address as well as new challenges that have cropped up in the pandemic longtail. Here are a few of the persistent challenges that we’re still working to harmonize within MistyOS.
Compensation
Because we have fairly fluid internal role structures and mobility, including a ton of non-benchmark and hybrid jobs, aligning the full value provided by our team to external market rates and accurate titles has proven a major pain point for setting and updating compensation. We’ve taken multiple stabs at various program frameworks, including highly complex PhD-level algorithms and a “choose-your-own-salary” consultative model. We’re now tackling it again using a system aligned to core job descriptions, salary bands and a visual-based architecture. We’re also playing with some additional incentivization models for our emergent leaders and key roles tied to performance and equity.
Leaders vs Managers
In flat orgs, you do not have a layer of middle managers. Sounds great, right? No micromanager hanging over your shoulder, checking up on you, or asking you for last-minute things at 3 pm on a Friday. However, traditionally strong managers also provide a lot of value in terms of 1–1’s, group facilitation, mentorship, career-pathing and coaching to their teams. In this “manager-shaped” void, we’ve had to develop new leadership roles and competencies intentionally (or sometimes hack them by necessity,) as the needs of our decentralized teams have emerged. Doing all this while maintaining autonomy and avoiding productivity bottlenecks is proving a tall order!
The Great Resignation & Building Trust with New Distributed Teams
Recently, we’ve learned that the “Great Resignation” is actually a decades-long trend, not a pandemic-created one and it will continue to impact business to an outsized degree across all sectors. MistyWest has not escaped this reality, and our turnover has in fact kept pace with industry predictions.
Having a high degree of turnover has impacted our team morale, trust and productivity. It’s hard to share radically candid feedback in a culture where you are new and haven’t built those strong bonds yet. Culture is also a bottom-up function, that shifts and grows with each new team member you add. That shifting landscape can be difficult to build on, extending lead times with new hires and ultimately impacting bottom-line growth. These workplace dynamics are also harder to address in distributed teams as they require a different set of strategies and tactics to overcome.
The New Cultural Landscape
MistyWest has always traded on a currency of a strong employer brand and a culture based on the cornerstones of flexibility, autonomy and People First, pretty much tailor-made for a system like MistyOS. During Covid, plenty of companies have discovered these values are now non-negotiable for top talent and so that lever has actually become less effective for attraction and retention of key staff. Supply chain and market forces have also conspired to narrow the types and quality of projects available to sign. All this presents some interesting future challenges that we hope to solve via our distributed governance, ingenuity, and a little bravery.
