How we’re becoming teal at Bee Talents.

Kasia Michalak
Sep 7, 2018 · 3 min read

Some time ago, I finished reading Frederic Laloux’ „Reinventing Organizations” and since, at Bee Talents, we’re trying to become a Teal Company I thought I’ll let you know how we’re doing it.

I guess that if you’re reading this post you might have heard about the book and the idea behind it — but if you haven’t, I recommend you to have a look at the website where you can order the book in 12 languages!

Below you can find a few examples of what and how we take the small steps to achieve our goals.

Hierarchy.

There’s no hierarchy. Yes, there are differences in responsibilities, but when we make decisions we make them after consulting with the team.

If there’s a new client with recruitment needs I don’t sign the deal right away without consulting and then just inform my team they have a new project. Firstly, I talk to my colleagues and ask them if they have space for this project and if it sounds interesting to them and how we can really help. Only after their acceptance, I come back to the prospect and we continue the talks. If we can’t help, I tell it honestly as well.

Transparency.

We’re transparent — every decision is made after informing everybody, there are no secrets, no private channels on Slack. You can ask about everything. We believe secrets create guesses which in most of the cases aren’t positive. This can lead to the weird atmosphere and unpleasant conditions at work. When we recruit, we publish salary brackets and we know what our salaries are. We know the monthly budget and — attention — our salaries depend on it not on individually closed projects. What does this mean? That it doesn’t matter how many candidates you close, you’re rewarded based on the company’s revenue. If your candidates are being interviewed, you can help me do the sourcing and fill my pipeline. How cool is that?

Care.

We care about each other — we have weekly 1on1s with team leader and peer 1on1s. We’re learning to give honest feedback. We have OKRs visible to everyone. When I notice you do something wrong I tell you about it, not to make you upset but to make you grow.

We’re vision driven, not money driven. Customer and client care, responsibility and constant development are just a few values that we have. We rely on the same values when working with our Clients because we believe we can solve problems easily if we speak the same language. We feel responsible for our tasks, there’s no micromanagement, we have flexible hours and Toggl to track the time. However, Toggl serves us more to measure effectiveness and over-hours rather than to track our work time to the very second. We can work remotely, and when you do that we trust you that you work not watch TV ;)

I know that what we do in order to be a perfectly teal organization is just a drop of water in the ocean. But we’re trying every day and I believe we will get better at this. Wish us luck in this way! If you have any tested methods that helped your organization to become more teal, we’d love to hear them!

Kasia Michalak

Written by

Business Development Manager @ Bee Talents. Speaker. The Best Recruitment Consultant in Poland-HR Pearls 2016. They say I can talk to developers.

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