Here’s How Workplace by Facebook is Helping us Successfully Run In a Holacratic Paradigm
For us, it all began with the question: What gets in the way of people working together as effectively as possible, in the most efficient way possible?
We wanted a system that gave freedom to work the way our people wanted to work, meeting only when needed, and with a clear focus on things that really mattered.
And the answer was simple — ability to self manage and deliver on the work at hand. We believe in self management and the fact that if we are mature enough and free to pursue our choices in our personal lives, then why not do so at work? With more than 200 employees across 12 locations, we wanted a system that kept us all organized and helped us work together and innovate faster than ever.
A clear-cut way to achieve such a system was ‘Holacracy’.
Brian J Robertson, creator of this work paradigm claims that Holacracy offers us a fresh ‘social technology’ powered governing approach where authority is authentically distributed, and flexibility and self-organization are embedded within the organizational structure. We adopted Holacracy in 2016 and this model has been helping us evolve and adapt our own structure and processes by undergoing peer-to-peer governance.
Our experiment with Holacracy is underway and so far it has emerged as a complete, packaged system for self-management. Holacracy replaces the traditional management hierarchy with a new peer-to-peer “operating system” that increases transparency, accountability, and organizational agility.
How were the initial days post-Holacracy?
How would you feel if you woke up to a well-organized home, where everything is in it’s right place contrary to the previously unkempt, unorganized, and temporarily pleasant place of dwelling. The new place has the same facilities, or even better. The experience, initially, can be quite disorienting and maybe even disempowering — your long-practiced chaotic and cluttered style of living suddenly comes to an end. You don’t know what is where. Yet, as you start your day, you tentatively move around, you get a sense that despite its strange new arrangements, your house has now, new capacities, old arrangements never had. It takes you a while, but gradually it becomes a joy ride to be a part of, to live and do your chores with much less effort. That’s exactly how it feels to switch from a traditionally-run organization to a Holacracy-powered one.
On being asked if there was any friction, here’s what Pramiti Saxena, lead link of People Operations circle at MediaAgility, had to say — “Friction is always there, it’s an indispensable part of any change. People had been practicing conventional, pyramid styled paradigms all their corporate lives, and were doubtful about Holacracy really working out for us.”
How did we address that? We applied the fundamentals of Holacracy to take this decision and asked every employee — Will this move harm the company in any way? If not, the clear answer to this proposal was to go ahead and roll it out company wide. That is how Holacracy breaks down every single tension (or point of friction) to simple nuggets of information or questions and then helps us to collectively resolve them. Holacracy also provides for a simple, flattened organization structure where people report to roles instead of people reporting to people — thus organically giving way to a self managed work-life — very similar to what we are used to doing in our personal lives.
“We focused on infusing new capacities into our core system. We made power and authority everyone’s right. We formally defined the way our organization is structured (through circles), we established who can expect what and from whom (role definition),” adds Pramiti.
The ground reality…
Here’s how it actually works with help of Glassfrog, Asana and Workplace by Facebook –
Glassfrog circles
Traditionally known as ‘Organizational Structures’, in a Holacracy-driven paradigm, we call it ‘Circles’. Within circles, we have a set of roles with clearly defined accountabilities. Hence, with this format we actually work together more closely than previously adhered to traditional style of org structure. The circles and the roles defined within are not fixed, they keep evolving via governance meetings as and when ‘tensions’ or ‘proposals’ are raised.

That’s our company circle, a.k.a, Alignment circle. The Alignment circle has multiple sub-circles that are named as per the nature of their operations such as Marketing Circle is called ‘Tell Our Story’ circle. Each sub-circle has defined roles and people within the circle (and many-a-times from other circles) fill these roles. Here’s a closer look what ‘Tell Our Story’ looks like –

Governance meetings
The Governance process helps us clearly define roles, accountabilities, and authority which continuously evolve to align with our quarterly strategies or yearly objectives. This helps us clearly identify and distribute work and the expectations that follows.
Sample role definition looks like this –

Tactical meetings
Weekly held tactical meetings are fast-paced forums to synchronize circle members for the week and triage issues (friction that are limiting circle’s progress) in a collaborative manner. Tactical meetings helps us focus on operational issues, share updates on projects we are working on, and ask for help if needed. With every tactical, the circle brings forth the information that provides circle’s current state, including a review of checklist items, metrics, and next action items to pursue.
The facilitators : Workplace by Facebook & Asana
To ensure we practice Holacracy in a smooth, hasslefree manner we had to have the tools that provided for an open and flat environment necessary to run in a holacratic way. We identified Workplace by Facebook and Asana — as an indisputable choice of platforms to collaborate on.
We rely on Asana to facilitate outcomes of these tacticals, and to make sure that the ‘next action items’ derived from them are harmoniously implemented. Workplace by Facebook helps circles to chart out their course through that. Workplace complements Asana and helps us to collaborate and understand how successful we are being at the work we are doing.
After a tactical ends, we come up with a list of to-do’s that should be achieved to get closer to our ultimate project objective. The action items are recorded in Asana and here’s what it looks like –

Workplace happened to us when we needed systems and processes to make sure that every employee is bringing enough value and contributing within the roles they believe in. Workplace has been helping people at MediaAgility to build open and honest relationships through communication. The platform has helped us embrace Holacracy by providing us a transparent platform that gives freedom to work on things that we think are really going to move the needle for our project and the company.
Groups on Workplace are at the center of the collaboration experience. Workplace lets us make project specific groups, which can be open to all or select members of the circle. We use the power of posts to get started with project specific discussions, or people add photo, video, or document to get inputs from the rest of the members.

Newsfeed
Any one person in a circle can have multiple roles, hence can be associated with multiple projects running at the same time. Newsfeed is one way for a circle member to gather all relevant conversations from other circles, to make sure they never miss an update.
Collaboration — anytime, anywhere
Bringing together remote teams is no easy task. Workchat helps us the instantly connect with each other via text chat and video chat across different geographies and timezones. So we really don’t have to wait specifically for scheduled governance or tactical meetings for collaboration. We have the power to connect as and when we need.
It has been a while since we bid adieu to org chart and embraced work circles. There were some core, deciding questions that actually pushed us to choose a more powerful system like Holacracy [Download the questionnaire here]. With a Holacracy powered system, MediaAgility has clearly achieved more adaptability, more flexible structures, more ways to empower people, hence more emerging leaders. For us, Holacracy has replaced the conventional, top-down predict-and-control paradigm with a new way of achieving control by distributing authority and giving everyone the opportunity to work on what they do best.
MediaAgility is a digital consulting services company created with the purpose of making work productive, engaging and meaningful for all. With offices in the U.S., Mexico, U.K., India and Singapore, MediaAgility offers a full spectrum of advisory and implementation services focused on analytics, innovation and collaboration.
Originally published at www.mediaagility.com on August 23, 2017.