Culture in a self organized company

Let’s gather around the fire and talk about company culture?

There’s a lot written about it — how to establish it, how to execute it, how to keep it aligned with business goals … Piles of management books, talks or workshops are telling you the nits and bits of building a strong cohesive culture and the implications of that in the long term.

All of them are describing best practices, giving you examples of role models and trying to convince you to find your own mojo in the sea of “awesome places to work” in order to attract a like-minded tribe. This knowledge is building a myriad of entrepreneurs who are establishing hierarchical structures which are trying to put down your throat all of their sugar-coated talks about how you should behave in order to thrive in their organization.

Typical corporations are not very good at describing their own nature. (How do fish describe water?). They also have incentives to say things that sound attractive rather than things that are true. They pave the way to onboarding practices in which the HR department is trying to braindump all of their values, purpose, mission and culture statements in the first day of your arrival. After that you are going in the rabbit hole and reminded of those statements with every opportunity that the management level is able to keep you from deviating.

All of this is pointless! :)

Homosapiens is adaptable and social creature. It tries to find it’s way no matter the environment. It can change company cultures no matter how many times. Some people switch jobs after a decade, others after 4–5 years, small freelancers do it probably every month-or-two. They are constantly changing their environment. With every place they absorb new ideas, concepts and emit their own understandings. But this is not happening because a boss or their project manager are drilling down on weekly basis powerpoints with concepts about being proactive and other bullshit. It’s happening because people experience!

People collaborate, coordinate, debate, comprehend and try to achieve their goals which puts them into a place of seeking. Usually they don’t run away from a job because of the tasks -> they just don’t like their boss. They can adapt to the unofficial culture but if their supervisor is manifesting something awful, people start to lose hope in that place.

But what if there’s no boss, no manager, no vision, no mission, no purpose, no strict boundaries? All that is left is exploration within the depths of self, the team, the department, the initiative, the value creation.

The company culture is becoming something that constantly evolves, unfolds around the members as they thrive together and peel away their next layer of significance.

What if there’s no culture?

People start to realize at some point that even if they are a tribe with flat structure they need some description for the public. Something that can express what’s it’s like to work with them. But how can one describe something which is not defined? He can only explain what efforts are put in building a culture which recursively builds a culture. And again this cannot be done by metaphors, this can be only achieved by asking the hard questions:

• Are you okay with chaos and ambiguity?
• Are you okay with owning your own career outcomes, rather than having predefined goals?
• What do you think about participatory leadership?
• Do you believe in transparency and honesty?
• Are you comfortable with freedom? Can you work from everywhere, anytime, on anything you want? There’s no delegation of work when everybody is self-organized

We ask those questions in Camplight as we’re constantly dissolving and building our fundamentals.

Our mission and goals are organic. They are derived on monthly basis by something which we call Happiness Index. It’s a short questionnaire which people fill by their own will. It measures from 1–5 how you feel regarding Camplight as a whole, your tasks within the organization and your client gig.

It also asks several optional questions

• What feels best right now?
• What feels worst right now?
• What would increase your happiness level?
• How will I contribute to raising the overall happiness level?
• Other comments.

from which we self-organize towards improving our company based on members feedback.

Does this mean we have a happiness-centered culture and we can advertise it this way? No. It’s just common sense that our primary metric is not growth/revenue but how do we feel :)

Kudos to Crisp.se