bol.com, the Dutch e-commerce champion, 100% agile pioneer
SPARK: Holacracy by bol.com
Leader in E-commerce in the Benelux, the company founded in 1999 offers more than 20 million items, has a turnover of more than 2 billion euros and employs more than 1700 people. In 2015, bol.com experienced a growth boom that made them feel the need to rethink the organization. It all started with logistics.
The experiment began with a small pilot project run by Harm Jans in the logistics department. The company already had a certain culture of autonomy and creativity, but the different projects were managed in their functional departments, which created a need for control and many meetings to align the departments. The search for a framework that would allow teams to organize themselves optimally according to their objectives proved to be obvious, at a time when turnover was growing by nearly 30% per year.
The establishment of the first holacratic circles generated enthusiasm that led to further progress. HolacracyOne then advised Harm to dive into all-in mode, signing a holacratic constitution with the bol.com board of directors.
Cultural caution and resistance
Harm Jans cites the example of Zappos (online shoe sales in the USA), a company comparable in number of employees and activity, which wanted to globalize holacracy probably a little too quickly. They experienced difficulties, obtaining a heterogeneous organization and decided to adapt pure holacracy to look for something more adapted to their specificities.
The bol.com teams have also shown some resistance to a complete and rapid transformation: “normality is crazy enough” is a Dutch proverb, Harm Jans laughs; the Dutch Calvinist culture tends to refuse to distinguish itself from what is practiced. Another point of resistance was that the fact that this decision to transform the organization came from above was not in the spirit of what the company had always practiced.
bol.com has therefore set about inventing its own model.
A specific terminology for a tailor-made model
Holacracy, constitution, tensions… All these terms were not very reassuring to some people and evoked more a revolution by arms than a reorganization of work. After brainstorming with the pilot teams, Harm Jans created a real internal brand “Spark: igniting teams”, i.e. a spark to ignite the teams. The idea behind this name was twofold: at the same time, to underline that teams alone could decide a start, but also to recall the notion of tension, a key concept of holacracy, since a spark is the result of friction.
Beyond the naming, it seemed obvious that bol.com needed its own solution. This was not only about creating circles and roles, but also about working to align the strategy of the different services with a more global business strategy.
The game is more important than the rules
Without being deleted, the constitution principle has been relegated to the background. Harm Jans justifies it by proposing the example of a board game with complicated rules. You can certainly read and reread them during the game, but you can also choose to learn them by playing with those who know them. We focus more on the game, and we learn to play at least as fast, and especially with more enthusiasm. However, the rules did exist, and everyone could refer to them or even adapt them when their partner’s reading of them did not quite correspond to their own needs.
A flexibility that has also been applied to meetings: rather than scheduling them at a fixed pace, we provoke them when tensions make them necessary, when one team does not understand what another is doing… This is a principle that moves away from pure holacracy, as is the case with the merger of strategic and governance meetings, which are devoted to making decisions concerning roles and responsibilities.
The alignment of the governances is done permanently, each team has the obligation to express what it expects from the other teams when it feels the need: an interaction that is missing, a need that has not been foreseen…
Improve with the customer experience
The positive effects of Spark and the enthusiasm of the logistics department quickly made a number of bol.com services want to organize themselves in “Spark” mode. With the support of Energized.org coaches, the principle was extended in waves to teams that wanted it. Supported by the enthusiasm of volunteer participants, this wave expansion has generated iterations that have made it possible to improve the method with each new extension. Each wave was more effective and appreciated than the previous one.
On the principle of customer experience, Spark optimization was also based on regular evaluations with an NPS (would you recommend the Spark method to your colleagues or business partners?), and a set of team feedbacks. “We know that it works for customers and suppliers, so why not apply the same principle to employees? “says Harm Jans.
In-house coaching to meet the demand
The supervision of the new teams provided by Energized.org ended up being insufficient to satisfy the ever-increasing demand from employees. A Sparkcoaches casting took place internally, starting with “the veterans”. OrganizationBuilders stepped in and helped train the new coaches as well as scale the program significantly. The enthusiasm was there, and offered the opportunity to see that among the employees, more than one already had experience in coaching or human resources development. An unexpected positive effect, this part-time Sparkcoach activity allowed these people to use a talent that their work did not allow them to reveal. A rewarding activity, rich in contact with colleagues, an additional development.. and an efficiency guaranteed by the acute sense of the “bol.com” culture that the “in-house” coaches joyfully demonstrated. The increasing NPS has testified to this.
The “mythical” bar of the third
In 18 months, Spark’s practice has reached 400 users in 50 teams, or about a third of the workforce. We often read that this course is decisive. If successfully completed, it will allow the reorganization to continue, because the rest of the “crowd” will follow. Harm Jans recalls that reaching the first third made it possible from a budgetary point of view to hire additional full-time coaches, which would not have been possible below that.
The mystique of the first third course has thus once again been confirmed at bol.com. “We have reached a critical point that makes the Spark movement sustainable in itself,” says Harm Jans, who now works in the group’s HR department. He is confident, and rightly so: more than 90% of the employees in the company now work in agile way, either with the Spark method — only the legal and financial departments still refer to the classic model, which perhaps corresponds to their own solution. Ontologically, the deployment of holacracy cannot be an obligation but a choice of necessity.
By Luc Bretones, co-organizer of the NextGen Enterprise Summit “The NextGen Enterprise Summit” on March 26th and 27th under the high patronage of Bruno Le Maire at the Pierre Mendès France Conference Centre of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, with Holaspirit, Maif, Manpower and OCTO Technology.
Apply for the “The NextGen Enterprise Awards” for managerial innovation trophies organized with ESSEC.
