When browsing LinkedIn or TechCrunch, a founder can get a feeling of inadequacy: through the lens of social platforms and mass media, successful companies look like they all have perfectly balanced teams with healthy attitudes. These ventures seem to be packed with autonomous, and OKR-driven employees where each member has a say in the company's direction and a freedom of expression.
It's enough to know that some companies succeed in creating such teams to want your culture to be this good, even if in reality things don't always work like this. Eventually, some entrepreneurs start looking for a way to implement these practices within their firms. However, for many it was easy to push away all plans to create the perfect corporate culture while the circumstances allowed it, but then there was COVID.
When Vladimir Drogan, the CEO of the software development company Roonyx with over 20 years of experience in the tech industry, found himself in a situation with his employees being locked in their houses, separated from their teammates, he started to rethink his role in the firm. Before COVID most companies felt that being in the same space together meant their teams were aligned and seeing things the same way. With his people separated from each other and being disconnected, and afraid, Vladimir faced the challenge to bring everybody together despite the circumstances.
A CEO is a crucial figure for any company, but it's not a healthy situation when employees see them as the only determinant of strategy and direction. It's unifying for a team when everyone takes part in defining a company's present and future. But what can a CEO do to motivate their people to open up and take on more ownership and autonomy? Vladimir managed to change the culture within his company to make the team more united, and the surprising outcome was a zero churn year that followed those changes. He shares his experience.
Transparent Communications as a First Step
Vladimir stresses that he had been dreaming about a more decentralized culture within the company for at least a year before he decided to take action. He saw transparent communications as a good starting point and made no mistake.
In Roonyx there had been anonymous NPS surveys since the company's inception in 2010, but they contained only two questions - what was good and what could be better. It didn't give enough information. Moreover, the results had never been thoroughly discussed with the team.
So, the first step towards positive changes was to arrange weekly all-hands meetings. During the initial meeting the NPS results were properly discussed for the first time and the CEO opened up the data on the company's finances, team churn trends, and hiring plans.
First Changes and Outcomes
When the team members got their say, there were immediately some interesting insights. For example, some had complaints about customers. It turned out that employees were upset by constant change requests, changes of priorities, and forgotten feedback.
Together the team dug into the root of this discontent and realized that they had been mistaking non-confrontation for being "customer-oriented." As a result, the company never set strict boundaries which supported lack of professionalism instead of supporting the clients. The Roonyx team fixed it by designing a new customer reporting system and automated a large chunk of it within the company's custom agency management tool.
"However," Vladimir says, "it's one thing when everybody agrees on having an issue and it's a totally different thing when you realize that some of your co-workers hold opinions opposed to yours." He explains that since Roonyx is an outsource team, it's super important to track work hours because hours are the internal currency. At the time the company used a third-party tracker, and it turned out that some employees hated it as an intrusion on privacy while others felt that the tracker made their lives easier.
To everyone's surprise, Vladimir participated in the discussion about the tracker only as a facilitator. Сonsequently, a team member took initiative and said he could write an internal tool that would address everyone's needs. Others volunteered to help, so that half of the team got involved with this project. No one asked them to.
What started as a time tracker has grown into a standalone tool, integrated with Jira. It was born out of necessity and now fills a much-needed niche. It uses a neural network to project performance, and an AI model generates customer reports from data available in Jira and collected by the time tracker. It also warns Roonyx when they approach a budget or delivery danger zone.
Later, driven by their own initiative, some employees deployed an internal marketplace powered by an Ethereum-clone blockchain where team members could bid on tasks and set tasks to each other. "It's not a project management tool," says Vladimir, "it integrates with Jira and is an agency operations tool. It was born out of and designed for the very specific pains of a software agency." Seeing the inspiring outcome of open communications, the Roonyx team have started to see it as one of their key values.
Zero Churn Year
"Now that we were all remote, we actually became more aligned in our goals, pursuits and world views," Vladimir reflects on the outcome of the transparent communications experiment. "Three months into our weekly sessions our zero churn year began," he continues, "In the 15 months that followed, no team member had quit their job. This means we didn't lose a single member through most of the Great Resignation."
However, in 16 months a team member quit, but in the 8 months since the churn rate has still been at under 5%. Vladimir explains that a low-talent churn is important for any company but it's super important for an agency because an agency heavily relies on its previous expertise to deliver. This is why an agency should do everything in its power to keep its talent.
The Roonyx CEO mentions that they didn't expect to have this result. He also admits that they are still not perfect and have many growth areas. For example, Roonyx don't have perfect attendance but it's above 95% most of the time.
"We still do our weekly team sessions but they are no longer led by me. Now it's whoever volunteers to chair the next session at the close of the present one. And we can't wait to see each other every Monday," Vladimir shares more insides. He reveals that he's happy with the results and believes that the outcome is worth all the efforts.
He warns, though, that there's no guarantee that the same strategy that worked for Roonyx will work for other companies, and adds that there likely was a bit of luck involved. Nonetheless, he enthusiastically advises other CEOs to find a way to make their company's culture more open because it leads to a lot of positive consequences.
* This is a contributed article and this content does not necessarily represent the views of techtimes.com
