There’s a big trend lately of giving people total freedom at work. Makes sense on paper — the people on your team are grownups who can make their own choices, and you shouldn’t have to babysit them.
More and more, though, people are taking this idea to the extreme. It turns what COULD be a decent holacracy into a total hot-mess-acracy, eliminating departments, managers, and a lot of the structure that makes workplaces actually work!
I get where the idea comes from. Everyone hates pointless rules and red tape, and bureaucracy slows down the speed of execution.
You know what else slows down the speed of execution, though? Forcing everyone to make a bunch of decisions every day that they’d rather not think about!
Stuff like:
Don’t you wish you could just make your own hours? “Get your work done, guys, we don’t care when!” Ahh — smells like total freedom.
Until you have to actually work with other humans, anyway.
Who’s online at what times? When are they available to meet with you? Can you expect them to be on this afternoon, or do they do their best work around 3 am? You’re waiting to hear back on some little detail before you can move forward, and nobody is around!
Now every person on your team isn’t just in charge of their work — they’re in charge of tracking the unique daily schedules of everyone else they need to interact with! So convenient, right?
The idea of total scheduling freedom has its perks, but it also adds massive administrative time even to tasks as simple as scheduling a meeting. You’ve avoided the bureaucracy of working hours, but by removing the simplicity of having the smallest clue as to when the people you need to talk to might actually be at work!
What we do instead:
Everyone at MeetEdgar works during normal working hours, relative to their own time zone, Monday through Friday. We keep a chart of what those hours are in every time zone, so it’s super easy to know when to expect people.
You naturally overlap with some people more than others, but you know who’s working and when, every single day. Plus, you never have to worry about if you’re working “enough” — actually, let’s talk about that some more in this next part!
“Unlimited” vacation SOUNDS amazing, but in reality, it just means that you’re making everyone guess how much the people at the top secretly think they deserve. (Yes, this is as stressful as it sounds!)
Because “unlimited” isn’t REALLY unlimited, is it? Can someone take off 350 days? 35? Do they have any idea of what you expect is normal? Stop making people nervous that they’ll be fired every time they take a vacation, and just tell them how many days they have to work with.
What we do instead:
Simple: we offer a real vacation policy. Retro, I know! Not “minimum” vacation, not “suggested” vacation, none of that vague stuff — just four weeks of PTO at your disposal, and plenty of encouragement to use it. (Because taking time off should feel good, not stressful!)
Speaking of encouragement, though…
Imagine going to a restaurant, sitting down, and asking for a menu.
They don’t have menus. Order whatever you want!
Well, okay. Can the server make a suggestion?
“Nope, you have total freedom! Be in charge of your own restaurant experience, we’re not here to babysit you.”
You finally give in and order a steak, but it turns out they don’t have it. So you order meatloaf — they don’t have that, either. And, well, they SAID you could order anything, but they actually sort of frown upon people eating meat. So, don’t do that.
This is what it’s like when you’re in charge of determining your own work every day. First, there’s the politics of figuring out what you’re “supposed” to be working on. (Because while it’s technically up to you, nothing’s ever THAT simple.) Then when you DO figure out something that The Powers That Be secretly wanted you to work on — but didn’t tell you, of course, because it’s all up to you! — you also have to handle all of the project management. From scratch. Every time. How liberating!
What we do instead:
Managers exist for a reason, and it’s to make everyone’s job easier, not harder! Our managers (who we call advocates) work with their teams to set priorities every week, month, and quarter.
You aren’t handed a to-do list by your advocate every day — you still own your area of expertise, and are in charge of optimizing it. (If we hired you to do something, we trust that you know how to do it well.) But you also don’t have to guess at what you need to work on in order to be as valuable as possible to the rest of the team, either — there’s a dedicated person in place whose job is to keep the wheels turning smoothly. That’s why we call them advocates — they’re there to make your life easier!
“We’re a flat organization — no managers to answer to here!” Cool, so does that mean I can change the price of what we sell? No? Who does? The founder? Okay, so we say there are no managers, but only because there’s one manager, and now every decision has to go through one person and everything is so hopelessly backed up that nobody can get anything done? Cool, this flat organization thing is very empowering.
What we do instead:
Decision-making power is distributed, and everyone knows how and why. Everybody on our team has the power to make the decisions that will allow them to get their work done, but our advocates are in charge of managing resources and coordinating logistics.
Like Zack Urlocker says, approval doesn’t add value. Knowing where to turn with ideas that could change the company, however, can make a big difference!
When you run a business, it’s tempting to want to reinvent the wheel and turn it into the flattest, most liberated, most empowering workplace on the face of the Earth. But there’s something to be said about giving people structure!
Sure, we could do the whole flat management thing. But in my experience, I’d rather just set boundaries, let people know where those boundaries are and why they exist, and let them do their thing. They’ll spend a lot more time doing what you hired them for, and a lot LESS time trying to figure out how!
