Holacratic Organisation with No Career Progress - Anonymous employee DCMN Employee Review

Thank you for your evaluation. We appreciate any feedback, no matter if it’s positive or that negative. We want to take the chance and provide some insights on the points you mentioned. First of all, we would like to confirm that personal development is an important topic for us which we're continually working on. While we are already encouraging people to develop in different ways and take responsibilities, we do offer different ways how people can grow within our organization. We want to point out that working for another office is not the only way for employees to progress. Our organizational system is built around responsibilities which every employee can take. An important difference to other companies is that there are no bosses who tell our employees what responsibilities they have to jump on. So, in our organization, it's important to have a high intrinsic motivation to see and take responsibilities by yourself to grow and generate success cases for yourself, your team and the DCMN in general. We believe, everybody can be a leader. Additionally, we are offering regular workshops on various topics which help employees to perform and select their responsibilities (e.g., Feedback, Mindfulness, Leadership, Resilience, Design Thinking, Meditation, Mentorship) and everybody is free to attend or even to come up with new ones themselves. We ask actively to look out for external workshops to push personal development. Everybody is free to participate in inspiring conferences like OMR, Frenchweb, Southbysouthwest and many many more. From time to time, we also invite speakers from other companies to learn from them on various topics. We are sorry to hear that the feedback you received wasn’t valuable at all. We know it comes back to communication and this topic is probably an ongoing topic for all of us, as it’s so important. Having said that, we are aware that our feedback culture needs improvements. That’s why we give concrete examples of how feedback should be given. Feedback should be based on facts, you should explain what effect it had on the feedback giver or others and it should be actionable for the receiver to make progress in the future. We're offering workshops on this topic to educate everybody at DCMN. This is a topic on which we all have to learn, work on and implement it even better into our daily habits. Of course, the examples you have mentioned are not at all what we think feedback should look like. So, thank you for your feedback which might lead us to prioritize this topic even higher. As for the holidays, we don't think that there are any employees who can’t take holidays. We offer unlimited holidays, but one of our rules is that you have to take at least 30 days off. We implemented that rule when we introduced “unlimited holidays” because we know that some people tend to take too less days off. For us, holidays are super important to recover and will lead to a higher productivity level in the end. Our People Team is constantly checking who takes too less holidays and reach out to everybody individually who has too less days off. Our numbers are speaking differently: We can tell you that only 5% of all our employees took less than 25 days off in 2018 (analyzed data set: all employees with a full-time contract who worked for DCMN the whole year 2018). One fact you've mentioned is not true: We're not using the Holacracy system and we never did. We developed our own organizational design. There are big differences between our BETA approach and Holocracy. To get to our organizational framework, we read different books, whitepapers, articles, ran countless workshops, brainstormed ideas, had external feedback sessions with experts and worked with various consultants. The outcome is an organizational framework which fits to our needs. A framework which no other company is using. We believe that every company needs to find their very own type of organizational framework and every external input was just inspiration for us. Our BETA organization is still in process (and always will be). We introduced it one year ago (after working on it for almost one year). To implement such a significant change into an existing organization, it takes a lot of time. An organizational design which requires a radical different way of thinking of every employee is nothing which you introduce once and then don’t touch for 10 years: It’s developing, and growing and changing - every day. We're a learning organization and we learn something new every day. In the end, we are very proud of what we have achieved so far as this truly build on one very important value: Trust. And we believe that BETA helps us to become the company with the happiest employees in the world. We would love to get in touch with you again to learn more about the different topics you have mentioned. Please feel free to reach out to us. Thank you!