Written Assignment

Research Conducted to Date

· Identified the initial reason why iQmetrix wants to adopt Holacracy in EE-1.

· Reviewed and analyzed the issues regarding decision making and culture barriers in iQmetrix.

· Started round table discussion about further research (Table 1).

Table 1

Issue	Research	Assigned To
Staff scheduling to deliver the projects within the deadline.	Find the suitable software or other techniques to maintain a clean timeline of the availability of the employees.	Subashini Hariharan
Communication, lack of transparency and accountability. Different teams not aligned on goals and expectations.	Research on tools and systems that would better emphasize on collaboration and communication, as well as project management.	Vivian Han
Increased interactions and coordination during each “circle” causing high admin cost and low productivity.	Research on efficient communication with better interactive tools.	Jingxin (Crystal) Guan
Loss of interest in people due to rigid tools and lengthy meetings	Research on suitable and engaging meeting formats and frequencies	Urvi Deshmukh

Process 3

Roundtable discussion: Each team member should provide a short answer—captured in the meeting notes—to these questions:

· Do you believe that Holacracy (or any other form of self-management) can solve these problems?

· Why or why not?

Subashini Hariharan:

Yes, I believe Holacracy would solve any of these problems as this self-management approach helps to increase the responsiveness among the employees, innovation, communication and decision-making, and liability within the organization. Everyone is allowed to discuss their issues/ ideas, or they can take their leadership to get them addressed by showing employee empowerment. The main essence of this management is the companies enforcing this style do not hire anyone by restricting with a particular job description but by using roles under a particular domain. In such circumstances, the power is distributed among all the employees and each role holder has the right to question anyone from that domain or take decisions if it’s going to solve the issue. Similarly, iQmetrix’s one of the issues was to delegate the right resources and allocate time to complete their project on time.

Vivian Han:

I think that Holacracy or another similar self-management type program has a lot of potential to be successful within iQmetrix. It seems that it already aligns similarly with the current company culture, and goals of the founder, but will provide more structure help improve accountability and transparency within the organization. By allowing employees the freedom to manage projects how they see fit, but also expecting them to be responsible for the results, increases the level of accountability. Implementing Holacracy should also improve the level of transparency within the organization. By making it clear what is taking place amongst the different departments in the organization, all employees will be better aligned about goals and expectations. This can help improve the level of productivity and increase efficiency within the organization too.

Jingxin (Crystal) Guan:

I believe Holacracy can do a great job solving the cultural barrier issues at iQmetrix. On Holacracy, as the work environment changes, teams can create and define new roles to shift leadership duties (Bernstein et al., 2016). As a result, employees who are used to the high autonomy culture at iQmetrix could pick roles independently and easily reject the objectives they do not want to take responsibility for. Holacracy will also increase transparency by running the structuring process internally where everybody can look up (Bernstein et al., 2016). It could sort out and assign roles for the best fit in the company automatically.

Urvi Deshmukh:

Yes, I believe, forms of self-management like, Holacracy can greatly speed up the process of initiation and achieving targets aligning with the company’s vision. Holacracy offers the freedom and flexibility to contribute innovatively. It focuses more on roles, rather than job titles or positions, and embraces individual capacities of humanity and creative problem-solving. Employees are not restricted to their roles, and with their innate and / or built skills, they can also choose to handle multiple processes at a given time. Holacracy is often considered as a flat structure, but organizations like iQmetrix could include periodic staff meetings to maintain the desired level of transparency.

Process 4

Identify the key issues that came from the Roundtable discussion. What research needs to be done to address those issues? Who will do what?

A detailed description of each team member’s research is as the following. Task assignments for further research are summarized in Table 1.

Subashini Hariharan:

One of the key issues that I have noticed was staff scheduling to deliver the projects within the deadline. To address this issue, we might use any of the techniques including maintaining a transparent communication medium to avoid any miscommunication between the employees regarding their schedules or availability. Any staff-scheduling software could be used to maintain a clean timeline of the availability of the employees. Avoid hiring more or less staff that are required for any roles as it affects the efficiency of delivering the items. Make employees satisfied by providing them a better workplace with flexibility and keep them stress-free to increase their productivity.

Vivian Han:

Communication, lack of transparency, and lack of accountability seem like key recurrent issues for iQmetrix. It was evidenced several times that expectations and deliverables were not managed appropriately because of these factors. As the company began to grow and expand their offerings to diversify, it seems like different teams were not aligned on goals and expectations, leading to missed deadlines and failing to deliver on projects. There needs to be a better emphasis on collaboration and communication tools, as well as a project management tool, to help increase visibility of everyone’s tasks and goals, to improve accountability and ownership. It would be worthwhile to research tools and systems that would help in these areas to improve inefficiencies and gaps in workflow.

Jingxin (Crystal) Guan:

Adopting Holacracy can be a good idea to solve their cultural barrier problems. However, once the “structuring” work expands to the entire company scale, there will be many interactions and coordination during each “circle” by many meetings. Efficient communication with better interactive tools could help the team enhance the productivity and cut administrative cost. For example, Zappos uses a Slack bot to conduct governance meetings (Bernstein et al., 2016). It is also feasible for iQmetrix to apply similar tools to prevent the issue.

Urvi Deshmukh:

Identifying effective meeting formats for periodic staff meetings can be challenging. As much as self-management can help in speeding up achieving goals, communicating those ideas periodically could also result in overly long meetings. Therefore, it is crucial for companies to identify and structure a suitable schedule for discussions, that can help in keeping the meetings relatively short and making it easy for employees to retain or track precise information. Tactical meeting resources like process cards and phrase books, and Governance meetings have been found to be useful in Holacracy (Holacracy Bootstrap Guide, n.d.). Snapper, a small New Zealand based transport ticketing service provider found meeting tools like Holaspirit and Glassfrog, stifling. The company then switched to free-format meetings and how they do that differs from meeting to meeting, which keeps it purposeful and interesting (Holacracy for Humans, 2019).

References

Bernstein, E., Bunch, J., Canner, N., & Lee, M. (2016, July–August). Beyond the Holacracy Hype. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2016/07/beyond-the-holacracy-hype

Holacracy Bootstrap Guide. (n.d.). Holacracy Resources. Retrieved October 15, 2021, from https://resources.holacracy.org/holacracy-bootstrap-guide

Holacracy for Humans. (2019, July 11). Agile Alliance. https://www.agilealliance.org/resources/experience-reports/holacracy-for-humans/