Since day one, internal work has been one of the foundations of our business. It’s how we have grown from the ground up over the last 12 years. Every Clarasys team member at some point has played a role in internal work that has helped expand our skills, build our services and scale our business.
When consultants are between client projects, they sit on what we call “Basecamp” – a team who work on various activities depending on the business priorities at the time. Activities can be specific to revenue generation, for example, drafting and delivering bids, or involve supporting other areas of the business such as marketing or the people team with content or research. It’s not unusual for a consultancy like Clarasys to do this type of work, but we believe we do it differently.
We are an employee-owned organisation, meaning each of us is a business owner with a vested interest in making our firm the best it can possibly be. People on Basecamp are encouraged to work on their own or other people’s ideas for improving our business. Encouraging our people to get involved in internal work across all functions including operations, finance, marketing, etc, gives our people ownership over parts of the business and empowerment to make changes they want to see.
Clarasys is non-hierarchical and nobody can individually reject an idea, not even Matt, our CEO. Instead, people with an idea build momentum behind their idea and if there is enough interest, they work on the idea with the team they have built. We call this the “advice process”, which simply involves consulting any impacted stakeholders, interested parties and subject matter experts on your idea. It’s key to our decentralised decision-making, and allows the person closest to the detail (who had the idea in the first place) to make the right decisions, based on the inputs of the people they’ve consulted.
To avoid new ideas pulling in different directions, it’s key to have a clear strategy and direction as a firm. New ideas should contribute to moving our business in the general direction of the overall strategy. Also, to ensure the work we are doing is delivering the intended value and impact, we have flexible governance around the process. We have a central team called Clarasys Scrum Masters that acts as the guardian of the internal work process. It helps teams to create new OKRs, which are work objectives and key results that ensure each team knows its goals and direction of travel.
One of the most important things about internal work is it enables us to explore and practice skills we aren’t using on client projects and develop the skills we want to be more proficient in. For example, if someone is interested in social impact work, they can support the relevant internal team and build their career portfolio. We treat internal work the same as client engagements – it helps people decide what they want to be an expert in, and it helps us build the softer skills we need to be excellent consultants.
A few years ago, when exploring the areas of work we wanted to do, our people were passionate about and would deliver on our purpose, we made a decision to invest in our sustainability offering. People interested in this area then started a ‘green team’ to explore and action all of the necessary steps to further develop the service and take it to market. This is a fantastic example of how we have the trust, autonomy and ability to shape the direction of the firm through internal work.
Governance means that internal work is not a free for all with people going off in different directions. It also ensures that goals aren’t static; there are multiple iterations of one idea as it moves through stages and the Clarasys Scrum Masters team makes sure that ideas progress, pivot, and provides a process that ensures a project remains the right thing to do as time goes on.