As we scale, retaining our culture while allowing room for innovation and change is important. The ‘Clarasys Way’ approach is a guiding principle to ensure we stay on course; it began as a side-of-desk piece of work that has transitioned into our organisational mindset.
As Clarasys grows, our organisational model must enable us to evolve whilst protecting our core values. Those values are what make Clarasys a great place to work and they automatically create a high, but achievable, bar.
We want to be profitable, do interesting and rewarding work, empower employees to act as owners of the business, and also enjoy what we do. As consultants, we are always striving for continuous improvement and, therefore, we have an opportunity to make Clarasys an even better place to work.
Clarasys has always had an open culture which has enabled us to investigate how we can move the business forward. Our structure, one where everyone is involved in shaping the business through internal work measurable by Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), empowers us to look to the future and ensure that we challenge the status quo in the appropriate ways.
Retaining culture as we scale
In 2021, a dedicated Clarasys Way OKR team was set up to explore how we should scale. The OKR was active for two years and its vision was to act as “the catalyst for building the company that we are proud to work for, now, and in the future”.
Discovery
The discovery phase involved ideating for a long time, focusing on the right way to move forward. What, if anything, do we need to change? How do we stay ahead of the curve?
One of our business’s USPs is that we are agile and strive to push boundaries further than traditional consultancies. As a Clarasys Way OKR team, we identified alignment with research by Corporate Rebels (CR) around progressive organisations and became particularly interested in its eight progressive principles. These tools help to distinguish progressive organisations from traditional ones:
We needed to make deliberate decisions about how we took the Clarasys ‘operating system’ from where it was to where we wanted it to be. We wanted to retain some things, take inspiration from elsewhere, and introduce new ideas. As there was no single answer, the OKR team facilitated a company-wide discussion and tested improvements, iterating these based on feedback, and subsequently championed and embedded new ways of working. We focused on exploring certain areas of these working practices, specifically, people’s sense of belonging, a decision-making tree, and external insights.
CR Principles
We asked people where they felt we were in line with the CR principles and discussed whether this was what we wanted or whether further improvements could be made. In the May 2022 Company Update, we presented the baseline current status and discussed what we could improve. The results demonstrated that our employees viewed our organisation as progressive, although not always at the highest end of the progressive spectrum.
We decided we didn’t want to be ‘very progressive’ in any of the principles as this may suggest there was nothing to improve on and potentially stagnate innovation. With people joining us from different backgrounds, and we want to keep the diversity of thought within the organisation, we agreed it was healthy for the organisation to have differing schools of thoughts, as long as nobody thought Clarasys was ‘very traditional’ on any of the principles.
By integrating CR principles into our survey to give us a baseline, we also checked on deviations. We identified groups where the sense of belonging was below average, ran workshops to look at the causes of this, and fed information back to the business. As part of our distributed authority mentality, we left the ownership of actioning on the results to those business areas.
Using CR’s eight progressive habits, where are we now?
We have incorporated CR’s progressive principles into the organisation in several ways. Firstly, we have fed these into a ‘Teams 101’ guide on how to make teams more high functioning in different scenarios. We now measure against these in our Company Surveys and this provides us with a framework that will allow us to identify dips or deviations from the baseline and continue retaining culture as we scale while innovating where relevant.
We are also now working with Corporate Rebels as a delivery partner for clients.
Find out more about our partnership with Corporate Rebels here. To find out how we can help your organisation become more progressive, get in touch.
