The Collaborative Web: Building a Divergent Organizational Model for Research and Development, Based on 21st Century Notions of Employee Engagement

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Citation: Laura McKinney, Jef Bell The Collaborative Web: Building a Divergent Organizational Model for Research and Development, Based on 21st Century Notions of Employee Engagement. 2014 Proceedings of PICMET '14: Infrastructure and Service Integration (RSS)
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Download: https://galois.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/CW-picmet-proceedings.pdf
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Summary

Authors describe structure of Galois, a "research services business for the US government". A " single project group tried some revolutionary approaches, focused on eliminating managers, strong project management, and 1-1 nurturing of people." This spread to the rest of engineering slowly. The company founder had an extended absence, revealing tensions. When the founder returned, the head of engineering, Laura McKinney (one of the authors) was made President, and made a declaration, "a citizen manifesto for Galois", applied to the whole company.

The executive team and managers were eliminated, with their 3 conceptual roles assigned:

  • Strategic vision and context: everyone, self-selecting participation
  • Nurturing people: stewards, usually long-term Galwegians, a "lightweight add-on, requiring between 5 and 20 hours a month depending on the number of people that are being stewarded [1-6]" These are long-term relationship not related to functional areas or organizational changes.
  • Task and project management: following traditional practices, varying depending on the project

Benefits included employees being able to make contributions across multiple domains and gaining broad business knowledge, engendering cross-functional respect. Annual satisfaction surveys of satisfaction with "strategy and direction" on a scale of 1-6 increased from 3.9 before the shift to 4.8 after.

Internal customers have things that company needs to do, which are offered to be fulfilled by performers. An employee may have multiple customer and performer roles at once. Project fairs are held 3 times a year to add a formal ask/offer venue. Matchmakers keep in touch with customers to have a sense of emerging needs and connect performers and customers. Annual planning is done by estimating client work and using zero-based budgeting.

Councils are teams that hold concerns usually held by centralized leadership, eg the Engineering Council fulfills a role similar to a VP of Engineering. Each council has a charter and a caretaker.

Compensation is public, and based on work to be performed in the next year, and compensation is set by type of work across company.

Recipe:

  • Start from first principles for compensation: based on value for company, about caring well for each employee, and supports team work
  • Define standards for compensation; salary points separated by $10k, moving between points requires significant change in future results
  • Determine how to measure value of results across organization
  • Identify levels of individual's results
  • Map result levels to salary points
  • Revisit frequently

Theoretical and Practical Relevance

Accompanying blog post https://galois.com/blog/2016/06/undirector-of-engineering/

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