Creating a collaborative agency culture that scales

I see agency management being most effective when they see their role as facilitating smart people in getting great things done - not telling them exactly how to do it.

Nothing limits people's motivation and productivity more than jumping through irrelevant hoops. At Deeson, as we've grown we've realised that it has become more and more important to decentralise decision making and share information effectively.

Since January 2015 we’ve been experimenting with some changes to enable a more empowered and self-directed approach. And I've been getting better at getting out of the way.

We have some beliefs backing the changes:

• our team members are intrinsically motivated and know how to get their own job done best
• open access to information is power - use tools to make your company data useful and accessible
• everyone must have meaningful input for a culture of continous improvement to be effective 
• we should focus on results not process
• we do knowledge work and our approach needs to embrace this - measuring who is in the office at 9am is reassuringly tangible but mostly irrelevant to doing great work
• principles used by people with good judgement are a lot more useful than lots of rules

In this session I'll explain why we made the changes, what's worked, what's failed, what we don't understand and how we see it evolving in the future as we continue to grow.