How We Practice Open-book Management at Atomic

I recently got to hear Jack Stack tell his inspirational story of working for, purchasing, and turning around a failing division of International Harvester. The new entity that he helped create, SRC Holdings Corporation, is 100% Employee-Owned and still thriving today. Jack helped enable the turnaround at SRC by taking the time and effort to […]

Three Crucial Times To Gather Client Feedback on a Project

The relentless push to improve is core to our culture at Atomic Object. We spend a lot of time focused on professional development and introspecting about how we can better develop software products. Over the last few years, we’ve also been sharpening our approach to gathering client feedback — we believe it’s essential to our […]

Connecting Values to Behavior with a ‘Standard of Performance’

We often refer to Atomic as a values-driven organization. We are loud and proud about our value mantras. We give recognition within the organization when someone exhibits our values. We are careful to hire people who are aligned with our values. But how do you consistently and comprehensively tie together values and behavior? How can […]

Why a Two-Year Mentorship Program Is Crazy (But it Just Might Work)

The thing that initially caught my interest and led me to a job at Atomic Object last year was a unique program called the Atomic Accelerator. If you aren’t familiar with the program, check out some of the excellent blog posts about the first cohorts.

Who’s Doing the Glue Work at Your Company?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the work that falls outside of job descriptions. I’m talking about the stuff that needs doing, but isn’t anyone’s explicit job. I’m aware of how this type of work can impact my career, but Atomic has made that impact manageable—and sometimes even beneficial—through smart policies. I’ll share my story and […]

Five Touchpoints for Kickstarting the New Hire Experience

I had the opportunity to attend the HCI Employee Engagement conference in Denver recently and really enjoyed Bek Chee’s talk, “Beyond On-Boarding: Using ‘Day Zero’ Engagement to Kickstart the New Hire Experience.”

Three Ways to Increase Employee Well-Being & Improve Business Outcomes

Imagine setting off with a group of strangers for a yearlong journey into the wilderness. You must all work together to overcome the dangers you’ll face along the way. Now imagine that the group’s leaders seem much more concerned with their own personal security and success than yours. This is a pretty stressful situation, right? […]

Onboard New Clients Like New Employees to Start Projects Off Right

Once you’ve sold work to a new client, you can focus all your attention on doing good work, right? Not exactly. Before you simply drop the client into the mix, it’s a good idea to invest some time in your relationship.

Setting Up KPIs and a Dashboard at Your Software Consultancy

Your secret weapon is data. You have lots of it. It lives in different systems and with different people in your company. But data itself does no good if you can’t turn it into information–information that is aligned to your business strategy and on which you can act to reach your goals.

The Vistage Issue Processing Framework – A New Sales Tool

I recently joined a local Vistage group run by Steve Johandes. Vistage is a peer-to-peer membership organization for CEOs, business owners, and executives of small- to mid-size businesses. Vistage has a powerful issue processing framework that I really enjoy. It’s effective at getting to the root issue of a problem that someone is facing, and it […]

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