Imagine working in an environment where decisions aren’t bottlenecked by layers of management, where employees have the autonomy to take ownership of their work, and where teams collaborate to solve complex problems. This is the reality for organizations that embrace a flat hierarchy with self-managing teams.
What is a Flat Organization?
A flat organization relies on fewer (or no) layers of middle management. These organizations typically rely on decentralized decision-making and empowered, self-managed teams.
Atomic describes our hierarchy as ATOC (Atom, Team, Office, Company). We rely on self-managing teams to come up with creative solutions and new innovations to continue to deliver on our brand promise.
3 Benefits of a Flat Organization with Self-Managing Teams
A self-managing team is a team that takes collective ownership of their work. They make decisions independently while aligning with broader organizational goals.
Atomic relies on project-based teams to deliver the highest value possible to our clients. These teams have guiding principles for success (e.g. iterative development, release early and often, etc.). Still, they are empowered to organize the work and themselves in any way that achieves these outcomes.
1. Empowered & Accountable Employees
At Atomic, each Atom has ownership and autonomy over their work. This encourages us to find creative solutions to problems and allows us to be more innovative. This freedom also forces us to remain accountable for the decisions we make. We must ensure we are innovating in the right areas for the right reasons.
For example, after learning about Shape Up as a new framework for delivering successful client outcomes, a team was able to experiment with running a project using those principles. The client had a roadmap with several releases to new geographies, each being a few months apart. The team didn’t need to go through several layers of management to make this decision nor did the organization need to implement a change initiative.
2. More Collaboration
Atomic’s teams are cross-functional, consisting of designers, developers, delivery leads, and testers. We do not create silos around any of these practices. When new teams are formed, Atoms rearrange their desks into pods with all disciplines involved in the project.
Cross-functional teams require collaboration to be successful. Our designers need to understand the business constraints that our delivery leads are discovering in order to create workflows that work for the client. Our developers need to understand the accessibility needs our designers are incorporating in order to build an experience that works for all users.
The same is true across Atomic. To remain flat, we need to collaborate so that leadership is making decisions in alignment with the needs of our offices and Atoms.
3. Higher Job Satisfaction
One of the biggest advantages to self-managing teams is higher job satisfaction. When employees have more control over their work and are trusted to make good decisions they tend to engage more.
When employees are more engaged they see the impact their work can have. They care more deeply about the success of the organization and our clients.
Atomic regularly asks employees to fill out Gallup’s Q12 survey for employee engagement. Our most recent survey ranked us in the 72nd percentile for engagement worldwide.
Challenges
Role Ambiguity
Within both self-managing teams and flat organizations, you always risk conflating or misrepresenting roles. It’s important to delineate practices with distinct responsibilities (designers versus developers). It’s also important to encourage teams to spend time aligning their roles for each project they work on.
At the beginning of projects, Atoms will regularly create a Team Charter. The charter outlines how the team will work together, what success looks like, and a clearer division of responsibilities for that project. On longer-running projects, the team may refresh this charter every so often.
Scaling
Atomic coined the ATOC structure when we were well below 100 Atoms. We’re now 100+ across 4 offices. We’ve been able to maintain our core hierarchy structure with our growth, but it remains to be seen if there’s a limit.
We do have an advantage with our growth strategy of small offices in separate geographies. If each office can keep the ATO part of ATOC intact, a new office doesn’t add that much overhead or management need across the organization.
Atomic’s Success as a Flat Organization
Atomic has been successful over the past 20+ years in part because of our organization model and our self-managing team approach to projects. We’ve fostered an environment where Atoms are empowered to try new technologies or processes to solve our clients business problems. We’ve kept our employees engaged and caring deeply about the work they do. It remains to be seen how far (or big) we can take this with such a flat organization, but I’m looking forward to finding out how we collaborate and innovate when we get there.