Wanna Guide your Team to Self-Organization? Here is How We Did It!

Building a great organization and sustaining it as a successful one is not a cakewalk. Aligning talented people around the organizational goal is the essential step involved. Adopting self-organization and embracing self-organizing teams is an efficient way to achieve this.

Netherlands-based Bridge Global has become one of the first IT companies to be driven completely by self-organizing teams. The organization is noted for its unique work culture and adept technology ability. Its disciplined allegiance to Agile software development and DevOps outlook has contributed a lot in this respect.

Evolution of Bridge as an Employee-Driven Organization

Great willingness to move from the traditional hierarchical thinking helped Bridge in becoming employee-friendly. The organization has become one of the IT companies in India to successfully integrate a flat organizational structure.

The foreign interns in the organization have played a key role in incorporating an international flavour and mindset. This has helped us in embracing a progressive work culture.

The Beginning

Bridge’s evolution as an employee-friendly IT company started way back in its inception stages itself.

Once during his visit, Hugo Messer, the founder of Bridge Global and the renowned distributed Agile specialist, asked all the Bridgys to write down their suggestions/opinions on the company’s infrastructure and processes. They were given a chance to anonymously paste sticky-notes on a whiteboard with their comments. Lots of them came up with inspiring and practical suggestions for improvement.

These proposals served as a huge eye-opener to the management. They decided to integrate these improvements and enhancements into the organizational structure.

Hugo asked interested people to voluntarily form a team to help the organization in addressing the issues. The team was called upon to work towards making Bridge an employee-friendly IT company. A few self-starters came forward to form the Bridge Improvement Plan (BIP) Team. The BIP team is an active contributor in making Bridge what it is today.

BIP is a prime example of a self-organizing team. The squad of go-getters takes active participation in all the decision making processes. It also serves as a level playing field wherein anyone can join and express their suggestions and opinions. All the Bridgys are also formed into sub-teams as and when there are requirements to fulfil. Different clubs and committees to nurture the hobbies and passions of Bridgys function in the most self-reliant manner.

The following are some of the instances wherein the self-organizing teams at Bridge took the leadership in executing various missions.

• Flooring on the top floor of the main building: It included striking a deal with the floor laying contractors, tile vendor tendering, design settlement, monitoring, cost estimation, budget planning, execution, smooth shifting of employees without hampering the work etc.
• Organizing IT Futsal Challenge 2017 and the upcoming IT Futsal Challenge 2018.
• Organizing worthwhile technical events under the TechWhizz umbrella.
• Finding and finalizing the new office space: It includes all the related activities to make the new office building a fully functional and funky office setting.
• Helping hand to HR Team in the recruitment process.
• Creation of Branding Team, Tech Event Team, New Leads Processing Team etc.
• Active coordination in implementing flat organizational structure.
• Taking lead in coordinating Leadership Training for employees

Dedicated Self-Organized Teams

Besides BIP, the dedicated IT talents that we extend to our global clients also function in the most autonomous manner. Team members pull out work on a priority basis with the ultimate goal of client satisfaction. There are no waiting time or blocked work instances. The entire team is accountable for the project and collective responsibility drives each project into an enviable success.

All these team initiatives have proven that when employees are given a prime voice in the decision-making process, their accountability and responsibility get a boundless boost. They are motivated to execute their duties without playing any blame game. This eventually benefits the organization in remaining as an employee-friendly entity.

Has Agile Attitude Helped Bridge in Endorsing Self-Managed Teams?

Creation of self-organizing teams is a prime goal in Agile principles. “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organising teams”, as stated by the Agile Manifesto.

Agile promotes a goal-oriented team culture. It gives guidance to achieve continuous improvement. The certified and proficient Scrum Masters of each team give mentoring and facilitation. Effective Scrum ceremonies strengthen the team spirit and coordination. Constant collaboration with the product owner results in the most versatile and functional software solution.

Our in-house certified Scrum masters conduct regular Scrum training sessions to help Bridgys to contribute to team success effectively. These sessions help in moulding competent IT specialists who can deliver projects in less time, with less risk and more business value. We can undoubtedly say that Bridge Global could foster self-organizing teams thanks to its adherence to Agile practices.

Another core aspect that needs attention here is that the strong self-organizing nature in turn helped us in strengthening our Agile character as well.

Agility and self-organization should co-exist. Self-organization leads to collaborative work culture, and this, in turn, paves the way for easy adoption and extension of Agile practices. All these traits have in turn helped Bridge in making its clients 100% satisfied.

Verdict

We can definitely affirm that self-organizing teams have made Bridge Global more open, fluid, adaptive, decentralized, and empowering. It is indeed a worthy example for other organizations to follow.