For more than 13 years Axiom News has been able to interview and story many cutting-edge workplaces while at the same time trying out some of the ideas we run across in our own space. We’ve been especially interested in people who are playing around with creating an ecology for work that, at the risk of over-simplifying, “embraces our humanity.”

Menlo’s Story

Menlo Innovations CEO and founder Richard Sheridan has just published Joy Inc. documenting his organization’s journey to a place of renown for its intention and hard work to create the conditions that enable his team to experience joy in the workplace — a critical state, Richard argues, for the team member and organization to experience success.

	A Menlo Innovations pair at work. (Photo credit: Menlo Innovations.)

Richard’s favourite story capturing how his company has made it possible for joy to manifest as a defining quality of Menlo involves his spontaneous invitation for a team member to start bringing her baby to work with her.

“It’s one of the most delightful aspects of embracing our humanity inside of a business and it paid off dividends in so many different directions that I can’t even begin to count them,” says Richard, noting one is how clients change their behaviour when a baby is in the room.

Menlo has trademarked The Menlo Way defined by joy through practices such as pairing — no one works alone — a daily stand up, making mistakes faster, origami project management and a work authorization board that includes story-cards, yarn and stickers.

The Holocracy Story

Renowned for some time as a freedom-centred workplace, Zappos, an online retailer, is now makingheadlines for its decision to adopt a system called Holocracy.

We interviewed Holocracy co-founder Brian Robertson a number of times several years ago when he was just beginning to see significant interest in the practice.

The reason Brian and two business partners had set out to bring this practice into being was a strong attractor for us to learn more.

Brian shared that he and his partners had come out of work experiences that were profoundly unfulfilling and determined there must be a better way for organizations to operate.

So they built a software development company with one question driving their organizational activities: How can we live and work together in a more full, more embracing, more powerful way?

They were looking for a more integral approach to living and working together; one that embraced not only different personality types but also the practices, systems and processes of the business world, as well as the “internal” sphere of individuals and cultures, including emotions, shared meaning, and language.

While it’s difficult to sum up Holocracy in a sentence or two, key elements appear to include figuring out what the organization needs to be in the world as well as a unique structure of overlapping autonomous “circles.” The circles are intended to distribute authority while avoiding hierarchy yet maintaining a consistent alertness to and focus on the organization’s larger purpose.

WorldBlu’s Story

WorldBlu Inc. is another organization that’s been steadily working towards enabling a different kind of work ecology.

We first reached out to Traci Fenton, founder and CEO of WorldBlu, in 2007 after learning of and being intrigued by her aspirations around celebrating and advancing democratic workplaces.

	Axiom team member Jennifer Neutel accepting the WorldBlu award from Traci Fenton at the WorldBluLIVE event in San Francisco in 2011. (Photo Credit: Hollister Thomas)

That’s led to a connection that’s included Axiom News making WorldBlu’s annual List of Most Democratic Workplaces seven years in a row.

In our early conversations with Traci, we were drawn by what she was seeing and her vision for the future.

“Greedy, me-first, command and control business is officially passé,” she said, noting she believes that there is a growing global movement towards creating workplaces that fully engage employees, giving them a voice and a stake in the outcome of their work.

WorldBlu lists 10 principles of democratic workplaces, amongst them purpose and vision, transparency, dialogue as well as listening, fairness and dignity.

Axiom News has been able to interview many WorldBlu-certified organizations over the years, getting their take on what it means to be a democratic workplace.

Key insights include that for many organizational democracy is largely about participatory decision making and openness to feedback. We’ve been surprised by how few mention shared financial ownership.

For some, it’s about creating a democratic process inside a company.

Axiom’s Story

This was Axiom’s story at one point. We started with a summit in 2009 that involved identifying key focus areas of activity for the organization for the coming year. Everyone could provide input on the focus areas through an Open Space process. Teams then formed consisting of either elected or self-selected members who drafted their own mandates and set of intentions. Finally a process was set in place for these teams to provide feedback and stay accountable to one another and the organization’s mission.

Sounds fabulous in theory, and we did manage to get a whole bunch of to-dos checked off in that time, which was cathartic.

But in the last couple years Axiom has been moving to conversations about and testing the waters around a notion CEO and founder Peter Pula calls deep democracy.

	Members of the Axiom team participating in a 2011 company summit. Appreciative Inquiry and Peter Block’s Six Conversations were building blocks of the gathering, which was hosted by Peter Pula.

Deep democracy is not so much about creating processes to guarantee “citizen” engagement and voice as it is about “opening up the space” for possibility- and ownership-thinking to take root across an organization. Conversations inspired in large part by author and thought leader Peter Block’s Six Conversations as well as Appreciative Inquiry and Open Space technology seem to have a lot to do with opening up this space. Peter Pula’s leadership approach is also certainly integral.

We see lots of cross-points between what we’re learning through our own experiences and also what we’ve found in hearing from people such as Traci, Brian and Richard.

But we believe there’s so much more to discover and would be interested to hear from others on this topic.

Feel free to comment below, e-mail michelle(at)axiomnews.ca or tweet using the hashtag #humanworkplaces.