The Flat Way

In my 4 year retrospective article I briefly mentioned our flat organisational structure. Since this is a key part of [e-spres-oh], I’d like to tell you a bit more about this subject.

Hierarchical vs. Flat

So what does a flat organisational structure mean?

It is the lack of one or multiple middle management layers that usually come between staff and the executive level. It also implies that teams are self-managed, meaning that the responsibilities of a traditional middle manager are carried out by the entire organisational unit. A flat or horizontal organisation is very common for small companies.

What does it mean in our case?

We adopted this model intuitively since our team’s size didn’t grow past 20 until our second year. There was no need to consider any other organisation structure. But even as time passed, and we kept growing past the 30 and then 40 people mark, we have never felt the need to add this additional management layer.

This is in part due to our dedicated teams business model, which means that our various development groups are more closely aligned with our clients’ project management and technical requirements. So, in essence, [e-spres-oh] functions more like a collection of smaller groups, each free to adopt a slightly different way of doing things.

This doesn’t mean that our teams don’t have specific roles, such as technical leadership or project management; it just means that these roles are more informal (i.e. they do not carry traditional managerial responsibilities) and are added only if they become a necessity.

These roles also tend to be temporary: a person could be a technical or team lead on one team, and then be a developer on another. This is highly unlikely to happen within a more traditional, hierarchical organisational structure — a manager will most probably retain their job title and role, regardless of the team they are assigned to.

What are the advantages of this model?

While we identified a number of advantages, I believe the key benefits for [e-spres-oh] are:

• It offered us a much greater flexibility in adapting to what our clients needed. Focusing on getting things done rather than procedure, especially in the first few months when the team is usually not bigger than 5 people, meant that we could show results right from the beginning.
• This approach asks that each team member be more involved, which leads to them being more empowered. It allows us to focus on context instead of control: we want each person to understand their role within a team and we ask them to define how they can best do their job, rather than give them a defined set of tasks and rules that they need to blindly follow.
• It helped us clearly define the roles of the managers we do have, me included: we are here to offer support. This might sound obvious or even overly simplistic, but this is really the key to making this work. Seeing our jobs from this perspective, as the bottom layer of our organisation rather than the top one, made us all more aware of our duties and responsibilities.

What are the disadvantages?

As with anything worth doing in life, there are some issues that come with using this model. Some of the bigger ones we noticed are:

• It is not a good fit for everybody. Some people tend to work better when their roles are more clearly defined; for them, this way of doing things is chaotic and even frustrating. We have learned this lesson fairly quickly and it made us very careful when recruiting new team mates.

• The traditional hierarchical structure usually functions as the communications backbone of a company as well (staff would find out about relevant information from their managers, who find out from their managers and so on). Not having this in place, makes internal communication tougher at times. While this wasn’t an issue when we were 20 or so people, this became somewhat of an issue once our ranks started to grow. To counteract this problem, we have expanded our quarterly meetups to include updates on everything [e-spres-oh], and have started putting a few minutes aside at our weekly demo lunches to discuss nontechnical things as well.
• Scaling might be an issue in the future. This flat organisational structure doesn’t lend itself perfectly to bigger companies. Although this might not become a thing until we grow in the hundreds, being aware of this problem might help us mitigate the challenges we will be facing.

Conclusion

All in all, I believe this model is perfect for us. The advantages that come from trusting your team unconditionally (which is what the flat organisational structure really relies on), far outweigh the issues we faced while sticking to this way of doing things.

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