Date post: | 28-Oct-2014 |
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Making work better (sometimes) @willmcinnes
This was us about a year ago Now 20 people in Brighton, UK
PS. We are horribly imperfect – what follows is not perfection, but it is an attempt to improve ‘normal’
business.
These two books inspired how our company would behave. If you haven’t, read them. They
are INSPIRING.
SMS
PR
Other agency
Digital Engagemen
t
Brand/advertising
Insight
Nixon McInnes
Internal comms
Business teams
(GBS/ BCE)HR
Legal
Customer service
Client
Our mission at NixonMcInnes is to improve the relationships between large organisations and
the people that matter to them.
We do this by helping these large organisations become social businesses.
Datacopter
We like making things too. This is a realtime visualization of tweets around a
Channel 4 programme called The Promise
The fun stuff
We value results – where you work or when is less important to
us. Some people call this ROWE.
The Wall of Win.Because praise matters and
spontaneous P2P praise matters most.
Someone gave Clive the Shield of Win for being
excellent. Now he has to pass it on.
Our clever technologists built NMStereo – a
crowdsourced stereo hooked up to Twitter
(currently broken :)
At ‘First Fridays’ we feed our brains with talks from amazing speakers on mental health, geodesic art, activism and music, banking, improv etc etc.
Once a year we have the NM Summer Camp – people
bring their partners, kids and pets. Sitting around a fire is
good.
The tough stuff
Weekly KPIs
We operate Open Book Accounting: everyone knows everything about the
finances. Each Monday morning, we see the forecast at the team standup – no secrets.
Everyone knows how much everyone else earns…
Yep...
Business planningBudgeting and business planning are done
democratically (this is just an early stage idea generation session at an away day)
We create small, decentralised sub-teams to deal with specialist
issues – there is a Rewards Team to manage the annual
reviews process, for example (toughest job in the company)
• Fair?• Attractive?• Equitable?• Affordable?
Ross published his Personal Development Plan on the blog. He
did Illustration at uni.
For two years we have measured happiness every day using 3 buckets and a load of tennis
balls.It creates a currency for discussion and
awareness.
• NM church of failOn an away day a group came up with an
idea called ‘Church of Fail’ to celebrate failing. People admit a failure, and the
congregation applaud. It is weird. And cathartic.
No idea if it works.
• NM church of fail
Strange looking congregation. Who is in the window?
Challenges
We are often very stressed. People can feel isolated.
We are all very busy. Some of this nice stuff is hard to hold onto when everything is a
rush.
UK employment law isn’t exactly friendly towards progressive business practices.
People still don’t always tidy up after themselves. Transparency is messy too. The
problems don’t go away – in fact they can loom large.
Results?
We have an amazingly talented team, with very high levels of personal growth and
retention. They rock.
We have been on the WorldBlu list of ‘Most democractic workplaces’ for 3 or 4 years, and I recently wrote a book
about other progressive business practices at places like Gore, HCL, Grameen and more.
2012 was a good year (but not an easy one)Income growth 20.3%
Net margin 10.4%Happiness 82%
Say hello!
@willmcinnesnixonmcinnes.co.uk
Culture Shock available today for pre-order on Amazon