Earlier this month, Niswey was featured on BBC Capital on a feature story about flat organizations. We have a flat organizational structure, and that’s why they reached out. How did that come about? Here’s the backstory.
Niswey from its very beginning has been about enabling people and businesses. And that is why we have always thought that workplaces should be about joy. Not about politics, or being lesser professionals than we could be. To make that happen, a workplace has to treat everyone as an adult, who can take responsibility, be accountable and nurture others. Not as a person inferior to another and hence needs micromanaging. Not as a person who cannot be trusted with anything. Not as a person who cannot think on his/her own feet.
And that is how we decided to be a flat organization. There are no managers to manage your day to day tasks. And there are more experienced people who can help others out by guiding, teaching, demonstrating or mentoring. The more experienced people keep taking on the more complex pieces, while helping the new people to learn how to handle the tasks before them to achieve specific goals.
It sounds very nice, doesn’t it. But it is hard work. Not everyone learns the same way, not everyone grasps things at the same pace. So a flat organization while speeding up things also needs a lot of patient and secure environment to incubate a person into new levels of high performance.
Many companies have been trying this flat way of working, some have succeeded, most haven’t. And that is what BBC Capital went about to explore. And as they searched for companies who have flat structures, they found us (good job on the SEO front, you could say). And spoke to Abhinav at length about why we moved to a flat structure, and how it has worked for us.
The story was published earlier this month. What did we do? As usual, celebrated with a round of margaritas! Cheers!
