Introducing decentralized structures and self-organized work
Impetus to the project
Tomorrow Bank offers a sustainable financial product that fully fits the spirit of the times. Not surprisingly, therefore, the organization has grown strongly in the past, combined with a heavy workload. For the founders, it was thus urgently necessary to withdraw from the operational business themselves.
To ensure this, there should be clearer team structures and responsibilities of roles, and more decentralized decisions. At the same time, however, everybody wanted to maintain the culture of the organization ("tomorrow-ness").
Other major challenges were frequent changes in the team structure due to growth and an additional burden on employees due to the pandemic-related shift of the project to remote workshops.
What we did
Together with our consulting partners from Dark Horse, we first trained pilot teams at Tomorrow Bank to implement role-based working. The teams filled the roles (including leadership roles) through open elections, and a tension-based governance process was set up to enable the teams to work on their roles and rules in decentral structures.
In parallel, internal facilitators were trained to accompany the changes throughout the organization.
Experience and Result
It’s not only the sustainable product that makes working with Tomorrow a pleasure for us. We were truly inspired by elements such as the “Amore Shower”, in which team-members showed appreciation for each other in the onsite workshop with the People & Culture Team.
The current status: the pilot teams are ready to independently conduct open, consensual elections. Customer Support team has filled the leadership roles via open election, and three teams from different organizational areas have established a role-based working and governance process. Two internal facilitators have been enabled to further accompany the process.
What our client says
In order to establish meaningful and functional structures, it is essential to understand how organizations work. Sascha and Torben imparted this knowledge to us practically, patiently and with a lot of humor and joy. Not only did we benefit from this during the actual collaboration, but we can also use this understanding for all follow-ups and new projects in the area of organizational development.
The engagement with our values and our culture, the openness to criticism and, last but not least, the wealth of experience and professionalism have meant that we have been able to find truly individual, tailor-made solutions to our problems.
Katrin Schwerdtner, Head of People & Culture
[At podcast “Kollektive Führung im Gespräch” Katrin talks about Tomorrow’s change - listen in (only available in German)!]