Holacracy Case Study

Many online companies like to make radical changes in the way their organizations are run. For example, sleeping on the job is frowned upon in most workplaces. However, Google (the largest online search engine in the world) encourages its employees to take naps while at work. Most people, being old fashioned, find this to be odd and downright stupid. What these old timers aren 't putting into consideration is that employees are found to be more productive after a quick nap, and a more productive employee is better for the organization. Like Google, Zappos is trying to make some big changes to the way they run their company. Instead of a more traditional structuring of a company, Zappos decided to implement a holacracy approach instead. Holacracy …show more content…
It seems like this could be an issue would it not? Holacracy supporters beg to differ. By removing titles this it prevents the risk of clashes between employees and managers (Russo 2014). This is a common problem in most work places. To be honest, I have actually encountered this problem multiple times. The most recent one was with a staff sergeant in my squadron. He asked me to accomplish a task. I was already in the middle of performing another task and I asked if somebody else was available to assist him. He told me to stay in line and to never tell him how to delegate his work again. This situation clearly caused some hostility in our organization. If we had a holacracy system in place instead of a hierarchy we would not be put into situations like …show more content…
Most big decisions that impact lower level employees are made by upper management in closed door meetings where lower level employees have no say in what happens. This will no longer be an issue with organizations who choose a holacracy structuring. Decisions are made at meetings which are held regularly by employees where they discuss issues they are encountering and anyone can suggest answers to people 's problems. These meetings have been found to be incredibly effective. Zappos said that they have actually had reorganizations occur within ten minutes. They managed to group two departments within ten minutes (Malter 2014). If a grouping of two departments were to take place in a more traditional setting they would encounter a lot more issues due to politics and bureaucracy. What it comes down to is this system will give employees and advantage over managers, who are concerned with the bigger picture, and can forget about the essential details of the