A More Resilient Organization: How Raise Scaled Self-Management to 450 People
- Scale self-management decision practices to 450 staff
- Propose, debate and document all decisions in one place
- Give every employee equal voice regardless of seniority
- Maintain a transparent record of every team decision
For more than 60 years, the Ian Martin Group (now Raise) has been helping organizations hire better through traditional contract and permanent placement recruitment services, along with innovative offerings like Fitzii for smaller businesses and Matchfield for matching consulting engineers with top employers.
"We describe our purpose as connecting people in meaningful work," says Luz Iglesias, Director of IT Recruiting. And that starts inside their own organization, by creating pathways for 450 team members to end every day with a sense of achievement.
From Six People to a Movement
About a decade ago, a small team of six within the Ian Martin Group read Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux and were inspired to start experimenting with self-organization.
Luz Iglesias was one of those six members. They began trying out different forms of decision making, the advice process, and increased expectations for feedback. After a few years of experimenting, these practices were working so well within their team that they'd started to gain traction across the larger organization. That's when Ian Martin Group decided to adopt self-organization on a company-wide scale.
"We do some quite radical things around employment and what it means to be employed — what freedoms and responsibilities our employees have and how we treat one another."
No Bosses, One Flowchart
At the core of their system is the idea that no one person has positional authority over any other person. Everyone is bound by the same operating system.
"We say that everything starts when you notice a problem or an opportunity," Luz explains. This could be something small like recognizing the company could be saving money on the coffee maker, or something big like whether they should be acquiring an adjacent company. Then no matter who the employee is, a single flowchart outlines how to deal with the problem or opportunity they've noticed.
"So anybody can start here on any problem or opportunity; it doesn't matter your experience, your seniority, how fancy your title is… everyone has the same freedoms and responsibilities as guided by this flowchart."
It's a homegrown system that Luz says is working better than anyone expected. "We have arrived at something that we think is quite scalable, that suits us and that we're very proud of."
Finding Loomio
When Luz and her team were looking for software to help them stay organized, they discovered that Loomio merged almost seamlessly with the system they already had in place.
"The architecture of decisions in Loomio very much aligns to our beliefs about decision making. Sometimes you just need to make a decision and sometimes you need to seek the consent of the people who are affected. That's a distinction we make here that this tool enables us to make as well."
Loomio was also easily adopted because it is visually appealing and simple to use and understand. Almost all of the Ian Martin Group's decisions are proposed, debated and documented on Loomio — from whether to relocate one of their offices, to redistributing accounts, to hiring or changing someone's role. Luz says she personally uses Loomio every day.
The Teal Operating System
As the company grew to 450 staff across three countries, they formalized their approach into what they call a "Teal Operating System" — a series of practices that staff engage with daily.
In 2023, Luz Iglesias, Tamara Extian-Babiuk, and Sagar Chatterjee presented Raise's Teal OS at the Greaterthan Solstice Jamboree, sharing how distributed decision-making practices actually scale in practice — the challenges, the experiences, and real example decisions from people living self-management every day.
The 2020 video below offers an in-depth look at how the team uses Loomio as the backbone of their self-organizing practices:
The Impact
In witnessing the transformation of her company, Luz feels like the biggest impact a self-organizing structure has made is an increase in employee morale and satisfaction. The Ian Martin Group placed second for midsize business employee satisfaction in all of Canada — two years running.
"I think it's empowering for people to have a voice in decisions and Loomio helps us achieve that. People would find it very hard to go back to a conventional business because of the way that we've grown as people and the impact that has had, not only on our work but on our families and our lives."
Luz believes that self-organization is the workplace of the future — and the immediate future at that.
"These systems and what Loomio enables us to do are cheaper and more adaptable to the market and to employee conditions in addition to being so, so satisfying on a human level."
