Voys as an open organization: sharing is caring

Voys is an open organisation; you could even say we are radically open. But what does “open” mean? What do we share with each other and why do we do that?

You might recognise this situation: a couple of colleagues return from a meeting. You’re curious about what they discussed. The meeting was about finance and you don’t really have anything to do with that team. But, if you ask them about it, you don’t get a clear answer.

No secrets please

A situation as described above wouldn’t happen at Voys. We don’t really like secrets. Why would you keep secrets in an organisation? Of course, not everybody needs to know the password to the company’s bank account. But there’s no need to lock up the meeting notes in the safe, right?

At Voys we assume that we’re all adults who can think and act in an adult way. If you keep that in mind, you can surely share information with each other, like the notes from a meeting. The more people have access to information (but to be clear we don’t mean personnel files or stuff like that), the faster we can notice things and the make adjustments if we have to. This way Voys keeps moving forward.

Open communication

Besides notes, we also share our email boxes with each other. Yes, that’s right. We can read each other’s email. And again, don’t worry, sensitive information won’t be spread through the organisation. Joint accounts are accessible by everyone on the team. And there are also ways to make your personal account accessible if you are going on vacation so someone can keep talking to customers for you.

Slack is the chat tool which we use so that we don’t need to email with co-workers. In Slack you can chat one on one. Next to that there are a lot of public channels in which we can for example share updates. Public channels can be joined by anyone who has a Slack account for our organisation.

Sharing is caring

We share the documents we work on in Google Drive. Is a co-worker looking for something? Then he or she can find it in our shared Drive. Another place he or she can find it is in The Oracle, our online source of information. There you’ll find information about internal processes and, for example, an instruction guide on how you set up the television in the meeting room.

If you visit our HQ in Groningen, you’ll see a couple of big screens in the pantry. How many deals were made? What’s the number of online conversions today? How many calls were answered? All the numbers that answer these questions are on the screens. Everytime you get a cup of coffee, you see them. This makes our metrics visible to everyone and makes it easier for someone to spot if something is off.

Our open organisation reaches further than just sharing information. We also decide together the future path for Voys. We think it’s not the best way to grow a company if you only have the director or some managers decide what is best for the company. One person or one group doesn’t know as much as multiple people in the organisation. That’s why we decide on Voys’ strategies together.