We have eliminated our teams!

We have eliminated our teams!

Wait, what?

Don’t get me wrong, we did not kick out any of our employees. But we have pulled off the biggest change ever and restructured our entire organization.

But first things first. Let me explain what had happened and how we got to our motivation to change everything

The Why

Like most companies, we used to have a functional division: besides development, marketing, HR or finance we had a sales team and our customer success managers, both responsible to work directly with our customers. Sales did everything before concluding contracts, while customer success management was responsible for the cooperation after closing, including hiring support for our customers.

And of course, it worked out well. Not only enabled us this structure to scale to a certain level. It furthermore led us to where we are standing as a company at this moment in time – in terms of revenue, the number of satisfied customers and much more. However, at one point we have reached our limits. Our biggest challenge was the cooperation between sales and customer success management. So, what happened? The incentives for both departments weren’t aligned, which led to high revenues in sales, but subsequently also created a lot of avoidable effort and costs in customer success. We were no longer able to provide our customers with the best possible service.

Thus, we had to solve conflicts between those two departments.

We asked ourselves the most important question: how can we be operationally as close to the customer as possible and put customer centricity at the heart of our organization?

The answer, at first sight, seems to be an easy one: the organization has to be aligned with our strategy. We want to be even more customer- and user-driven as we were. We want to put the user at heart. It is our only option to get to the next level and continue growing. We have ambitious goals! Even though corona has made it difficult for us in the last few months, Instaffo coped quite well with the conditions that started with the pandemic; however, now is the time to look ahead and get the most out of the next weeks, months and even years. Our aim is growth and for this, changes in our company are indeed required.

How did we do this? We changed the design of our entire organization. And that’s how.

How we turned our company upside down

Together with our senior leadership, we created a circular organization of the firm, called the orbit model. This model makes us able to adapt a living culture of innovation with our customers at the heart of the company.

We put our purpose in the center of the Instaffo orbit. Our vision is it to empower people individually to reach their full potential. So why not making this the heart of the organization in order to create the best possible outcomes for our customers? It’s a way to align our daily doing with this vision. That's why it's all at the heart, that's where it belongs. It guides our actions. Our strategies, mission, and OKRs are now very focused on this purpose, and we align everything we do with it.

The inner circle of our purpose is enclosed by the next circle of the model, our users. Why? Our users make our purpose valuable. What does that mean? We at Instaffo, as shown in the diagram, see our customers and candidates as the purpose of our work. Here, we intend to solve problems and to make things easier due to our work and support. Not only do we value the fact to solve problems but also the building of relationships, the satisfaction and feedback of these people – that's what it's all about. That's why they go right to the center, right to the heart of our organization.

Our reorganized team structure is called squads and is the next circle around our users. And this is the biggest change we’ve made. All areas from operations are combined. There are two criteria being very important to us in order to create successful matchings: locality or local proximity of the jobs we’re matching and the main tasks in these jobs. We want to focus on the tech market, which is why we started defining micro markets by geographic components and the job area. For now, we're just going to focus on the geographic distinction, as we have very diverse regular customers with diverse job postings. Based on this geographic component, we defined our new squads. Those teams will be cross-functional and have all the core competencies needed to be successful in each geographic micro market. With all these concentrated skills each squad will be able to grow in its micro market and will be able to support their customers in the best possible way.

How will such squad look like at the beginning? The main needed skills are talent acquisition and user management. At the beginning, we will work with functions and tasks that have proven to be successful in the past. Candidate and business services will intentionally not be separated, as we experienced that collaboration between sales and customer success is crucial. Furthermore, the combination of B2C and B2B helps us creating valuable insights. Besides talent success management (B2C), account executives (B2B) and sales development (B2B) these squads will have customer success management, so we can guarantee to grow with our customers. Last but not least: those roles are very important. Nevertheless, the core goal of our squads is to create teams that work closely together, so whenever someone can’t cover his or her tasks, someone else in the squad takes over in order to provide a full service to our customers. With this agility we can achieve one of our main goals: having successful micro markets, finding dream jobs for our candidates and the perfect fit for companies that are searching for new employees. Competencies as HR, product, tech or performance marketing will be added to the squads when needed.

The next circle consists of two parts: our platform and services. Our business model is based on the platform; therefore, it has to be embedded in our organization. Development is important since it is a central element of Instaffo and a great way to reach our vision, solving the problem of our customer. After all, we do not consider us as a classic headhunter but as a software company that replaces the job of a headhunter via our platform.

Around the circle that represents our platform, the circle of our services is drawn. In addition to the squads, these are teams that don’t operate directly in our core service. That’s why we added those shared service teams, consisting of marketing, communities, HR and finance. Each team brings expertise in specific areas and supports in our micro markets to make them successful.

The outer frame of the Instaffo orbit is formed by our board which has the overall responsibility to hold everything together. What is of utmost relevance to mention here and can be seen in the graph is that it has not a central position in our company (as it is normally the case for organizations). It connects Instaffo with our external environment. The boards meaning is to give – together with our whole team – a framework and standards we can work with and to ensure that despite the autonomy and freedom we hope for through the new structure there is a frame keeping us all together. We consider this as one of our added values to the company culture, since even though employees have to work remotely, we still are connecting during our daily work. It is exactly what we want to maintain and promote with redesigning Instaffo.

Another responsibility of the Instaffo board is to look outside of the box and to foresee the possible development of Instaffo in the future: how can we solve problems; how can we be sustainable with our vision in mind? How can we achieve our goals, shape the future and continue to grow? How can we identify opportunities for new business models? All these questions will be answered by our CEO, COO and CTO with impulses and content from our most valuable resource: our employees. Because without them, there is no way to grow, achieve goals and to shape a beautiful future.

Besides the circles of our orbits, there will be two other divisions in our new organization: projects and centers of excellence. They will be developed to realize further cross-team and cross-company projects in the future. The project team can be created across all circles and is agile and flexible. It arises from different resources, bringing together all skills needed to achieve that particular project. This structure will enable us to concentrate on specific projects within our framework of OKRs and then consciously allocate the resources and implement the project quickly. A formation of such teams can be suggested and done by anyone at Instaffo. Within the squads, we will have centers of excellence. There it is about sharing expertise and best practices for our different roles, which is very important on order to work more efficient and effective.

Looking to a promising future

We have asked a lot of relevant questions to ourselves and have questioned the way our company is performing. However, we haven’t answered them all. We’re sure that there will be always a lot of new challenges along the way. For now, we know that Instaffo is required to be restructured, since it empowers each of us to express their ideas. If they notice something is not working, they can bring this into the organization and help shape it. Because our premise is to create more accountability to individual teams. We want to solve and address emerging problems together.

All in one, our intention is to break down existing structures to bring the most value to our users first and foremost. We want to take the next steps of growth together and we believe that with the new structure we are best equipped to do so. We also believe that with our team, we have completely different and divers’ personalities and mindsets to be able to create something like this successfully. Many thanks to everyone involved, especially for everyone’s openness and feedback, especially to Nikolai, Dusan, Pascal and our Coach Christian, who enabled us to go this step together. We want to get started now and shape a wonderful future of Instaffo.