Why I believe Ekipa is a great place to work

The past weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want our company to be. Our company is as strong as the people we have in our team. And the function of our company is to have an ‘operating system’ that binds everyone together. This is a technical term which for me defines the culture within our company. 

As an entrepreneur, I’ve been playing with ‘operating systems’ for almost 2 decades now. Thinking about the key ingredients of the operating system I believe in, brought me to these three:

• Self organization. Everyone knows how to set the right priorities and can work without a boss. We coach people to get there
• Entrepreneurship. Fixing stuff, making the world a better place, breaking rules, doing what nobody else is doing. That's what we do and teach. 
• A balanced workplace. We set high standards, deliver quality and push ourselves. And we also value working smarter, not harder. Let others say they're busy. 

We’ve captured these ingredients in our Ekipa DNA a couple of years ago:

These are three things from the heart. I truly believe that the future of (large) organizations will evolve around ‘self management’. The reason is simple: people get higher levels of education. Most of the work we do is ‘brainwork’. Why do we need people to tell us what to do and how to do it? Why do we need those people to then kick our butts and check whether we did what they asked us to do? I believe every educated, smart person wants to be ‘free’. Free to decide how he spends his own time (the most scarce thing in anyone's life). Free to work from any place; on anything he wants to work on. Free to work on your own terms.

In Ekipa, ‘everyone is his own boss’. The other side of the coin is guidance and coaching. We have recently painfully concluded that it’s very challenging to be completely self organized with a team of young people. To get people to become self organized, we need to coach them. Our team asked for ‘more clarity on direction and expectations’. That’s the traditional ‘management question’. The answer we are trying to develop now is a healthy balance in a ‘system of accountability’ and ‘coaching to make our coworkers' successful’. My personal insight is that I as a leader, need to be 100% focused on my coworkers. My sole goal is helping my team become successful; develop their competencies to achieve their own dreams; finding out how I can help everyone all the time. 

For many people the above sounds like ‘utopia’, but is it? The thing we need to make this happen is ‘entrepreneurship’. And look around you, the past decade(s) entrepreneurship has sparked a massive startup movement all over the world. These people all set out to create innovation and companies on their own terms. The leaders of the future will all be more entrepreneurial. An entrepreneur tries to make things better all the time. I personally have an entrepreneurial brain and I’m always seeing and sparking ‘new things’. It drives people crazy sometimes (because it looks like changing direction), but this is what companies need to grow and improve. Combine ‘fixing stuff’ with ‘execution’, which is the other side of the entrepreneurial spirit and you’ve got the basis for self-management. 

The central mindset in Ekipa is ‘everyone can pursue any initiative’ as long as he/she gets support from the team. That last part is important, because in our team, nobody can launch a new product or service without support from the others. I love entrepreneurship, so I will always embrace people who come up with new ideas to improve things or launch new things. 

The last point is a balanced workplace. I have never understood why people work 9-5 all week and move from vacation to vacation, all in order to buy a larger house or car. Now I see nothing wrong with that if people really love to live within such ‘boundaries’. But I think there are better ways to go about the short life we have. Although in Ekipa, we do need to work 9-5 sometimes in our customer’s offices, we always try to find the right balance between the desire to service customers and the ‘freedom’ of our coworkers. 

In Holland, where I am from, the past decade people have become more and more busy. When people ask each other ‘How are you?’, the answer many give is ‘busy’. Somehow that’s supposed to be ‘good’. The busier you are, the more important you look? I’ve never understood the logic in that statement. A driving force for me has always been doing more with less. Working smarter, not harder. If I can get the most important things done in 4 hours today, why would I sit for 8 hours just to fill my hours? Yes, if I can have 4 x the impact working 8 hours, it might sometimes make sense to do that. But I don’t believe anyone can consistently do that over a longer period of time. We need balance. We need harmony. 

2 years ago, we described our operating system in ‘Ekipa reinvented’. Some of the ideas (taken from ‘reinventing organizations’) haven’t worked out as we envisioned. We tried self-setting of salaries, but that lead to tension. We then created a democratic system in which everyone earned the same basic salary and a % of income generated. That has worked for the past year. But today, as we are growing and want to attract more talent, we’re revising the compensation system again to accomodate for differentiation between people. 

The idea of ‘let everyone do what they want’ didn’t work out as I expected either. Since a couple of months, we have introduced stronger leadership and a stronger performance system. That system brings clarity to all of us in expectations and our contributions to the team. We even publish a ranking of people in performance. 

The interesting thing is that in the spirit of agility, we are continuously improving our ‘operating system’. Based on feedback from our coworkers, we change and improve everything, from leadership, roles to performance and compensation systems. And I believe that’s another key thing that makes Ekipa a great place to work: we’re still a small team and your voice counts. You can be part of ‘shaping our operating system’. 

If you like the ideas here, reach out and let’s have a coffee. Or maybe you want to ‘taste’ our team and join our team dinner, join one of our coaches ‘on the job’ or join one of our training? 

Send me a whatsapp at +6287786693690 or mail me at [email protected]