EP041 - How to boost employee experience with transparency with Adam Horne of Open Org
About the episode
This episode focuses on how to boost employee experience with more transparency. The more open a company is, the higher the level of trust is within teams. With distributed teams, transparency is given and preferred in terms of operations to ensure clarity and efficiency. To discuss this, I invited Adam Horne, the co-founder of Open Org.
About the guest
Adam is the co-founder of Open Org, on a mission to rebuild trust by bringing transparency to the world of work. They provide a guided cohort and accreditation program to both companies and People Leaders worldwide to help them take their businesses from Opaque to Open, building trust and improving key business metrics like Engagement, Retention, and Productivity along the way.
Before Open Org, Adam’s career spanned 12 years in the People and talent space, 9 of those as a founder or co-founder. He bootstrapped his last business remotely from 2 to 72 in 18 months, with a core focus on People & Ops.
Aside from that, he has spent years working closely with tech startups and scaleups worldwide on their talent, hiring, and people strategies.
Connect with Adam on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome everyone. Welcome to the Leadership Anywhere podcast. Today there will be a topic which we will discuss, which is really close to my heart. It's transparency. I think even just discussing about transparency is controversial. At least that's how I experienced it in the last one or two years. Every time I mentioned transparency, which I think is a really good value open term which we need to discuss anyway, I always feel some pushback. I always feel some non clear sometimes even attacks around that term. So I thought that it should be one of the pivotal topics that we should discuss on this show anyway. And one of the best person to discuss transparency is Adam Horne from OpenOrg. Welcome, Adam. It's so nice to have you here.
Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me on and having me.
So tell me your journey. How did you end up working in transparency, working with OpenOrg and what OpenOrg is?
Sure. I co founded OpenOrg this year. We launched this year in 2023. So it's still early days for us. And without going into too much depth on the business right now our mission is to rebuild trust between employers and employees. It's at an all time low. In our eyes, attrition globally is rising, engagement globally is declining and there's been some real erosion of trust between employees and employers. So it's something that has driven our desire to, to do something about that. And that's ultimately what OpenOrg is trying to fix and put right. Prior to launching. I probably about 11 or 12, I lose count years experience in the people and talent world in general. I'm starting out graduate recruitment agency from an external perspective for a few years. I then left at 23 to naively set up my first company. Thinking I'd I'd make millions and I didn't but have remained as a founder or co founder since. So I've spent nine, nine years or so working for myself, building companies. This is my fourth iteration of my own business. Now, but all broadly speaking within the people in talent space or slightly different sizes my last company just before launching open org we launched during the pandemic and it went from two of us to 72 people in about 18 months. So it was very quick growth around 2020, 2021. And we were fully remote as well. Although we did want to say fully remote. We had an office in London, but we hired all over the UK and so have had a taste of hiring people remotely post COVID, which has been great fun. And yeah, stepped away and launched open org this year.
And why did you, this, that's a great journey. Thanks for sharing it. Why did you started a business around transparency?
It wasn't planned, honestly. I made a conscious decision to step away from my last company without having any idea as to what I wanted to do next. All I knew at that point was that it didn't feel right for me to stay in my current business at the time. And so I knew I needed a break and it just felt like a natural gut feel. It's hard to describe as a founder. You never leave because of salary or benefits or anything like that, you're the founder. But I just felt a little bit like my passion wasn't there. So much anymore. So it felt like the right thing to do. So honestly, I stepped away. And instead of thinking about launching a new business, I actually spent some time applying to roles for the first time in 12 years, I became an applicant. And that was actually probably the start of that moment for me. Honestly I consider myself to be quite a transparent person and founder prior to that, we had a public handbook at my last company. I've also worked and hired for some really progressive forward thinking startups who have had public handbooks. And I've seen the benefits of being open, being transparent. So I've always defaulted to open, so to speak, but becoming an applicant for the first time in 12 years, really opened my eyes to how bad it was for candidates out there. And maybe I've lived a sheltered life as a founder for a while. So I was horrified. I was looking at job adverts that were vague and gave me the wrong information and doing interviews that didn't really give me any information as well. And ghosted and interview processes and all this, all these frustrations you hear about on social media all the time. And it really got me frustrated. And at the same time, I circled back to discovering or rediscovering some of these companies that I've previously fallen in love with. People like buffer GitLab remote Posthog, who are probably my favorite of all time, relooking at them and thinking, I love these companies. I want to work for them. I don't know why I don't know them, but I want to work for them. And there was a link there. They all have public handbooks. They were all open. They were all transparent and they all made me feel like I know what it's like to work in this place. And that was the light bulb moment for me alongside my co founder John we got chatting. We've known each other 12 years. We've always aligned on culture and transparency and how to do things in the right way. And this was this light bulb moment where we thought transparency can be that lever to improve trust at work. Communication is key and the more transparent you can be, the more trust you can build with people. It's basic human psychology in some respects. Sure. How can we do that? And that was the kicker for us to, to launching something like OpenOrg.
Yes. What you can see, you can trust, it's that fricking simple, by the way.
Yeah, that is true. And we've actually, what we've our challenge, however, with open org was we needed to take that one step further. So there is the cynical side of you will also say, okay any company can put anything on a handbook and people will believe it. So our job with open org also is not necessarily just to encourage companies to share more, but also for us to act as that verifier. That information is true and correct. So what is something you can trust, but our idea is that you can trust it even more when there's some external verification around that, that we've seen it, we can attest to that. And also we've checked that with employees, for example. So there's some verification that you can apply to that idea as well.
So it's pretty much like a glassdoor for transparency.
Yeah, Glassdoor without the toxicity element to it. We're trying to take a much more supportive approach to helping companies open up because you've, you touched on this on your intro and I'm fully aligned with you on this. When you mentioned the word transparency, people tense up particularly founders and leaders they freak out. They immediately think you're asking them to share their bonuses and their salaries, and then they start sweating and thinking we can't do that. There's normally a reason people are aware that they're not paying people equally, or there's something not perfect in the business and that they freak out. So rather than taking a slightly more aggressive, toxic approach to calling companies out which you could easily do here. We're taking a supportive approach. We're trying to say, Hey, we know you probably want to fix this. We trust that you want to fix it. Let's help you do it. And let's help you make transparency tangible so that you can understand the steps you can take to get there.
Just quickly reflecting back to your libel moment, so interesting when you step out from your immediate circle, like for example, everyone in the remote workspace, for example. You just realized how sorry about the situation is and what we are talking about about transparency, clarity, and employer loyalty and stuff like that. It's so wrong in most of the companies and it's so toxic for most of the people. So yes, there is a problem. I'm a hundred percent sure. And transparency, like creating a little bit more transparent workplace it's not the solution, but it's one of the solutions of course. Tell me about the challenges. Maybe it's the same challenges that I face by the way. When most of the times people hear about transparency, they freak out because they thing that they need to share details that it's too, I don't know, personal at least to them, that's one, or they just don't know how to do it. It's too fluffy. It's too intangible. It's too cloudy. We don't know what it is. I cannot put that in the next expression. That's what we discussed in the prequel. Tell me more about the the challenges, what do they say?
There's a few different ones that we come across. I think firstly, I would say that 95 percent of the people we speak to up HR and people leaders, and they are on board aligned on the bus. They believe in this, they want to do better. They want to make their company better. Where they hit resistance sometimes and all the time is with leadership, founders, CEOs. And that's not to say that CEOs are evil that they're not intentionally saying, no, we must keep secrets. They're probably just a little bit more anxious and nervous. They're looking at their business from a much wider spectrum. And just the people, they're looking at their customers, they're looking at other investors and there's some private and confidential things that they see that maybe the people team don't all see. So you can understand why people might tense up a little bit. But that creates an immediate. Level of friction, their intention in that process for us, we have no issue getting a people leader to say, yes, I'm on board. It's the founding team, the leadership team, whatever they may be. So we do a lot of work around that with helping people leaders to build a business case around this just to get leaders, to understand a little bit more about transparency and that, that's the second challenge really, is that word transparency. Ironically, we try really hard not to use it too much because it freaks people out. So we try and talk more about communication and trust and how you, the things that you can use transparency to improve and that tends to resonate a lot better with people and make them a lot calmer. But that word transparency is a challenge in itself. Because people have different definitions of what it means to be transparent as well. We always have also an element of conversations where people need to see data. They always want to see that the stats, the data especially leaders. Yeah. I could tell me what if I'm going to do this, tell me what the ROI is going to be. It's a hard one to answer. It's hard one to answer because. From an open org point of view, we're a brand new company. We don't have 10, 000 open orgs yet where we can say here's the data about being an open org. There's a heap of research out there that clearly points to the benefits of transparency around productivity and profitability and engagement and satisfaction. So we can lean on some pretty solid studies out there ourselves, which is helpful. We're also resigned to the fact that. There will be some people out there who will never be happy, even when, if they see some stats, some reports where we're focusing our attention to kickstart a movement, so to speak, is finding those companies, those founders, those leaders who don't care about ROI. Don't care about the benefits. They do this because they believe transparency first is the right way to go for their employees, for them, for their business. And that's who we're aligning ourselves to in the early days.
And by the way, there, there can be a pool effect as well. So if, I don't know. Let's name a few if Deloitte is doing or getting a badge obviously the other big fours will follow suit because they just don't want to miss the boat.
Yeah, I'm sure there'll be an element of that at some stage. We're still so early days that we're in the, we're literally, as we speak, a couple of weeks away, probably from announcing our first couple of official verified open orgs. We've got a cohort going at the moment so that a handful of those will become verified companies at the end, which will be really exciting. And we're also verifying a couple of others outside of that too. So within a few weeks, we've got some really exciting names, companies, leaders in that progressive startup scale up space that maybe we'll help bring others along in that journey and with any movement, as it were and we're not some rebellious from aggressive movement here, by the way, but we were trying to create a wave with any movement you can start it, but you're relying on those first few people to stand up and join you to create that crowd to pull others in and as soon as you do that, hopefully others do start joining. So that's the hope.
Yes. And are you doing it only for only in the UK. I'm not sure that you mentioned it.
I am. Yeah. And honestly we didn't want to run before we can walk. We're both UK both based in the Southwest our hypothesis for, or intention at the start was let's start small. Let's focus on the UK market. We're probably going to be looking at startup scale ups. Was I got feeling. Without stereotyping or generalizing that more progressive tend to be more remote more asynchronous. And that lends itself well to transparency. So we had to some gut feels there, but we've honestly been blown away by how far reaching this is. We've got a French startup on our first cohort. Company called figures who are in the sort of compensation benchmarking space that some people might know brilliant business. And in our next cohort in November already, we've got people leaders across Europe doing this as well. Someone in Italy, someone in Romania we've had a heap of interest and support from people leaders in the U S as well. And so we're running a U S cohort in November too. So a little bit quicker than we planned, but what we've realized quite quickly is transparency is a hot topic everywhere, but it's a legal topic in the U S and in Europe as well. So companies have to do something about this. They have to take action. And then that's where we're seeing that wave now as well.
And it's interesting that you mentioned that it's a legal thing for most people, because I'm sure you're the same in that sense that for us, it's an operational issue. It's all about how you work. The reason why you're familiar with, for example, buffer, they are the ones who are usually mentioned in that in this is that because you already know most of the things they do and how they do it. Most of the playbooks that they use salaries operational manual, everything it's, everything is public and online. And even though you're not working for them, you're still feel that you can work for them because you understand what they are doing. So I think it's an operational issue. And because of that, let's step back a little bit for, especially for the audience who are not yet initiated in the transparency operation space. So what are the main benefits that you would say if an organization becomes a little bit more open?
From an emotional point of view just to quickly touch on that there's the trust piece. You immediately improve engagement, trust and satisfaction at work, people feel like they know what's going on and they feel, and I'm not trying to use as few buzzwords as possible here, but you ultimately, you feel as an employee, like you, you're in loop with what's going on, how's the business doing, where are we going? What are the goals? What are the objectives? And there's some very scary stats out there to suggest that the majority of people don't feel aligned or in the loop with what a company's goals are, what their own personal goals and objectives should be. And that's a big problem when it comes to engagement and trust. So companies that are more open, more transparent, tend to be a lot more organized operationally with OKRs goals being out there and in the open with what they're doing, how they're doing it. An extreme, you've got a company called post hog, which some people might know of and anyone who hasn't looked at their website or their handbook yet, please go and have a look at it. Because they're my favorite, but they share publicly share their strategy and their product roadmap with people. You can go there and see it. They're not fussed about their competitors seeing it. They don't care.
They're open source.
Yeah, fully. And they're brilliant. And then they are fully focused on what they're doing. They don't care about their competitors that let them come and see it. So there's that trust element, which I think is important. I think from an operational point of view, it depends on the setup of your business, of course. But if you do happen to be remote or asynchronous by default transparency is a natural default that you really should be embracing because if you keep information hidden, that's going to be impossible for anyone to get things done. You can access information quicker. You can make decisions off the back of that information a lot quicker. There's an inclusion element here as well for employees without going too deep on, on examples. The more you can document around things like, I don't know, mental health or wellbeing or maternity paternity policies, the less people need to put their hand up and ask questions around it. Some people aren't comfortable flagging that they maybe are struggling with mental health to be able to go and access information that's documented and action that themselves without anyone ever knowing. It's really powerful. It's great for inclusion. It's great for employee wellbeing and happiness. So there's a lot of emotional benefits to this, but operationally, long story short, you can get a lot more done a lot more quickly and efficiently. And there's collective brain power involved here as well. You start getting other people's. And that can be dangerous if you try and co create too much. Collective brain power is way stronger than singular.
And we safely state that the transparent organizations are more efficient in terms of operation, productivity, delivery, building, whatever they do they are just simply more efficient.
Yeah there's again, I would stress before anyone jumps on the stats we haven't personally run our own studies yet. We're a tiny startup, but we're just getting going, but there's studies, there's research out there by very reputable companies that points to productivity being way higher, roughly 21, 22 percent higher and profitability being 21, 22 percent higher in companies that are seen as transparent. And it makes complete sense to work. Ignoring the stats again when you look at it on a human level when you can it's logic.
It's logic.
It makes sense. The more involved people are the more engaged they'll be the more aligned they'll be on goals The more likely they are to hit those goals it's you can't argue against that logic.
And just fyi anyone who's listening and there's a leader No, you don't need to share your salary No, you don't need to share everyone's else's salary on a public excel spreadsheet. You can share how the salary is calculated or so if you want, but that's not all about transparency. One other thing I think it's important to know that when you have an open org shares most of the stuff that they are doing anyway, it's so much easier. We mentioned this before, but given the fact that you are coming somewhere from recruitment as well, it's so easier to recruit. It's so easier to find people.
Yeah. It's honestly, I've mentioned this to a few people before, but the, and we've started this business called OpenOrg that is now my entire life, but actually going back a few years, I'd never heard of notion as a platform, which is now I live and breathe notion and handbooks I'd never heard of public handbooks, to be honest, it was a new thing to me, but I started working with this startup who was then called WeGift, they're now called Runa worked with them for a good couple of years, helping them hire. And they introduced me to their public handbook on notion. And initially I was a bit skeptical. I thought this is a lot of information to digest who's going to read this. Anyway, I was, I had to read it. And I loved it. I didn't have onboarding necessarily, but that was my onboarding. An hour later I thought I know this business that I know the expectations. I know their culture. I know, I get the, I've had a crash course and that's really helped me. And I started sending that out to candidates who applied to roles and it was already on their job descriptions anyway. By the time they got to me for an interview, they've read this handbook, some of them in more depth than others, but I would comfortably say six out of 10 calls that I'd have with a candidate would that handbook would get mentioned. And then it would be a positive review of This is amazing. This is absolute gold. I loved it. I feel like I know the business. It was the best sales tool I could have ever hoped for as a recruiter. The only downside if there was one was whenever you ask someone whether they've got any questions for you at the end, quite often they're like, no, like I've I think for I've seen and read so much. So if you're trying to find downsides, I guess that could be one, but it's powerful, really important tool. And honestly, I know they get some pushback, but we are seeing so many companies message us at the moment to tell us that they're in the process of building these out, they're making them they're doing this. They are going to be launching them and it will become a very mainstream thing within the next few years. I guarantee it.
Yes. And just quickly, like some of my personal clients are from open source and it's so interesting to see that they almost never have any kind of recruitment at all in house or externally at nothing. All they do because everything is public what they are doing anyway, all they do is just fish from the contributors who are already contributing to the project and they're not on the paid list And that's it. It's super simple. You already have a I wouldn't say like fan base, but like followers People who are aware of the company and they know what they are doing and whatever.
It's the employer brand conversation, which is a big one for us and a tricky topic to talk about actually, because sadly employer brand has become all about trying to attract as many people to your company as possible in recent years, and which has caused problems for companies. You're inundated with too many applications and people who just aren't right. And but you do it in the right way and you build handbooks in the right way. Actually show the true culture, the ups and the downs, the rough side you can repel people as well and turn people away from the business naturally. And that's powerful too. So recruitment can become a lot easier if you have a balanced honest employer brand, and you can do that with a handbook as well. I referenced this a few times, even though for me, and I think for most people, university, they agree that sort of GitLab are probably the most transparent company in the world because of their handbook. And it's been a huge source of inspiration for us with open org on a personal level or everyone. Yeah. And it scares me to death. The idea of actually working at GitLab, though, if I'm honest, because for me, their handbook is so in depth, so detailed, it may make me a little bit anxious reading it. And that's just a personal thing for me, but I find that fascinating when I think about it because I love them. I love their handbook, but it's made me realize it's naturally repelled me as a candidate, and that's okay. They don't want everyone to work for them, but I'm comfortable in the fact that I don't know if I would work well in their culture and their environment, just because I can see how detailed they are. I find that really interesting and I think it's a great thing for them and a great thing for me.
And imagine the level of enthusiasm and productivity when you suddenly tomorrow, you will get hired by GitLab and you're starting working with them and just jesus Christ, I have to like Oh my God, I'm not sure I will be able to get onto that level, but I will prove myself and then you are immediately start. Normally you would start from here, but you will start from a much, much higher position in terms of drive and enthusiasm and productivity, just because you already know how they work and was the set of expectations that you need to fulfill.
It's a filter and I think we talk about benefits of transparency. That's another huge one is onboarding and ramp up time. That's something that really improves productivity for new hires is ramp up time and onboarding. And you can be onboarded so much, not necessarily quicker, but more effectively, more in depth. If you open and document this information for people and let them read it. And. Yeah, they will get up to a speed so much quicker in their role, whatever that role is. And that's, again, logic. You cannot argue with that. So there's another benefit there to throw on the table.
I always sell this with two things. Like it's most of the benefits of anything transparent or trustworthy operations it's all connected to growth because you will feel and experience less lost time and less lost money or time or energy, whatever you call it. But yeah, it will be faster and more efficient just because you invested on the operation side a little bit more.
I think it it, and I know this will be something, a topic I'm sure that will resonate with you as well, but from a manager point of view as well, it relieves a lot of pressure on managers who traditionally feel this huge pressure to onboard and look after their employees. And yes they still need to do that. Of course, they can't just give them a handbook and then disappear. But there's a, there's an opportunity to deliver so much information and make that handbook. For example the default place to go to get an answer before you lean on a manager for a question. And that can help managers who we all know are under too much pressure not supported well enough anyway, do you not have the tools and the resources and the emotional support to do their roles properly typically anyway. So there's with that's another big topic as well.
That, that's actually a big topic by the way, because like 15 years ago, I had an agency one of the values that we had, might sound arrogant, I don't know, but it was that, that Google first and ask second. So just don't bother me with small, undetailed questions. Go to Google, ask. And then if you cannot find the answer on your own proactively, then you can ask the seniors and the managers to solve your problem. Is the same with this. That's why you are doing the manuals and the handbooks openly because it saves time for the manager. New applicant is Googling the handbook, actually.
I was let's say brought up when I moved into the working world with exactly the same answer from my manager, whenever I forgot to Google something first and asked him, he'd say, Google it. And he wouldn't look at me. He just say, Google it. And it was all very friendly and tongue in cheek. And I think, ah, yeah, I, why am I even asking you like, okay, I'll Google it, but it's I agree with that. I do agree with the idea that it builds a level of initiative in someone to, if you're going to ingrain that habit of saying, okay, go and find out first. It's that whole like coaching versus management argument as well like you can encourage people to go and find out and learn and push them to get the answer first without being spoon fed that answer all the time. I think it's important and I think it's powerful and it helps people.
It's simple. You are working on a project and you have a problem. I know that you're working on a project with a company and whatever, but it's your problem. If you cannot find the answer, then it's our problem. Yeah. And then we can help. But yeah. Yeah. It's like being responsible and have some ownership on your stuff.
And again, it depends on the setup of your company, but this is why this is so much more important in if you're remote or asynchronous, those people you're asking questions of may not be online at the same time as you. So you can't be affording to waste time asking them a question and waiting two hours to get a response. You need to be able to go somewhere and get that answer straight away. And that's where if you're a company that is remote or asynchronous, but you don't have that level of transparency and documentation, you're going to be in real trouble. And that's, I don't see many companies who fall into that honestly, most companies who are open source or in that mold tend to be by nature, very transparent and embrace that.
Yes. One other issue. And I think we need to talk about that as a last topic of today's. So most of the like open companies or transparent companies, and I'm sure that that the companies that are participating within your cohort or the companies that you're working with also the companies that I'm working with also the companies that everyone is seeing as open, they are usually I don't know the exact numbers for like the companies that we already mentioned, like buffer and gitlab, but it's like around 50 to 100 people, give or take. We can call it scale ups or starters, whatever, but it's in terms of size, it's like a small to medium sized business. Doing transparent operations with that size I think it's doable. How can we level up if you are in a if i'm vodafone uk hq? How would I do that? I have an answer for that, but I would love to hear what's yours.
Yeah, and on a personal note, i'll try and answer but My comfort zone my world for the last 12 years has been those companies that are 50 to a hundred people typically I've always worked with startups, scale ups. I've never really been in that corporate world or gone near it, if I'm honest. So if I were to be thrown into a company like that right now and said, fix this now. I'd have some ideas and gut feels as to what I try and do and where I go, but there'd be a lot of work to unravel. It's hard. It ultimately, I think, still starts at the top. Where the top is in a Vodafone is much harder to find, of course. And those leaders in a Vodafone are less present most of the Vodafone employees probably don't know who the leader is and what they look like, never heard from them, never engaged with them other than maybe like a quarterly newsletter that gets emailed to them or something like that. So it's very hard to role model in that type of business properly. Versus 50 person business, but there's something there that needs to be done at that top but also within your immediate bubble within a Vodafone trying to silo off a little bit more to understand who, not who's my CEO, but who's my immediate manager and how can they start role modeling. So I think there's some work to be done at a managerial level, maybe in these bigger companies to empower managers to become those leaders that are seen, that are present, that can role model in the right way. And be transparent across the board in the same ways, there's probably a tooling element that you look at as well. I don't want to lean too heavily on tools. I think people at times rely on tools too much and you lose that element too. So don't just throw tools at it to fix a problem, but there is an element there operationally of having the right tools in place with regards to communication and so on and so forth. And trying to look at how you can motivate change from a bottom up perspective as well. And can you find enough people at a team level to start finding their own way of transparency? Even if they're not controlling things like funding and finances and how you share certain things about the business, are there things at a team level that you can do to create openness and transparency? So we're seeing a lot of companies embrace things like team like user manuals and readmes for individuals to understand how I work with each other. What's my manager like? You can still have these within companies like Vodafone that maybe won't spread across the entire business, but at a smaller level will, will help. And if those things spread, that can help drive some change within a business. I also, there is one thing I would say about larger companies where they maybe tend to have a little bit more structure and transparency, ironically, is around salaries. So yes, big companies will always have some secrecy around salaries, but they tend to have more legal obligations around how they report their finances, their salaries, their gender pay gaps, that tends to hold them a little bit more accountable to what that looks like. They tend to be a little bit more organized because they've got the structures in place and bigger teams of people to organize those things. So you will often find that. Some of the big corporates are salary transparent, at least when they advertise to some degree. And there's a company in Europe called CISAR who have been around for 20 odd years and they do pay transparency via their platform. They're all big corporate companies. So this has been going on a long time. And that can be done, but I think the culture, the communication piece is probably where big companies get it wrong.
I think it's interesting to, I agree by the way, everything you said, I think it's interesting to see that The startup companies are like smaller like these growing companies, they are not really not that afraid of sharing how they work, but they are afraid of sharing their numbers. And on the big side, like enterprises, especially public companies, by the way they are obliged to share the numbers. But they are so afraid to share how they operate. But I do agree that it's because of the silos and it has to be grassroots. So even though you're a, I don't know, 50 to 100 people startup company or scale up company, that's about the size of the, I don't know we mentioned Vodafone, that's about the size of an enterprise marketing team in house.
Yeah.
At the HQ. And if you can work with that and make that team only the team a little bit more transparent because ultimately when you recruit for that company, you're not really recruiting for Vodafone, you're recruiting for the Vodafone marketing team. You will never have any work done with the, I don't know, logistics or whatever you are working at the marketing team and that's it. And if they are working transparently or at least a little bit more transparent it's easier to recruit for that too. So I think this whole agenda has some things to do in the enterprise level as well.
I think to touch back on the employer brand piece where I see a big difference, isn't how companies hire and attract people, smaller companies always have a little bit more character, personality, freedom. With what they've got on their careers pages, they poke a bit of fun at themselves. They do silly things, but the personality comes through and they're very bold and transparent typically. And then you hit this size where you look at a corporate company's careers page and it's just cookie cutter. You can, before you open your eyes there's going to be a video on there that doesn't really tell you anything, but it's got big, powerful, emotive music on it. People doing stuff they probably got a couple of values posted, but nothing deeper than that. And they've just got lots of paragraphs of texts that really love buzzwords that end up being pong table. It creates problems because you look at that and you're like, I have no idea where this company is going to be good for me or not. And they're hiring. They're not hiring the right people who are going to be aligned to their culture. So if you can become radically transparent as a large corporate business and how you hire people that will fix automatically fix a lot of the issues you're having from a cultural alignment perspective. It won't fix all your problems, but you can double down on your lens on how you hire and what your careers page looks like, your job descriptions. Be more honest and understand your company at sub cultural level, team by team. Like you pointed out, you're not hiring against Vodafone's values. That's pointless. If there's any, but yeah, understand what the marketing team's values are, what their team culture is and hire against that. And that's what companies don't tend to do arguably.
Yeah, totally. Oh, that was a nice chat. Thank you for your time.
Thank you. Thank you. Always good fun.
Thank you for your time. So you mentioned a lot of stuff about the cohorts and cohort, this cohort, that. How does it work and how people can find you if they want to join a cohort?
Sure. So high level OpenOrg is an accrediter so we provide. Company level accreditation for companies. But we also provide personal accreditation to people and talent leaders. These are the individuals who ultimately will be driving change within their businesses and they are the ones who will start and spark and ignite that change. So 90 percent of the people who we work with actually will be the people and talent leaders themselves going for some form of personal accreditation. Whether their company is getting accredited or not. So we run these typically as cohorts we run them every other month and there's small intimate cohorts of probably 10 to 15 people leaders from very similar companies. We haven't had a Vodafone on that yet as an example. So they tend to be small tech startup scale up type companies who have small lean solo people, talent teams, all having similar challenges and headaches. So join a cohort, four week cohort is fully remote, fully async. Not fully async. That's a complete lie. We have some synchronous calls, group calls and round tables and fires. Yeah, probably 50 to 60 percent I think I would say with a heap of self led learning and reading and behind the scenes as well. But the ultimate aim is we've got a framework at OpenOrg that we work against. It assesses companies against 30 plus areas of their business and how transparent they are. So we teach that framework to those people leaders, help them understand which areas of their business they can be more transparent in. They identify and build out many projects that they can work on and action within their business and execute against that. So it's a very practical way of making your business more transparent whilst understanding how you can take on a more transparent mindset as a people and talent leader as well. But also becoming part of a community of like minded people and talent leaders believe in something a bit more progressive from a future work point of view. So yeah, we've got the next one in November we were running two in parallel, one in us time zones and one in a European time zones. Space is currently left on both. By the time this gets released we might be filled up, but we'll probably be running another one in January time as well. Anyone interested, obviously can reach out to us. I live and breathe on LinkedIn mostly. So just type in Adam Horne, OpenOrg on LinkedIn, and you'll find me check out openorg. fyi. And you'll find our site with a heap of information on there as well. That's probably two of your best bets to find us. Or you can obviously contact my co founder John Faulkner, Will Cox as well.
Nice. Thank you very much. All of these links will be linked in the show notes on the episode post later on the show. Again, Adam. Thank you.
Thank you.
I always love to talk with like minded people. Thank you for your time. It's a great chat.
Speak soon.
