Getting Started

You are officially getting started on the journey to self-management! Before beginning to implement new ways of working, there's a lot to consider!

Dealing with change always carries with it many challenges – even when your new work practices and software/tools offer great potential to increase productivity and unleash new levels of innovation. Most transformations can fail because of a lack of strategic focus and vision.

Before your team begins any transformation process, answer these questions and refer back to them to realise success:

• Why are you making this change?
• What are you asking your team to do and commit to?
• What are the expected outcomes?

Most organisation are traditionally designed and focused on hierarchical structures, just like in the past. These often hinder the flexibility and speed required to adapt to change and decrease employee engagement.

The Traditional Hierarchical Organisation has shown some drawbacks:

• Slow to cope with external/internal changes
• Too many structural layers slow down and reduce teams' productivity
• Authority is maintained centrally, reducing the effectiveness of teams
• Problems take too long to solve and keep recurring, wasting time and resources
• Teams are not aligned and purposes are often in conflict
• People feel disengaged leading to poor performance

Because the world today is Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous(«VUCA»), we have to reinvent management, imagine new ways of working and free up leadership. The objective is clear: to become a more efficient, agile and innovative organisation in this complex and uncertain world, and to ensure that employees are fully committed and empowered.
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To achieve this, many players are developing new, more horizontal operating methods that foster direct relationships between employees, provides greater responsibility to autonomous teams and transform the role of the Manager. Now, you might be thinking Holacracy, Sociocracy, Teal and others. How these principles can actually be
applied has yet to be determined. There are no rules, or readymade models and methods. Each organisation is unique.

However, we've found out that most organisation focus on these areas to set things in motion:

• Empower individuals, create small autonomous teams and build trust
• Spread purpose and vision across the organisation. Most people want to contribute to something larger than themselves - something that makes a real difference and adds value to the world.
• Break down silos and share information
• Embrace uncertainty and be the quickest and most productive in trying new things 

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To start moving towards new ways to organise, we recommend creating a Change Management Process. In order to successfully implement a flexible work environment, people need to adapt to the ever-evolving culture.

You can follow these five steps:

1. Experiment, implement test & learn to give employees the opportunity to practice new working methods
2. Create a plan for change.
3. Implement changes.
4. Introduce change into the company culture.
5. Analyse the success or failure resulting form change.

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To survive and thrive in a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous world, businesses must change the way they work. Purpose, Transparency, and Agility are key.

Let's start with presenting what are generally the major setbacks of traditional organisation structure.

• Inability to Adapt: Slow to react to external or internal changes and a feeling of not being able to cope with a quick evolving environment.
• Long Decision Making: Too many structural layers slowing down decisions and communication.
• Lack of Individual Authority: Top down decision. People are not empowered to be autonomous.
• Communication Problems: Teams and people work in silos. Data isn't accessible to everyone to make informed decisions and streamline processes.
• Less happiness: People are not included in the purpose of the organisation and don’t feel they’re part of it, making it difficult to retain talents.
  

Holaspirit was purposely created to address these problems. It started as an internal tool growing from these same frustrations. In 2016, we released Holaspirit to the public with the goal of supporting a new approach to management and help build better workplaces.

Mission : Accelerate the transition to decentralised work and unleash the full potential of organisation

We believe there is a better way to organise and make organisation more efficient. Over the past decades, many companies have been working on alternative approaches. You might be thinking about Holacracy©, Sociocracy, Agile, Teal, Lean. as a great source of inspiration to change your ways of working. Throughout the years, we found out that the 'one size fits all" approach doesn't apply when it comes to new ways of work. That's we designed Holaspirit to provide extreme flexibility to  easily tweak the tool to fit your unique way of working and support whatever model you may have.

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Watch this quick video to learn more about Holaspirit story:

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Here's what you can use Holaspirit for:

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MAP: How you organise and team

You can use Holaspirit to visualise, optimise and understand your company structure in a chart.
You’ll have a common place to reference your organisation in roles and circles that have clear purpose and explicit accountabilities. You’ll get insights on how your structure learns and changes over time.

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STRATEGY: How you plan and prioritize

Set objectives to guide the work and align teams with OKR (Objective and Key Results).

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MEETINGS: How you convene and coordinate

With Holaspirit, you can set clear purposes and agendas for team meetings. Make your meetings count with an agenda builder, minutes reports, and assign tasks based on meeting outcomes.

DECISION: How do you decide? Who participates in decisions?

Use Holaspirit to capture your tensions, and turn them into better decisions, faster. 

Holaspirit guides teams through a proven process that is inclusive, safe and fast as it keeps things moving asynchronously. We rely on a consent based decision approach to help you build a culture of experimentation and innovation.

INFORMATION: How you share and use information

Keep reference materials in one place, describe the organisation operating system (policies, working agreements) using Holaspirit as your internal wiki and resources center. Information is shared freely across teams to allow for better collaboration.

COLLABORATION: How you divide and do the work

Track and manage projects and actions for team and roles and keep everyone on the same page.
Maintain visibility across all your projects in a flexible Kanban board.

Introduction

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The Holaspirit structure is the heart of the platform, and it provides you with an organized way to break down your organization into self-organized items.

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The Holaspirit Structure is made up of the following:

• General Circle
• Circles
• Roles

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We'll unpack this for you throughout this lesson.

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Pro Tip: When just starting to map your organization, design what your organization is today. Not what you expect it to be!
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What Is the General Circle?

It represents your entire company or organization.

When you first begin your journey with Holaspirit, you'll typically start by updating your organization's general circle.

Add your Company's Purpose (what you want to achieve beyond financial resuls) and foster it to your teams.

A helpful way to think about the General Circle is a container for your business.

 Some roles from other Circles can be represented in the General Circle to report the circle's needs, goals and achievements.

What are Circles?

The first way to break up your organization is through Circles.

In Holaspirit, each team is organized into separate Circles.

Circles help break down your organization into different departments, teams, groups, initiatives, group projects or really anything you want to group together within the General Circle. 

For example:

• Engineering for building a product
• Marketing for content creation and acquisition strategy
• Sales to convert opportunities
• Customer Success for ongoing adoption
• Professional Services to implement with clients  
• Customer Support to field questions and bugs

There are countless ways you can use Circle to manage your work in Holaspirit.

Circles help organize roles and responsibilities.

Each Circle has its own settings and can be shared publicly or privately with other team members in Holaspirit.
A separate Circle per department is a great use case for most companies.
Companies who are frequently collaborating on projects together across multiple departments may want to consider creating a shared Circle for their project work.

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Pro Tips About Circles

Each Circle is completely independent from one another. It means it will have its own meetings, project board...

The data within each Circle is separate and won't interact with other Circles. However, the data will be transparent and accessible unless you change the privacy settings.

All Circles settings enabled by default from Administration will apply to all Circles unless you specify it otherwise.

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What are Roles?

Roles are the building block in the Holaspirit's structure. 

A Role is where accountabilities live. Think of a Role as a guide that contains responsibilities : 

• Of a similar type
• With a similar purpose or goal

Consider creating Roles for every type of work that needs to be done for your company.

Roles are the activities, the things you need to do. 

Roles should be assigned to at least one user.

What are roles made of?

When viewing a role page, information is separated into two columns, left and right and separate tabs.

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Left : roles details - basically, why, what needs to be done.

Right : assignee(s)

Each role contains important characteristics such as:

• A name
• A purpose that clarifies the identity and intention of a role or circle‍
• Domain that represents a distinct area of influence, control and decision making of a specific role (optional)
• Accountabilities which are the responsibilities and ongoing activities of the role or circle
• Policy that specifies how the role is delegating authority and power (optional)
• Attachments, in the tab Documents‍
• Custom Fields‍
• Assignee(s)

(We'll get to the rest later).

Take Aways

• Your General Circle is your Company as a whole
• Your Circles contains your teams
• Your Roles contains accountabilities and activities 
• A user can be assigned to more than one Circle or Role
• A Role can be assigned to one or more users.

Let's put you in complete understanding of who sees what, what permissions they have.

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Basics

They are 4 users type in Holaspirit (Members, Admins, Inactive and Owner).

• Members in your workspace can view and make anything they have access to.
• Admins  can do everything a member can do, plus invite new members, setup the Administration settings or manage subscription.
  
• Inactives are guest users who can view the organization chart and members directory. They cannot create new items in your workspace.
• Owner is the only person who may delete the workspace. Owner can do everything an Admin can do.

Frequently asked questions

• Admins are not granted extra permission to map the organisation. They need to be a circle member if they wish to make something in the circle.
• To edit any items a Circle contains, users need to be a member of the circle.
• To edit a Circle itself, users need to be a member of the circle above.
• Inactive will only be granted view permissions. They are free users.

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As an admin or owner of your Workspace, it's important to familiarize yourself with settings and customization options.

You'll learn how to configure the settings in your workspace to make your organization more productive and efficient in an optimized Holaspirit.

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Administration Settings are accessible to admins or owners of accounts. Members don't have access to change this information.

If you are the person who created the platform, you are considered the owner. Owners can add admins, members, or inactives (guests) to their workspace as needed.

To access your Administrator Settings panel, click on your avatar in the lower-left corner of your Holaspirit.

After you click on Administration, the Administrative Settings panel opens.

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When you're first setting up a workspace, you'll be given several option to:

1. Customize your workspace
2. Manage settings for your circles
3. Add people into your organization

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Let's see how that's done.

Customize your workspace

Color

Change your workspace color with your own branding.

Templates

You can build a library of Role Templates to save time when you use the same role in different circle of your organisation.

When you create from a template, your role can be quickly imported into your organization chart.

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Additionally, you can create meeting structure templates for your team to use.

This will help you run better meeting.

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Custom Fields

Custom fields let you create additional fields to describe a Role/Circle.

Add custom fields  according to your Workspace’s needs.

Ultimately, you may want to create custom fields for the member profile.

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Apps

You can enable or disable Holaspirit Apps depending on the feature your team will use. Start simple and improve usage over time.

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Manage settings for your circles

Circle settings define the overall structure of a team / circle.

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Circle settings can be customized down to the Circle level in Holaspirit, but default for Circle settings can be set in Administration. This means, if you set default circle settings, then every circle by default will inherit setting set from Administration – but you can override this in any circle you want.

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Core Roles

Core roles are automatically created in every circle. They are generally the roles your organisation uses to enable teams.

If you have a common team structure, you may add them as core roles to save time when a new team is created.

Core Roles are linked to the role templates available.

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Pro Tip 🪄: If you’re unsure how you want to start building your organisation, we recommend to have at least a referent/lead role who's mission is to enable the team.  Sure, self-management means new forms of leadership and no management but every team needs some sort of a leader and guidance.

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Links between circles

To make sure information passes across circle, you may want to create ascending/descending link.

Representative / Link roles are represented in the circle and the General Circle and may work, process items in both circles.

It can be interesting to set that up if you want a role able to report in different circles.

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Assignation

Simply decide how people should be assigned to roles. They can join freely or be assigned by a specific role.

You can even have a rotating role and organize election on a recurrent basis.

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Governance settings

Define how members take decisions in the circle. Users can take collaborative decisions about Roles, Circles, Policy, and Election.

If you select Open Mode, all members of a circle can change the structure without prior consent. You can use this option when you're just starting to map the organisation.

If you select Consent Mode, all decisions will be run according to the consent decision making process. This mode is highly recommended if you want to leverage collective intelligence and want to engage people in decisions.

By default, everything is “public” - meaning they're shared with anyone that has access to your workspace (except inactives who do not have access to Projects, Actions, Meetings, OKRs, Inbox, Proposals).

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You may wish to add privacy at the Circle level. Only circle members will be able to view the information contain at this level.

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How to make a Circle private

• Open the Circle  
• Click the 3 dots
• Go to the privacy tab and select the option Yes/No

By default, Admins have access to the local circle settings. You may grant access to any circle member.

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