How software firm uses clear communication to become purpose-driven

Listen to Commercial Director and co-owner Jesper Westfall talk about the collaboration with Feedwork.

About the collaboration

Acies is a company in Silkeborg, Denmark, that has been supplying software to kitchen and window manufacturers since 1978. Acies has a purpose-driven organization, which means that employees organize themselves, coordinate their work and make decisions without middle managers. This requires open and active communication on many topics in order to ensure well-being and good job performance.

To strengthen communication and procedures around self-management, we partnered with Acies, which was initially built around a 5-month program:
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• Interviews with employees and management
  To gain insight into the challenges and opportunities that the organization's
  members experience in everyday life
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• 4 themed workshops for all employees
  This included education and training in various disciplines such as feedback,
  coaching, decision-making and psychological safety
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• Ongoing trials/experiments
  At each workshop, experiments are set up in the different teams
  which aimed to create experiences with new ways of working together
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• Monthly steering committee meetings
  The project steering committee meets to brainstorm, share insights, hypothesize
  and adjust the direction of the process

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About the benefits

As Jesper explains in the video above, they have become more courageous in their communication and feedback to each other. They also feel that they have found new ways of running internal processes by succeeding with their experiments.

The collaboration has been extended as Acies wants further support in implementing new decision-making models, meeting structures and improving collaboration.
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Video transcription

The collaboration has given us a more open communication in our company. We can feel this in our everyday life.
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My name is Jesper Westfall and I am the Commercial Director at Acies in Silkeborg.
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We have what we call a purpose-driven organization. And a purpose-driven organization is an organization with minimal hierarchy.

This means that we have no middle managers in our company, even though we have about 30 employees. We have a group of really talented and competent colleagues.
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But a prerequisite for making such an organization work is that people can communicate with each other.

That's why we chose to get involved with Feedwork, because one of the things in communication that we experienced challenges with was sharing feedback with each other and being receptive to feedback.

In the process of tailoring this process for us, I know that Morten went on some walks with several of our colleagues to get a good understanding of our organization. I don't feel that we are being forced into a structure or a process for how to do these things, but rather that our way of being and the issues we have in our daily work are being taken into account.

Everyone wants to communicate better, more openly, but with the processes and structures we have gained through Feedwork, it has become much more concrete how we can do it.
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Another thing the collaboration has given us, both as management in the company and also our employees, is more courage to be open with each other.

We all believe that we can improve if we get good, constructive feedback, and we have become more courageous in giving it.

We have chosen to extend our collaboration with Feedwork, because we can see that in addition to giving feedback to each other, there are also some structures around how we hold meetings, make decisions, manifest decisions in such a purpose-driven organization.

It is important to get some good structures around it, and we believe that Feedwork can help us do that.