BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of The Bottom Line podcast. It has extra content we couldn't squeeze into the radio version. Now you go to work, you love your job, but you hate your boss. What do they even do all day other than stand around interfering? Well...
Numerous companies have come to that view in a way and are trying to strip away layers of middle management. The word to describe this is unbossing. Meta, Amazon, Citigroup, to name a few, are... trying it, flattening the hierarchy. And you know that while growth and productivity are much talked about, is it possible that we can strip out middle managers, we can cut costs and we can let self-managing teams get on with the job? Well, what is an unbossed...
company like? And is it worth becoming one? I have three guests with experience of setting up or working in the managerless businesses, or not managerless, but reduced manager businesses with varying degrees of... success. Let's start with Chris May. Now, he's the founder of Mayden. It's a company based in Bath. It makes software systems for the NHS. Chris, tell us about how you do it, what you do.
that makes Maiden, if you like, a flat hierarchy company. Okay. The way I always like to start this is if you go to any business conference and you ask the audience, how many of you manage other people? Almost everyone will put their hands up. If you then ask them how many of you need to be managed by someone else, virtually nobody will put their hands up. And you can see the virtual hierarchy just collapsing like houses of cards at that point.
And it's really by kind of asking that question, it takes you on a journey. So we started our journey just over 10 years ago, where we basically took out all of the managers and formed self-managing teams. And it's been a journey since then. It's not really... We haven't reached a destination. We are still on that journey. And although we did write a book about where we were at last year. This is made without managed. It is, yeah. So we published that.
We make it absolutely clear. It's just a stake in the ground of where we got to, but it's an ever-evolving process because effectively what we've created is a biological, organic organisation. Okay. Tell us about the company. I mean, just give us a picture of it. Is it people coming into an office? Is it spread out?
How many of you are there? Yeah, so mainly we're 150 people, mainly based in Bath. We do have a few people who are remote and we're a health tech company and we work mainly in mental health for the NHS. So we provide tech for... So what are your staff doing? They're coding? So we have about 40, 50 software developers and then all the other functions, finance, marketing, you know, HR. Now you're Chris May, the company's Mayden. Yeah.
Did it ever have layers of management? Or did you create it in this spirit when you created it? I mean, when I started out on my own and added people literally incrementally, and all startups don't think about hierarchies and structures. So initially, just everybody mucks in. But yeah, we went the traditional route and we did introduce managers as we grew up.
And so we were founded in 2000 and we really started on this journey properly about 2013. So we ran 13 years in a traditional way. And you have no regrets. That's why you wrote the book about it. I have no regrets at all. No. What's impossible to say is would we have achieved what we've achieved if we'd had a hierarchy and maintained that or would we have we done better? It's actually impossible. Yeah, because you didn't. It's counterfactual. You only get one observation.
Exactly. The two different scenarios. All right, thanks. Let's go to my next guest, Hazel Brown, who's the chief executive of Cornerstone. Now, Cornerstone provides social care to people across Scotland. 2,000 employees, I think, Hazel. So it's a big operation.
Tell us what Cornerstone's journey has been, from managers to fewer managers to maybe a few more. Yeah, we were looking at, I mean, you see everything in the news just now about the crisis in social care, and that's nothing new, actually. There's been huge problems in social care.
how it's delivered, how it's commissioned, how people who work in it feel valued or not. For a long time, it's just got particularly acute. And so back in 2017, I was with the organisation. I wasn't the chief exec at that time. We decided that we needed to do something radically different.
terms of how we delivered the care. And after doing a lot of research, we actually fell upon this Dutch model called Burtsoig, where they provide care and health care through a series of self-managed teams. And we thought, ha ha, this is the answer.
upskill the staff, you pay them more, you strip out your layers of managers and, you know, it's all happy and everyone can have a hug and everything works really well. So that's 2017-ish. You start on that journey. And you've mentioned this Dutch... company which seems to have inspired a lot of the thinking in this area don't tell us too much about that because i think we should probably hear more about it later but you started on the journey how did it work
Well, we're not doing it anymore. That's how it works. I would say it's not actually, I'm not actually against the principles of self-management and self-managing teams. There's a lot in there we learned about change management and how we did that. We're a very big organisation to try to introduce this really.
big change but I think the biggest lesson we've learnt from it and we paused it and then we reviewed it we reviewed it across the organisation you know getting a lot of feedback from all our colleagues about how they'd found the experience and things like that and unanimously people did not want to do it
anymore but the key thing that they did really get out of it the most important thing is I think we focusing far too much on structure what they got out of it is it in terms of feeling valued and a coaching and mentoring culture so I think we got really kind of caught up
in looking at the structure and what the self-managing teams look like. But actually we should have been focusing on the culture of the organisation. So it's good leadership and bad leadership, isn't there? So that's something, I guess one of the main things we kept from that strategy is that...
We focus on that. So we don't have traditional command and control. We do have a management structure, but we focus on all our managers and leaders being trained as coaches and mentors. And that seems to have a really positive effect in terms of staff satisfaction and turnover. of sickness and we're actually doing compared with other organizations in the sector we're actually doing quite quite well so
Like I say, not against it per se, but there's something about a very heavy regulated industry as well that made it very difficult to make it work. But I just want to be clear, you basically have not gone back to where you were in 2015, 2016. You have gone through... through the the the unbossed model to something a little bit different to what you had before yes yeah but not as radically different as our original strategy envisaged yeah
All right, let's introduce our third and final guest. Luke Kite is the operations director of Redico. It's a digital agency specialising in search engine optimisation, helps companies maximise their online traffic. OK, Luke. What has Redico been doing?
Yeah, so Redico, similar story really to Hazel. So we started in a very hierarchical model, founded in 2012, and we got to around 2017 and a similar approach where we started to identify other companies and different ways of working that we wanted potential.
look at and what inspired us and what we did was in 2017 2018 created a culture manifesto which identified these core areas of the business that wanted to change to give people more accountability and responsibility and autonomy in how they work today
today and so it wasn't just necessarily debossing but introducing the opportunity to set your own objectives to take unlimited annual leave every time you're sick to be paid for that rather than a capped limit to essentially restructure the business and focus around everyone having complete
control in how they work, when they work, and what they need, the tools they need to be able to deliver that. Empowering employees. Essentially, yes. Just tell us a bit about the company, how many you have, what you're up to, what you do. Yeah, so smaller than these other two companies, so around 40 people. based in the uk and then we've got around sort of 60 people based worldwide as well okay and how has it worked
Well, so the initial Culture Manifesto worked really well. So we'd always been at a great place to work, but we'd always focused on the wrong thing. So we started with beer fridges and nights out and annual retreats across Europe to various destinations.
But what we were missing was that element of giving people that full accountability. So we started rolling out changes and we had some really good early success. So revenue continued to increase, profits continued to increase. We started to improve sort of team retention and team NPS results. got to i think it's around 20 21 22 and
started to realise that some of the manager elements that we had stripped away, we kind of needed to bring back in because there was some discontent within the team. There was a lack of, I suppose, clear accountability and clarity in terms of who was doing what and who was responsible for driving.
and driving areas of the business forward. And it was people within the team coming to us and saying they needed clearer hierarchy. They needed to know who was in charge and who was doing what. So it was actually, it wasn't the boss class who was saying we need to have our power back. It's like the...
below the boss class who are saying we need some bosses here to tell us what we're meant to be doing. Absolutely. And I was saying to Chris earlier that someone actually left the business a couple of years ago and... started their own company and said they used the Redico handbook to inspire them in their policies. But one of the things they will never do is implement the managerless sort of company. Everything else they love and they utilise. OK, well, we've heard three brief experiences here.
Chris, it's almost 2-1 against in a way, isn't it? I was going to say, I've been set up here, haven't I? No, we hadn't. But look, you must know about the Burtzorg Dutch company because everybody talks about this in this area, flat hierarchy. Chris, tell us a bit about it. what experience it offers? Basically it's a district nursing service and it has tens of thousands of employees so it's not as if...
Size really is an indicator of whether this works or not. And they've been working like this for ages. I think one of the big differences is that each of the cells, if you like, of district nursing around Holland can work independently of all of the others. If you're working in an organisation that's a similar size where everybody is part of one big machine rather than lots of little machines, then I guess it's much more difficult. It's a federation in a way. Exactly. So we're 150 now, you know.
if we were the size of Hazel's organisation, I'm not sure whether wheels would fall off at all, but we're at that kind of crunch point. Yeah, Hazel, have you thought about why it worked at Burtzorg, which is not so different to your company, really?
couple of things i think were key differences and one is actually they started with four people they started with this model with four people and grew it from there so actually to then implement for other organizations to implement change is always more difficult more challenging
So they had an advantage there. And I also think, and there's something about the workforce I work with, that my workforce were further away from self-managing. And that's not a criticism or patronising my workforce. I'm saying they were very heavily regulated, never encouraged.
think for themselves, follow the policy, follow the risk assessment. So they were a long way from that, whereas the Burtstag model are qualified nurses who are used to kind of a level of self-autonomy. So I think the key thing is that they probably started like that, just with four people and grew.
rather than trying to implement it as a wholesale change. So it's middle managers that are going. I mean, Chris, talk to me about what middle managers do. It's just a really interesting function. We talk about that. you know, middle managers? I mean, they basically make up the hierarchy. So you have the directors at the top and then you have all the middle managers and you have the people who actually do the work.
and see the problems on the front line. And by stripping out the middle managers, what we've done, then essentially there's not so much of a disconnect between the directors and the people who are on the front line. You take the NHS as a great example. It's a massive hierarchy.
one and a half million people employed. And there are so many layers of management between there. And it's impossible for people at the top of the NHS to really understand what it's like on the front line. But it's really interesting you say that, because actually I was looking at the NHS. and thinking about unbossing. 2009, the NHS had 39,000 people classed as managers, 39,000. Four years later, 28,000 managers. So it's lost a quarter of its managers.
in the course of four years, I think a lot of people look at the NHS and think, I know we love to berate the managers and the bureaucracy and the paper pushers, but actually maybe the organisation needs more management, not less management.
Because you can get a lot more out of the people if someone's thinking about what they're doing, opposed to them just thinking about it. Yeah, I guess it depends what they've replaced those managers with. I worked in the NHS for quite a while before starting Maiden. Quite often they would have these cycles of getting rid of managers, but they all get replaced with consultants. So you then have people who are not part of the organisation. Which is worse.
But for me, I would say, I mean, poor middle managers get a terrible name. We've all, you know, climbed our way up that greasy pool of management, haven't we? And it's a really hard place to be the middle manager. But for us, the key thing that we missed from that...
is about the quality oversight, which is really important. It's important in every industry, I'm sure. But in terms of delivering quality care, to not have that oversight and supervision of the quality of care that's been delivered, it was really fundamental. And when we were talking about you,
about reviewing it and people that it was the staff that wanted the managers back when we did our review it was also the staff that wanted the manager they wanted a go-to person so when things go wrong who's the go-to person not to blame but to sort it out uh but for us you know if you
move all those middle managers and again i think it probably depends on the sector and things like that but the quality for us was the thing that we felt did suffer because we lost that oversight yeah i mean let's talk about middle managers I mean, we're talking about middle managers here. No one's really proposing to get rid of chief executives and have a proper, proper anarchic communist kind of company. But Chris, you at Maiden, you don't have middle managers as such.
But you do have coaches, right? I do. So everybody has the go-to person. Yeah. So just as Hazel mentioned, we've replaced managers with coaches and mentors. So everyone has the support they want. Not everyone's taken a coach. It's not compulsory. And they are the people they go to if they want to kind of get advice on how to solve a problem. So we're encouraging people.
to solve their own problems. But does that mean you haven't really saved much money by getting rid of the middle managers? Oh no, the coaches all have other jobs as well, so they do coaching as kind of a part-time thing. Yeah, so I come into work...
I just know what I'm meant to be doing. The coach tells me what I'm doing. No, the coach doesn't know. Well, the way we work. So one of the reasons why I think we've been successful, particularly at Maiden, is because we combined this model of flat structure with agile working. So the way that it works is generally we work in two-week sprints. So at the beginning of the two weeks...
a team will pick from a to-do list all of the tasks that they think they can complete in two weeks. So there is somebody telling the team this is the to-do list? No, there's a team that... is responsible for putting the to-do list together, but the team decide for themselves which tasks they're going to take off that list.
and complete in two weeks. But that's crackers. I mean, what if there's something that needs to be done and they pick all the other things on the to-do list? The list is prioritised. So, yeah, they won't go to the bottom of the list. It is prioritised. So, yes. They have choice in the sense that they plan their own sprints, basically. They're not planned for them. Luke, how did it work at Redico when it wasn't working, so to speak? Talk me through in detail the problems that you encountered.
One of the biggest problems we faced was that directors had to get more involved in decision making, which ultimately slowed things down even further because you've got the managing director, the previous operations director, having to get more and more involved in just day-to-day current affairs of the business. department and team level that they couldn't focus on the bigger picture because
Ultimately, if everyone's responsible for driving a department forward, then no one is. And that's one of the biggest things we've faced. So, sorry, this is basically people much more senior were doing middle management jobs. Yeah, pretty much, yeah, because there was no go-to person to make...
those decisions and move things forward. So they would go into, I suppose, the upper echelons of management and trying to bring those people into decision-making, which just slowed it down even further. And that's one of the interesting things that I'd like to know from Chris as well, is that there are directors at Maiden.
What do they do and how do they get involved in that? So that was one of our problems for sure. Just on that point, and Luke mentioned about clarity before and the lack of clarity. So David Marquette, who was actually the commander of a nuclear submarine, wrote a book called ship around way back.
He determined that the crew just needed competence and clarity in order to be able to manage themselves. So he stripped out a hierarchy from a nuclear submarine and actually turned quite a poor performing team into a really strong performance. performing team.
So we have exactly the same issues. We have a decision-making protocol where anyone can make a decision, but they have to have clarity about what the overall objectives are they're trying to achieve. They have to have the competence to make that decision. They have to consult with people who will be affected by it.
position we have a whole load of things that they're supposed to check but in theory anyone can make a decision yeah we did it just quickly we did a very similar thing where we looked at all the responsibilities that a manager would hold hiring recruitment strategic decision making and sat down with each team and said, who's the best person in this team to take this on in the way of trying to create democracy and distributing those responsibilities among the team? And ultimately...
70 to 80% of those responsibilities end up sitting with the same person. So we almost had a manager in that team without calling them a manager. And then everyone would then look at that person as...
almost their line manager, but we pretended they weren't a manager. And it just kind of went down that route for a long period. I can believe that. And Chris, isn't that really just telling you that managers are doing something? There is a function that they're fulfilling. And you can pretend you're getting rid of them, but you're...
just reinventing it by other names, be it coach or team, you know, to-do list or compiler and things like that. I'm not against hierarchies or managers. I think when you look at surveys of... people in work, what you find is that loads of people hate their bosses. You mentioned it, I think, in the introduction. I think I saw a survey recently where 20% of people have actually had thoughts about killing their boss. So, you know, there is another side to this.
Yeah, no, no, that is absolutely... Hazel, what did you do? You took a company where you had supervisors and managers and you said, let's move to a flat hierarchy. What did you do? Did you just lay off those people? How did that work? No, I mean, originally, like I say, I was part of the management team then, but I wasn't the CEO. The CEO was all for just...
Taking them all out, which just filled me with absolute horror as I was basically the director of Ops at that time. So, no, we tried to do it gradually where teens would come together and would volunteer to be part of this rolling programme of developing. And then, you know.
as they came together as a self-managing team, then they would have no need for a manager. But what we did, is what the other panels are saying, is we found that they were still looking for that go-to person. So we introduced mentors. So we were like managers by any other name.
But all this conversation, it takes me back to what I said at the beginning. There's this focus on structure all the time, but it's the culture that's important. It's the culture of leadership and managing and how people work together is more important than the structure. So, yeah, we found we weren't making any mistakes.
What do you mean when you say culture? Just out of interest, give me an example of what a cultural change is that isn't a kind of rebadging of a job title. Oh, that's really hard, isn't it? Because that's really... hard to verbalize you kind of grab it out of the ether about why have you got a good culture and what makes a good culture but it is about people feeling valued and people feeling listened to and people feeling respected and people understanding their roles uh you know
really knowing the framework for their roles and what's expected of them and actually then give them the right amount of praise and recognition. But valuing and listening to your colleagues is probably one of the most important things. Right. So there are ways of bossing people. Collaborative. Leading, leading. I've heard the word leading. Which involve leading, motivating, encouraging.
and organising and being seen to organise. And there are other ways of bossing that are kind of yapping at them and nagging them and being unpleasant and, you know, at worst, bullying or beyond. So, Chris, what do your staff...
think about your way of doing it, your flat hierarchy? Do they like it? Does everybody like it? So a lot of people join the company because of it. There are lots of our staff who would die in a ditch over it. And actually, if we stripped out our way of... working they would potentially leave but there are people who struggle with certain aspects of it so don't get me wrong there are challenges with this.
The biggest one is progression. So if you don't have a hierarchy and what you realise is, well, there's a number of things. First of all, our closest ancestors are the sort of the chimp world in sort of genetics. Dobos and chimps, I think. And they create hierarchies naturally in their environment. So there's something innate in us that actually is used to building hierarchies.
But, you know, the research now that says we're becoming less chimp and more bee as a species. So we're kind of becoming more community and pastoral focus and we're looking after each other. So, you know, and if that's a direction of travel, then ultimately... all our organisations were moving in that direction.
But we're not there yet. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's unlikely that we're going to change from being closer to the chimp and move towards the bee in the course of sort of 100 years of corporate life. But it is interesting that we do seem to evolve into. hierarchical structures. But let's think about it from the employee perspective, because it's really interesting that you said the employees didn't like it. Was part of that the career progression point? Because actually I...
If I'm ambitious, I might want to be moving up the company. And if there are no rungs on the ladder, that's not really possible. Absolutely. That was definitely one of our challenges that we had. And I was going to say before Chris mentioned it, we have people in the company that are...
Juniors, freshman university, people that are in mid-weight roles or senior roles. So again, that's a natural hierarchy that starts to develop because you've got people that are more senior than others, despite the fact that there wasn't a clear cut manager there.
I think what's really crucial is making sure that there are alternative paths for people depending on what they want to do. If you want to move into a manager role, that's one track you can go down. If you want to just develop your core skills and competencies and you just want to get better at your key job, then that's another route you can go down.
go down as well so i think untying salaries with sort of managerial paths and kind of pushing people down that route will definitely help a lot of businesses going forward i've heard it said that younger employees We keep coming back to sort of the differences between older employees and younger employees on this programme. It's not deliberate, but it drives a lot of changing workplace behaviour. But younger employees...
don't like hierarchy as much as older employees. And they don't want to be the boss. They don't want to be bossed around. They're kind of more comfortable with flat hierarchies. But I'm guessing your staff are quite young, actually, are they? Yeah, anywhere from sort of 20s and 30s.
mainly and we do get a mixed reception from the team in terms of what they do and don't want from their manager and what they want that to look like I think ultimately people just want clear clarity and direction in what they should be doing and again that go-to person that If there is a problem, they know who exactly it is that they can speak to to solve that. And without a managerial structure in place, people just didn't really know what that looked like.
My biggest shock in all of this was the opposite of what you just said, Evan. When we first implemented this, I expected all of the people who had long careers to really struggle with it and that the young people would find it all new and sexy. And it was the opposite happened.
So the people who had lots of jobs and had been through lots of hierarchies and all the politics and, you know, information hiding and et cetera that goes in hierarchical organizations, they found it completely refreshing. It was the young people. and we take on lots of those who really struggled with it at the beginning. And the problem is that...
Our entire education system is built around hierarchy. If you think about it, people do GCSEs and then do A-levels and then they get their degree. They're already on a hierarchy and they expect the rungs of the ladder just to be there. And, you know, in our organisation, the ladder's been taken away.
experience of that hazel i'm just interested in in what the employees think yeah well particularly that accusation of pulling up the ladder behind you that was a really key one you know how would somebody make the leap from being one of these teams to where do you go next you want to be director there's far too huge
a leap there so we did try to focus on you know where we could help people in either kind of management and leadership skills or becoming more of an expert but the point about young people as well today that's another thing it's connected i suppose but looking at our organization now when we look at succession plans and developing our workforce and who's coming up the ranks.
People just don't want to do it. They look at the old middle managers who get such a hard time going, why would I want that? You know, not much more money. You get all this hassle. I'd rather do a side hustle of Deliveroo or something like that because I just don't want that.
And I'm seeing that increasingly with, what are they called now? It's not millennials. I don't know what stage we're on now. Gen Zed, I think you're talking about. Gen Zedders, Gen Zedders. Yeah, they're not interested. You know, I think about, I think of myself when I was that age, I was thinking, oh, exciting. I'll apply for the next promotion and I'll work hard.
No, they don't want it. And yeah, it's quite a problem. But that takes you towards a flatter hierarchy because if no one wants to be the boss, then you better have a flat hierarchy. But of course, they're also wanting to have guidance and they need...
they need a manager as well. Yeah, a flat hierarchy also means that those tasks that are traditionally done by your middle manager are shared amongst that team. So you'll have people say, well, I don't want to do health and safety. I don't want to do personal budgets. I don't want to do the rotas. You know, I just want to...
do my basics of my job and not take on an additional what would have been seen as a management responsibility, albeit that these are shared out amongst the rest of the team. So it doesn't work for them either. But you know, I think you're making me feel like there's an advantage to all of this. which is if you give people responsibility and you tell them you've got to take these decisions, won't most people rise to that? And they will be able to do it.
feel uncomfortable with it, but in a way you only really train employees to be kind of more responsible by giving them responsibility. I mean, who's the boss of your family? You know, who's the boss on your street when someone organises the street party? I mean, work gets done and it gets organised, but you don't need to have bosses. You know, the work needs to be managed, but people don't if they have clarity about what.
what it is they're supposed to be doing frameworks for decision making and responsibility and accountability are really important but it doesn't get away from the fact that some people will just make incredibly stupid decisions which are not good for your business Luke
as well is that hiring people to fit a self-management model is really difficult as well because again everyone looks at um sort of redico or maiden and the culture that's there that you can see on the website and thinks this looks great this is really for me
When they come into that setup and realise exactly what they need to do and how difficult it can be to manage yourself as well, they actually realise, no, this isn't quite what I wanted it to look like. And they then move again to a sort of traditional structure. And we find it really difficult.
to hire people anyway, because we've got a really sort of specialist niche in industry. We're really picky with the candidates we look for. So not only are we looking for a unicorn in their skillset, we're looking for the unicorns that can adopt and manage themselves as well, which ultimately was another downside. to how we worked.
Chris? I mean, Luke's quite right. One of the first things you have to learn when you go down this route is recruitment and your recruitment processes need to be completely different. So we used to recruit on basic skills and experience initially, and then we moved to aptitude and attitude.
and we did better and when we actually adopted this way of working we actually got an employment psychologist in and she basically looked at all our interview questions and said Well, you're trying to recruit people, you know, who will fit in with the company.
What you should be doing is asking questions which will screen out those people who won't fit in with the company. So we actually change all of our questions in order to find people that just wouldn't fit with the culture. And there are people who won't fit. So typically organisations have gone down this route. have lost around 20% of their staff during the transition. Oh, what? Take me through this. What happened? So...
There are some famous examples, mainly American, of companies that have gone down this route. I think the worst case, Basecamp is one in the software world, which is quite big. I think they lost 30-odd percent of their staff, who just didn't think that the model would work for them. get replaced with people for whom the model would work with. But now you see you're really, I think, taking this to where it logically ends, which is horses for courses. There are some organisations where...
It's not going to work because it doesn't suit the employees. It doesn't fit the culture. It perhaps doesn't fit the task where you're going to need... quality management. I don't know, I always come to sort of building a nuclear power station. You don't want it to be a bit of a free-for-all and people sitting and come by hour in the evening. You do want somebody to make sure.
that the job is being done and being done properly and who can shout at you if a mistake has been carelessly made. But there may be other companies where it can be. I would have thought, though, Redico would be where it would work. You're a kind of... hip company or in a kind of modern modern sector Luke so you're in a way a slightly disappointing one but is it horses for courses absolutely and I'm disappointed as well I mean I was fully embraced in the whole self-management approach
I love the idea of it. I love the idea of being unique and different and pushing boundaries and almost going down a... a new path and giving people that full autonomy. But ultimately, you can give people autonomy, you can give them responsibility, you can give them clear guidelines and approach and how they should work, but still have a level of hierarchy in place to help manage that and to give people clear, I suppose, clear support. Clear networks. Have you kept the people take as much...
vacation leave as they want, holiday leave. Yeah, so even to the point that managers don't approve holiday, so people still have full autonomy over how, when, where they work, the hours they work, the days they work, everything like that. It's just that the core decision making and strategic thinking and... pushing the company forward is retained in one role. How's that going though, the holiday thing? I mean, how much holiday do you take a year?
Me personally, around 30 days, so not too much more than the national average. It varies among people. You have people that take a bit less than average, people that take more. In general, though, it's not abused. I think people ultimately...
trust their teams and themselves to work in a way that's right for them. And when it is abused, what happens? A manager does have to step in and say, I think you're just a bit overdoing it. We actually do expect you to do some work as well. To be honest, we haven't really had any situations where...
Anyone that's had that situation has moved on for the company more recently. But not because of that, but because ultimately their widest dynamic and what they were giving to the team wasn't quite right. They didn't fit. Hazel, how do you see it evolving at Cornerstone? Are you fairly comfortable with it? where you've arrived at now.
Yeah, well, you'd asked me a question before about the culture, and that's really important for us. An example there, when you asked about if somebody abuses their system of how much annual leave they take, in a traditional organisation, the process and the culture would be, right, we will punish everybody by...
taking away this lovely policy, you know, and changing it and monitoring it. But in fact, actually, a good culture says, I will address this with this individual and we won't have a knock-on effect on everybody else. So for us, I know I'm sounding like, you know, a broken record here, but it is about the culture.
It's really tough. In social care just now, it's really tough to recruit people to it. So what we try to do, make ourselves stand out, is make it a really great work culture and environment where people feel valued and developed and invested in, even if we competently invest financially.
like the way it's evolved over time. If you'd asked me to go back to the point at which we stopped the last strategy and say what I thought it might look like now, I think it probably looks quite different actually. But keeping that culture, it's quite a fragile thing. You need to be really aware of it.
a lot of work around it. It doesn't just happen on its own. It doesn't just keep going on its own. So we work really hard at that. Did you want to come in, Chris? You mentioned about managers shouting at other people before and I kind of thought the word that's not been mentioned in this talk...
so far is the word trust and that's key to our culture so you know there's lots of words we can use but I think trust is absolutely you know no but trust is great and everybody believes in trusting others until someone is untrustworthy and then you've got a problem to deal with It's just useful to know what you're going to do to the untrustworthy person before...
they're confronted with the opportunity to be untrustworthy. The way we normally react to that, though, is create rules that apply to everybody. And Hazel's quite right. What you need to do is address it to the individual who actually has kind of gone off-piste, not make 100%. percent of your employees follow a set of rules because actually you've got one bad apple.
Absolutely. That's a really good point. And I think it's building the policies and the framework of the business around the 90%, the 95% that will treat it in the right way with respect and do the right thing, not the 5% that won't. And again, on both points, just making sure that you deal with those isolated instances on their own.
own rather than bringing the whole team down because of it okay well look this is absolutely fascinating discussion and uh if you are a boss and you've been listening to this with horror i hope you've had food for thought and and good luck in your important role, but let us leave it there. Thank you to my guests, Chris May of Maiden, Hazel Brown from Cornerstone and Luke Kite from Reddico. Thanks for listening. The podcast was produced by Nick Holland and Bob Howard. It was presented by me.
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