🖤 Open Works #012 Launching The Open Culture Framework

Greetings Pioneers!

Welcome to the 12th edition of Open Works and the 37 Progressive People People who joined since last time.

If you’re reading this then three things are probably true:

1. You’ve worked with at least one ego-maniac founder in your time.

2. You don’t get why so many companies try and pretend to be something they’re not.

3. You want to build businesses that default to open.

👉️ Quick reminder of what’s in the box?

So this is our fortnightly-ish drop of tips, resources, memes, templates and insights from our small but mighty community of amazing People People trailblazing workplace transparency in the pursuit of a less opaque, less busted world of work.

Ready to dive in?

Let’s go!

🎁 Free shit to make your life easier:

Introducing the 📖 Open Culture Framework.

After months of iterating on this in beta with early adopters and some of the world’s first open orgs we’re excited to open source our accreditation framework.

We hope this makes becoming an open org more accessible and provides clarity on what good looks like.

We’d love to know your thoughts and feedback on this – it’s a community project, hit reply and tell us your thoughts?

And if you want to join companies like Juro, Switchee, Figures, Emerald and Whereby. Here’s the deetz on becoming an accredited open org.

Peace ✌️ 

🎉 Transparency Shoutouts

Buffer were one of the companies who inspired Adam and I to start openorg.fyi, the way they build culture transparently is 🔥, as is how transparent they are about their financials, learns and decision-making. We love this post from CEO Joel Gascoigne. Check it 👇️ 

📖 OpenOrg #Build in Public

We’re preparing for OOF#1: our upcoming fractional cohort right now, super excited for this. We love connecting with small intimate groups of people leaders and can’t wait to kick-off!

In product land, we launched a ton of new features for peoplemetrics.fyi with our 350+ strong beta group and now have 100 people on the waitlist for the product. It’s currently at an 80% discount so if people data and making business cases 10X more powerful is your jam….head to peoplemetrics.fyi to see what all the fuss is about.

Have done a fair bit of user research on pricing and most folks seem to value it in the region of £1.5-3k per year as an influencing, benchmarking and market analysis tool. Some pretty interesting use cases emerging around reputation proof, investor due diligence and project prioritisation too. Need to kinda figure out the core and build that next.

Prior to this, and why i’ve been a bit quiet on Linkedin is….I shipped some rubbish code right at the beginning, forgot about it, then shipped some more bad code and broke everything. This resulted in panic calling 3 engineering friends after many hours of failing on my own. It’s fine now, but much coffee was consumed and i haven’t slept much in the last couple of weeks.

😅 Here’s the 20 second Loom I sent Adam in the early hours…. yes I do sound and look unhinged. FML. 😂 

Other things top of mind: we’re thinking a lot about community right now, we’re looking at deepening our offering here. There’s so many amazing people leaders building open culture, we want to provide a stage for them to inspire the next generation and connection for those looking to learn from their wins and fails. Watch this space.

💡 Tangible Transparency Tip

Introduce founder AMAs into you hiring process (h/t Glenn Martin for this gem)

🖐️ Stop: failing to provide a psychologically safe space for candidates to ask those ‘can i really ask that!?’ type questions.

👉️ Start: inviting anonymous ‘real questions’ and embed that mechanism into the process (sli.do great for this)

Incredible way to build trust from day 1.

📚️ Interesting Internet

Things I find that I like. Hope you like them too:

1. Book: Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais is a fascinating read on org design and culture building.

2. Template: Async Masterclass by Remote’s CEO is 🔥 .

3. Post: Thought this was a pretty interesting take on company values by the browser company.

4. Framework:  Open Decision Making, an approach to arriving at actionable agreements through participatory practices.

5. Product: LetterLoop – private group newsletters for friends, families & teams.

6. Newsletter: Wonderful Brilliant - each month, they share a mix of neuroscience insights on human behaviour, tips for enhancing culture and performance, self-reflection prompts, free resources like workshops and toolkits, and spotlights on interventions for deeper learning.

🦁 Join the Open Culture Revolution

We are continuing our search for more progressive People & Talent folks who want to spark change in their orgs. You know workplace transparency is the future of work but you’re not sure how to get started / operationalise? You’re exactly the person we’re looking for.

Let’s do this thing! :-)

We’re running a bunch of exciting programmes this year, including our signature remote cohorts and bootcamps for People & Talent Folks and our new 8 week programme for fractional People People. 🔥

Hit reply, if you’d like to learn more, or hit the button👇️ 

If you’re curious about what we’re building, have an idea or want to collab then Adam and I would love to chat. Our cal is always open here.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

Adam & John

p.s 👋 Come say hi on Linkedin and if you think a friend might enjoy this then please share it with them.

👉️ Folks can sub here.

🤘 Cheers.