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Once that framing entered the company’s discourse, it may well have shaped the workforce’s own understanding and evaluation of the company’s transparency. And yet it would be wrong to cast the executives’ transparency in cynical terms. By sharing what they do, TechCo executives display considerably more trust in their employees than do executives at most other companies. And, as we just saw, the workforce derives educational and professional value, as well as personal meaning, from that sharing. Executive transparency also undergirds a second form of communicative openness that these employees value.
EMPLOYEES SPEAKING UP Whereas “radical transparency” involves executives sharing information down to employees, the second practice that subverts the conventional hierarchical flow of communication within TechCo is letting employees speak up. In conventional bureaucratic firms, the right to address the entire company rests with senior managers, and employee communication generally follows the formal chain of command.9 At TechCo, by contrast, individuals throughout the firm’s hierarchy are given broad voice rights. They are encouraged to share their own information, ideas, and opinions with executives and the entire organization, and to participate in firmwide conversations on important issues. (As the Mystery Dinner showed, executives’ transparency undergirds this practice by fostering an informed workforce that is capable of, and genuinely interested in, weighing in on such matters.) The wiki serves as the seminal platform for supporting employee voice rights, and one discussion I watched unfold on it illustrates quite well what is unique about the communication it supports and what is unique about communication within TechCo more generally. Jacob, a long-time member of TechCo’s marketing group, sparked discussion on the wiki one day when he asked, “Should TechCo have an org chart?” Despite the company having more than six hundred people at the time, and despite it having conventional job titles (such as CEO, COO,
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vice president, director, and manager), executives had thus far refused to publish an organizational chart. They argued that such formalization was unnecessary—a relic of “old school” bureaucratic corporations—and, furthermore, that it would discourage the sort of free-flowing open communication they wanted to promote. Employees like Jacob disagreed and believed communication in the company was suffering from its lack of an org chart. Since the start of my fieldwork, I had been hearing employees co-opt executives’ language of openness and argue that an org chart would offer greater transparency into the company’s actual structure and greater ease of communication in it. TechCo was growing quickly and, as Jacob explained in his wiki post, “There are a lot of people at TechCo these days (including myself ) who have trouble figuring out who works in which group and what they do.” He asked employees to vote on whether they wanted an org chart and to offer their thoughts in the comments section. Shortly after Jacob’s post went live, individuals from across the company began to chime in. In answer to Jacob’s question, and consistent with what I had been hearing in my interviews, responses of “Yes,” “Yup,” “Yes please,” and “Absolutely” filled the comments thread. Eventually, a more involved conversation got under way. An employee who had joined TechCo three months earlier wrote, “I hate the idea of really publishing out a hierarchy and reporting structure in the company. I think we do SUCH a great job of treating everyone here as equals whose opinions have equal merit, and I think that throwing everyone into a tree structure undermines that somewhat.” In response, a woman who had been working there for ten months wrote that she did not think having an org chart would change the culture of TechCo. “Let’s get real,” she wrote, “There IS a hierarchy, as TechCo’y as we want to be. The assumption that having an org chart changes all that is TechCo seems rather absurd to me. Can we please have one?” A long-time member of the sales team responded, “Amen.” The CTO Anil then joined the conversation and seemed to draw it to a close by conceding, “TechCo does have a structure, so we might as well document it and make it accessible.” But he added:
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Having said that, we should keep in mind that the org structure does not define who you can/should talk to . . . . We can and should break the “chain of command” and talk to whoever we need to in order to move the mission forward. You don’t have to go “up and down the org tree” in order to communicate or work with someone.
In fact, discussions on the wiki every single day demonstrated how people at TechCo broke out of the chain of command to communicate. Jacob had sparked this whole conversation by doing just that in his post, and here are three other illustrative Wiki discussions from my time at TechCo: 1. Heather, a junior member of the marketing team, posted an analysis she had done of recent customer wins and losses versus one of TechCo’s largest competitors. In the following days, individuals from across the organization and up and down the company hierarchy commented on her post, asking follow-up questions, offering their own perspectives and analyses, and discussing steps the company could take to improve TechCo’s win rate. Those who chimed in included TechCo’s CEO Eric, the CTO Anil, sales reps and sales managers, product managers and engineers, colleagues of Heather’s from marketing, as well as her boss and her boss’s boss. Senior sales reps shared their experiences of going head-to-head with this particular competitor in the field, Eric offered his own perspective on how to position TechCo relative to its competitors, and engineers discussed current and future product features being developed to address market demands. By the end of the discussion, folks in marketing had decided to conduct additional customer interviews to collect more information on several of the themes raised by Heather’s initial analysis, and a sales rep had offered to beta test a new product feature with two deals in her pipeline. 2. Glenn, an engineer in TechCo’s user experience group, had done some recent testing of the effectiveness of TechCo’s own website. He had noticed that a particular phrase describing TechCo’s products resonated especially well with customers who viewed the site. He wrote a wiki post in which he acknowledged that product positioning was not his area of expertise but suggested that perhaps this phrase be incorporated more broadly into
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TechCo’s marketing efforts. “At the very least, I think we should test this phrase with our prospects and customers. If we find it resonates, we can push further with it,” he wrote. Employees from both marketing and product development commented on Glenn’s post, as did the head of engineering, the head of marketing, and Anil. There was widespread agreement that having a conversation to clarify the company’s product positioning was important, although a number of commenters believed the specific phrase Glenn proposed was too narrow to describe TechCo’s entire product suite. Staff from marketing, as well as Anil and the marketing group’s head, offered their thoughts on how Glenn’s phrase was “part of the story” but not necessarily the “headline” when it came to positioning TechCo to customers. 3. One morning Anil posted on the wiki that “in keeping with [our] tradition of transparency,” senior executives were willing to disclose their compensation to the workforce. The company intended to go public within the next year or two, and Anil explained that this information would be released “to the world” then anyway. In the meantime, he said, this was just another way to demonstrate the organization’s commitment to transparency. Anil asked employees to vote “yes” or “no” on whether they thought this was a good idea. Within minutes employees began weighing in with comments. “What’s the point of this, really?” someone from sales wrote. Rather than voting yes or no, an employee from the account management team wrote, “There should be a third option for I don’t care.” What the executives earned was “not relevant” to him or his work, he explained. What was relevant, he said, was that executives continued to make good decisions for the company and to share information with the workforce pertaining to those decisions. He praised the company’s regular all-hands meetings as well as executives’ practice of sharing notes from their board meetings and senior leadership meetings on the wiki, and he encouraged executives to keep doing things like that instead. A few hours in, an engineer joined the thread to acknowledge that he was torn on whether Anil’s proposal was a good idea or not, “but I LOVE the fact that we’re discussing it.” Many employees said they appreciated the gesture and some voted “yes” to see the executives’ compensation. Others were bothered by it and said it would be a distraction from important business issues the company was facing. One wrote bluntly,
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“This whole discussion reeks of transparency for the sake of transparency.” Offline, a number of individuals approached their managers and other executives directly to say that this was not a necessary or welcome example of transparency. Anil soon rejoined the conversation online to say that people had made some compelling arguments and he was swayed: “We’re putting this experiment on hold for now.” These vignettes make it clear that TechCo’s wiki is not just a place for executives to post information. It is also a place where employees can step outside the formal chain of command to question their leaders, challenge corporate polices and decisions, and share and discuss their own ideas and opinions in a forum visible to the entire organization. In these ways, social media platforms like the wiki seem to offer a promising new vehicle for employee voice and dialogue. Past work on employee voice has generally taken one of two approaches. In the field of organizational behavior, scholars have examined the conditions that promote or silence individual expressions of voice inside firms. This literature tends to focus on instances in which individual employees informally speak up to a manager (or in a team setting) to offer opinions and suggestions on local matters of concern.10 By contrast, in the industrial relations and human resources fields, scholars have generally examined the formal mechanisms through which employees can express their collective interests and grievances to top management, focusing, in particular, on the role of unions.11 From either perspective, the wiki seems a new and different beast. It is a formal platform, but one on which employees speak as individuals, not as a single collective; where what is said is instantly visible to everyone in the company, not just an individual’s manager or work group; and where the topics discussed are often strategic business issues of importance to the entire organization, not just local matters or workplace grievances. A number of social media scholars and pundits have argued that platforms like the wiki are ideal for enabling voice and dialogue, claiming that they can act as democratizing public spheres for modern society.12 Like the eighteenth-century salons described by Habermas and the public spheres envisioned by philosophers and political sociologists since then, the open
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platforms of social media seem to afford a public space in which individuals can transcend social distinctions and come together to share ideas and discuss and debate issues of common concern.13 The nascent literature on enterprise social media suggests that many for-profit corporations, not just TechCo, see an opportunity to leverage that very potential by using these technologies to promote productive upward communication and employee discourse. From some vantage points at TechCo, the discussions happening on the wiki really did look like some sort of utopic corporate public sphere. Emma, the tech support rep introduced in chapter 1 who said the wiki “is one of my most favorite things on the planet,” praised the egalitarian dialogue she felt it promoted: “It’s so cool that if I come up with an idea I can post it on the wiki . . . . It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been here. I can do it now if I want, and if it’s a good idea, people will respond.” We just saw that Heather, a junior employee, was able to share the results of her analysis with the entire company, have senior executives weigh in on the implications of her work, and then watch as people across the company took action in response to the discussion she had started. For employees so accustomed to sharing their thoughts and ideas on social media, this was a cherished aspect of working at TechCo. All this open sharing provoked healthy debate within the company too. Whereas Anil commonly said, “We share everything” in reference to the company’s practice of transparency, the head of marketing once retorted quite aptly, “We debate everything too!” During my fieldwork, I watched numerous debates unfold on the wiki concerning such topics as how best to demo the company’s new product and what the precise methodology should be for training customers on it. Just as a well-functioning public sphere is believed to promote rational, critical debate that eventually leads to enlightened common agreement, these debates often led to productive resolutions.14 As I was drafting this very chapter, I received an email from a TechCo contact who was excited to tell me that a particularly lengthy, thorny project concerning changes to the sales process had finally been resolved. His email read, “This was a nasty project w/no owner, super-complicated,
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no good options and super important . . . . Trish and I posted the current plans on the wiki. That created a whole lot of discussion from the masses, and the result was a conversation that got people’s attention and ended up solving the problem.” Sometimes the discussions that unfolded and the employee opinions that were shared led directly to the executives changing course, such as Anil’s reconsideration of disclosing executives’ compensation in light of the discussion on the wiki. Other times, no immediate organizational change came about, but employees were left with a better appreciation for the context in which something had been decided. Glenn’s suggestion about product positioning was not taken up, for instance, but it was taken seriously and addressed by both the head of marketing and the CTO. Perhaps most interesting, the employees’ upward communication on the wiki was so startlingly open at times that I found myself wondering if this might be a setting in which employees had finally transcended all the theorized barriers to “speaking up” to hierarchy. Above, we saw employees criticize their leaders quite pointedly for “transparency for the sake of transparency” and challenge an executive decision not to publish an org chart. These were not isolated instances. In response to a post about the company’s new HR benefits, an employee wrote that the company’s 401(k) match was the worst he had ever seen. In response to a post listing some TechCo company values, another employee wrote, “If I was a new TechCoer coming in and I read [this], I’d probably just roll my eyes and go back to doing what I wanted to do.” Such public voice and dialogue simply have no precedent in past accounts of corporate life. Take, for instance, Robert Jackall’s 1988 book Moral Mazes. Jackall interviewed managers across a range of firms and found that even though private skepticism of corporate policies was quite common among employees, public criticism of the firm’s leaders and their policies was considered a “death wish” in most organizations.15 Jackall observed, “The hierarchical authority structure that is the linchpin of bureaucracy dominates the way managers think about their world and about themselves,” and, consequently, employees tended to engage in
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strategic silence.16 The general rule was to “keep one’s skepticism to one’s self and get on board.”17 Other canonical ethnographies based on observations of corporate life in the 1980s through the early 2000s found the same.18 Without a doubt, the voices sounding off and the conversations happening on TechCo’s wiki (and in related offline public settings like Hack Nights) look wildly different from the discourse we are used to seeing in conventional bureaucratic firms.
L I M I TAT I O N S O F E M P L O Y E E V O I C E
Greater openness does not mean perfect openness, however, and the picture I have painted is not a complete one of how TechCo’s wiki works, nor should we expect it to be. Although new technologies can provide us with powerful new capacities, their potential is always conditioned by how we choose to use them and the specific constraints of our setting.19 The social and political dynamics that have long suppressed employee voice in corporations remain salient today, and it would be surprising for a new communication platform like the wiki to transcend them all so easily. What is more, recent critiques of the literature on public spheres as well as the emerging literature on social media use within corporations suggest that public platforms of this sort may have certain inherent qualities that prevent them from being as transformative as some scholars and practitioners have idealized (and as we all might like) them to be.20 One reason for this is that openness is not inherently democratic. Dynamics on an open platform may well promote more opportunities for dialogue and voice, but they may also suppress certain voices, warp the form and content of what is shared, and even lessen the accountability of central authorities. As positive as TechCo employees were about the opportunity to share their ideas and opinions on the wiki, we will see that they and their executives were acutely aware of these tensions. Reviewing their nuanced understanding of the wiki and how they tried to navigate its limitations offers a first glimpse into the complexity of shooting for openness inside a firm but also the strengths of the conversational environment being fostered at TechCo.
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