A happy team is a happy and productive workplace. This was the driver for founders, Natalie Bramble and Glen Dunkley to create a team culture.  A culture that brought out the best in people, worked to their strengths and provided a healthy, safe environment that encouraged critical thinking and diversity.

With Natalie’s understanding and expertise in governance, organisational systems, agile workplaces, and social enterprises, she developed an organisational governance model with sociocracy with working circles at its core.  Sociocracy is a system that’s designed to create psychologically safe environments and effective organisational results.  It’s designed around working teams with agreed objectives and make decisions on the areas that affect them in their role. 

iClick2Learn has been using this system successfully since 2018, learning what works and improving along the way. 

In 2020, a number of improvements were implemented. Team member, Lisa Griffiths, developed and managed one of these projects.  Leading the team, Lisa  articulated the teams’ culture into a documented wellbeing strategy, together with a video induction for new team members.

 “It’s a unique culture we have, and I value it tremendously,” said Lisa “It creates an impact on us, it has changed the way that we work, we are happy employees, and we have ownership over the whole business. We want to see iClick2Learn thrive because it’s ours.”

One of the key secrets to success Natalie shared is that it’s not enough to develop a framework. You need to engineer these opportunities to give everyone the time and space needed to cultivate emotional intelligence, critical thinking and robust decision making.

One example of this in practice is the weekly Mad, Sad and Glad meetings. Founded on the principle that people share things with the best intention, this meeting encourages people to express what’s not working for them (mad), what’s annoying them (sad) and what they’re happy about (glad).  

Natalie said these meetings help build understanding, empathy, and a strong ‘we’re in it together’ team culture. “It’s also a chance for everyone to address the little things that can sometimes get so annoying that it negatively affects how you feel about your work. Because our actions prove we take these things seriously and do something about the issues, everyone’s more willing to share and be truthful about their experiences and issues.” 

“It’s a very different environment for our team members, we find it takes a while for new people to understand that we authentically embrace this culture. It often takes a while for them to feel safe to challenge ideas and the status quo. Once they realise it’s not lip service, they embrace the opportunities and add so much value to our conversations and our work quality and output’.

The culture is also felt by people they work with outside the organisation. Natalie said they’re consistently told by clients how much they enjoy talking with team members because everyone’s so happy and motivating. 

You can learn more about sociocracy here: https://www.sociocracyforall.org

iClick2Learn helps staff and volunteers govern, manage, and fund their community organisations through training and education, mentoring and development programs.  iClick2Learn is Australia’s only certified social enterprise offering online learning development services.