Advertising PR Media
Bridging the gap
How to open the doors to a flat organization
By Brooke Bates
Smart Business | June 2009
Page 1 of 2
Jay Woffington, president and CEO, Bridge Worldwide
Jay Woffington doesn’t believe in doors. Even if he had an executive office at Bridge Worldwide, he’d rip the door from its hinges to stay accessible to his 220 employees.
Barriers won’t come between the president and CEO and his employees at the digital marketing firm. Instead, Woffington sits in a cubicle like everyone else. He eats in the cafeteria with everyone else. He keeps the lines of communication open and the power spread across the organization.
That open interaction yields the input he needs to make the best decisions for everyone involved.
“Just because you’ve empowered a lot of people and just because you’ve asked for a lot of advice doesn’t mean that you are absolved from having to make decisions,” he says. “You just make more informed decisions. You know you have more potential pathways to go down as opposed to just what you would think of.”
Smart Business spoke with Woffington about leveling your organization by staying accessible to employees, interacting with them and giving them a voice.
Get out and interact. Maintaining a fairly flat, egalitarian-type approach helps keep you connected to the business but also doesn’t let you get too much of the ego. People are going to tell you what they don’t like, and you’ve got to love hearing it, as opposed to squashing that kind of stuff.
Being able to keep your fingers on the pulse by really touching a lot of people in the organization, it’s a little bit more [of a] hands-on approach. I think that’s a key.
Know everybody’s name. When everybody joins, they get a nameplate that’s on their wall in front of their cube with their name and their picture. That’s on our intranet as well, so you can go on at any time and look at every single employee’s picture and everybody’s name and know who they are.
If you see somebody and you don’t know their name, go look it up because it will mean a lot more the next time you see them.
Get out of your office — literally. If I had an office, I would never sit in it. I would rip the door off of it. In fact, I did that when I was [a brand manager] at Procter & Gamble; I took the door off the hinges. There are lots of artificial thresholds that people are going to be less likely to cross. If you make it easy, everybody will do it.
One of our clients, The J.M. Smucker Co., there’s a great story of how they do it: Richard and Tim Smucker just eat lunch at the cafeteria, just like everybody else. There’s not an executive dining hall. You just go to the same place; you do the same exact thing.
