Olikka: How we get the right staff

One of the things we try to do at Olikka is have a great culture. That means treating people like people and making sure you have the right people on board. We focus a lot on our hiring to make sure we get the right people with the right experience and attitude that aligns to some of our cultural ideals. Then you can give them a fair bit of rope because you know they are good, you know that they’re responsible, you know that they’re passionate and driven,” Michael Pascoe, co-founder of systems integrator Olikka, says.

“I try to assume that people want to do the right thing and want to improve and want to contribute to the business, and I give them the opportunity to do just that. What you need on top of that is to foster an environment that is supportive.”

Olikka has a workforce of 16 and Pascoe keeps the structure flat to ensure he has a connection with everyone. “At the moment, it’s pretty simple. All of the staff directly report to myself, but in reality we have a fair bit of ‘dotted line’ operational support going on so when we’re in projects for customers, a consultant will be leading that and the staff working on that project will report to that person for that project.”

The consultant will then report to Pascoe. “That takes a fair bit of the load off me in terms of people management.”

As part of that flat structure, Pascoe has put in place simplified career paths. “We really have two project roles – an engineering role and a consulting role. We try to simplify it. Our consultants are true consultants, they really understand how to interpret IT department and business requirements and map it back to technology; they understand how to run projects, they have a very good commercial sensibility, they can write very well, and they can present very well.

“It really is a very different job role to the technical specialists. We don’t see that role as a more junior role and we don’t see a natural career progression as moving from that to a consultant so, as a result, we include those people with a lot more influence in the business than some of our competitors would.”

It’s also a structure that allows him to talk to everyone. He is not one for email management.

“I meet with every person for breakfast every six weeks, all 16, one-on-one every six weeks,” he says. “We have breakfast together. It’s a very informal chat but I endeavour in every meeting to give them some feedback. Sometimes it’s positive feedback and sometimes it is negative feedback. We discuss what they’re doing well, what I’d like to see more of, areas of improvement and techniques of how to do that. I try to connect people. 

“I’m not very big on email. Personally, I work better with face-to-face conversations. I don’t think email is a particularly great tool for people management.”

The company also uses technology to generate ideas. “We have a tool, cloud-based software, that asks people every week a simple question such as how happy are you here, what’s one thing we do really well, what’s one thing we do really badly, do you feel you know what your job is?

“We get that feedback every week from staff. It only takes one minute, or even 30 seconds, to fill out.”

Pascoe says the aim is to create a workplace where everyone feels they are doing meaningful work. “It’s absolutely about them doing satisfying, meaningful work, where they feel they truly have an influence, and they have an opportunity to actually raise good ideas and work on some of them, and are generally being empowered to do what they’re good at.

“We try to remove any roadblocks from that so that people are able to do really great work for our customers, and then just put enough process and systems around that. 

By doing this, we have the right checks and balances so that it’s consistent and we reduce the risk for our customers.”