Semco’s approach to management.

Semco’s approach of management is pretty unique and is guided by three important values and concepts: employee participation, profit sharing and transparency. There is no formal organizational chart and there is only four official title and three management layers in this system. The corporate layer also called counselors is composed of five managers who apply a supervisory leadership system where all company’s strategic information is shared to employees and important decisions voted with the entire workforce. All the employees are autonomous in their work and are treated as responsible adults who would always do their best for the company as they are sharing decisions but also profits.

Employees set their own salary based on what they can bring to the system and how hard it would be to replace them. Semco’s applies a tough and highly competitive start-up structure where employees must constantly justify their existence in the system. Every six months, employees must “virtually” resign and be re-hired for a new contract of six months. Moreover, all the managers are anonymously evaluated and rated by the employees about their management skills and performances. This strategy promotes high performance teams by highlighting, on a regular basis, the organizational discrepancies in the structure. Thus, every six months, employees have an opportunity to take new challenges or match their work positions with their professional or private life expectations. Best specialists are easily recognized and talented workers or new leaders would emerge by themselves. Finally, this system shows a “Total Quality Management” approach that would naturally help attracting the best talents from other companies.

Another interesting aspect of this lightly regulated management approach is the excellent work life balance provided to all employees.