Valve steams ahead
Is
it possible for a company to survive with no managers? Valve software, the maker of computer games classics such as Half
Life,
Portal,
Team
Fortress,
Counter
Strike and Left
4
Dead and the online game platform Steam, seems to prove that this is possible. In
2012
the company had about 300 employees, and although based in Bellevue,
Washington,
USA, the company jokingly claimed that up to half of employees were from
Australia.
So how does a company with no managers operate, and how does the company structure itself? The company describes its structure as organic and flat.
Nobody
“reports to” anybody else. They have a founder/president in
Gabe
Newell, but his role is not to serve as a manager.
The
company tries to keep its structure flat to remove or reduce barriers between the employee’s work and customers. Valve states that they are not averse to organisational structure, but they are averse to hierarchy or codified divisions of labour created by people other than team members or divisions that last for a long period of time. They believe that those structures become self-­‐serving and restrictive, thus limiting the innovation potential of talented staff.
The
company may not have an organisational chart, but they do have a new staff handbook.
The
staff handbook explains the values of the company and how the company operates without managers.
The
handbook explains how staff select projects to work on, how to review staff performance, how to hire others and explaining what
Valve
is not good at. The book itself has ‘gone viral’ on the internet, with blogs and reader comments indicating