Offy Handbook

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What is Offy Handbook

A practical guidebook to a more fulfilling Offy life!

Welcome to Officience! Whether you’re a new member of our tribe, someone hoping to join us or a long time Offy, you’ll find everything you need to understand our why in this Handbook. More importantly you’ll also discover how we do what we do. From performance management to leave requests, and going through our internal social network, this how life happens at Officience!

Last but not least, this is a continuous work in progress, we adjust our way of working to better fit our purpose every day. Should you have questions, comment or concerns, we’re here to help.

Content

The Offy Life

Officience - Offsharing in Vietnam

Our purpose is to make sure that Vietnam skips the age of mass consumerism and leapfrogs to the new global sharing and connection economy.

Our culture, causes and values you shall understand, live by and promote

First things first. That should come as obvious, but if you decided to join us, and if we identified you as a member of our tribe, it means you fit the following portrait:
You embrace our causes
You live by our values.

Commitment: Do what you Say
No action is engaged without a definition of the expected final results. We only have one word and managing the proper expectation from our interlocutors is a daily concern.
Open & Sincere: Say what you Think
We believe that the world is better when we can openly and constructively share our feelings, thoughts, and doubts. It implies an environment of trust where constructive criticisms are encouraged.
Merit: Lead by Example
Justice is important to us, and we strive to maintain a permanent state of awareness so that each of us gives and receives its fair share of returns.
Innovation: Think out of the Box
We encourage creativity and innovation and are willing to accept the risks that come with it. This attitude is at the root of the continuous improvement that is part of our promise.
Caring: I Know therefore I Care
We empathize with the men and women we interact with daily, living in their shoes and caring with passion about solving the problems that prevents them to be happy. We get our satisfaction from seeing them smiling.

The right attitude you shall have

Functioning without managers requires self-responsibility from each Offy, that translates into the following attitude. Keep in mind these are not simply best practices. It’s part of your responsibility as an Offy.

Self-Managing
You are the actor of your life. Note that we did not use the word “career” here. Your life happens within Officience, but also outside of Officience. And our objective as an organization is not to drive you through the ladder of success. It is simply to accompany you in whatever life goal you have, whether they are within the organization, or outside.
As you will read in this handbook, we put in place a few processes such as salary reviews, performance evaluation, or identifying influencers. Don’t consider these as “processes” that you “have to” apply. They are simply guidelines to help you better manage your life. And you should maximize any opportunity to exchange with your influencers about your life.

Knowing when you don’t know
Letting anyone in the organization make any kind of decision has its side effect: It can lead to “bad” decisions for the organization.
There are two ways to ensure this does not happen:
- The first one, that you will discover a bit later, is the advice process. You cannot make any decision without having followed this advice process.
- The second one is related: you need to know when you don’t know. You have to understand which are the situations where you are a bit short, and should look for advice.

Acting as a sensor
A very common question of the organization is: If I don’t have a manager, who makes sure I gets things done and bring value to the company? The answer is simple: every single one of your peers.
As a consequence, it is part of your responsibility to address any situation that makes you feel uncomfortable through one-on-one, open talks. Here are a few pieces of advice to raise this type of concerns. Acting as a sensor is not a way to “create troubles”. It is simply to ensure fairness, balance and that everyone is working towards the same goal.
If you read the above carefully, you also understood that there is a kind of attitude that we should absolutely avoid: complaining about a situation, and doing nothing to address it.

As a sensor you shall act

“Be the change you want to see in the world” - Gandhi

Wait, we just covered that part… Why do we need to talk about it again?
The reason is simple: it is the most critical attitude that will make our organization thrive. It is the glue that will ensure we are moving forward every single day.

Now, one interesting thing about “acting as a sensor” is that its principles go against the "natural" culture that we can often notice here in Vietnam. Yes, it is a blunt statement. Most people don’t want to be seen as troublemaker. They will prefer to avoid addressing a sensitive point rather than taking it as a chance to improve the organization.
If you tend to complain about things without taking action, don’t even think about working at Officience. It is the most unproductive attitude: it creates bad feelings, not only for you but for everyone around you.

So, how to act as a sensor? “Be the change you want to see at Officience”.
Keep that motto in mind, and everything will be fine.

No complaining

Complaining is not productive. It creates bad feelings. So how to turn a complaint into a positive action?
Two solutions:
- If you start complaining about something, stop and think: “What can I do to address that?”
- If you hear someone complain about something, tell him/her: “Ok, enough complaining! What can you do to change that?”

Sharing bad feelings is natural. We all do this. The trick is to be aware when you (or someone around you) start doing it, and turning it into an opportunity to change things.
What kind of concerns should you share? As soon as it becomes too hard to keep for yourself, share it. By practicing it, you will notice that the question is less WHAT to share, and more HOW to share it. We all have things that annoy us on a daily basis. What we need to learn is how to make the most of these small annoying things.

You may think that constantly sharing concerns and annoying things makes for a very stressful working environment. It doesn’t. Sharing (and more important, solving) these small daily issues is what makes Officience a better place to work day after day.

Google+ you shall use

“By changing the way we communicate, we change society” - Clay Shirky

So how do we communicate? You may hear a lot about autonomy during recruitment, and autonomy doesn’t come without transparency. How do we ensure this transparency? By communicating publicly as much as possible on a platform shared to everyone in the company, Google+. Heard about it yet? If the answer is “no”, you’re off to a bad start, but it’s not too late. Create an account. Go check it.

Google+ is now becoming your mailbox. Your main communication channel.
- Within the first hour of your life at Officience, create a Google+ Account.
- Check it every day. How much do you check your mails? Well, that much.
- Be open, share your activities, your feelings, your life in the company.
- Before sending a mail, stop and think: “Can I put it on Google+ instead?”.
- It is now your mailbox. No more mails. Just Google+.

You may forget to add Offy in your circle, but don’t forget adding Offyspace community. A place to meet other Offies, know what’s going on in Officience, share your latest project updates or simply your feelings!

On your own you shall decide

A very important principle of our organization is that each of us can make any decision as he or she sees necessary to the pursuit of Officience’s success.

There are a few simple rules to ensure consistency and harmony, we call that this the Advice Process:
1) Before taking your decision you should take advice from all the people who will be impacted by your decision. It's up to you to identify them.
2) Before taking your decision you should also take advice from all the people who are experts in the subject matter of your decision. It's also up to you to identify them.
Taking advice means listening actively and with consideration. However it does not mean you need to do as they say, neither that you have to reach a consensus before moving on.

Remember that it's YOUR decision. You make it, you are fully responsible for it. For a few specific decisions that we have to take routinely, this Advice Process principle has been implemented into Dinh (*) to help us run them (salary review, purchases...). But in case no custom tool has been designed, the process shall still be hold and you can use generic tools like Google+ or Hangout as platform for your decision.

(*) Dinh is our OpenERP-based ERP system used mostly to allow individual time & skills management, opportunity and invoice tracking, people profiles update and purchase follow-up. The best way to learn how to use it is to ask your fellow Offies!

A few words you shall unlearn. And a few more you shall learn.

We are proud to say Officience is a learning environment, and funnily, part of the learning process can also involve “unlearning” a few things.
These are a few words and expressions that you want to stop using. Why? These sentences go against our values, our vision, whether it is by breaking the commitment idea or by going against the autonomy and no manager idea. So stop using them. Today.
- “I will try my best”
- “Can you validate/approve/review?”
- Manager. Boss. Staff.
- “I will reply/do it as soon as possible”

In return, at Officience we welcome every individual as a whole, with its moods, its feelings, its doubts... As such, you will hear and you are invited to make extensive use of terms like:
- "I feel that ..."
- "I am happy / unhappy because ..."
- "I like / i dislike ..."
- "I sense that you are not satisfied."
- “I think I made a mistake when I…”

Customer confidentiality you shall ensure

As an open organisation, we strive to be as transparent as possible. However, we do not practice "radical transparency" (i.e. full and complete transparency at any cost).
In particular:
- We respect the desire of our clients not to be transparent. As such, we sign and honor our NDA commitments, and even is no NDA has been signed, we treat any customer information as confidential by default.
- An incomplete view on a situation can be much more harmful that no information at all.

Henceforth, we strive to communicate information comprehensively, with the proper context to let the receiver properly capture and interpret the facts. For that reason, information that can leave way to erroneous misinterpretations are not published bluntly. In these situations, access shall be requested to any person identified as subject matter expert.

See Also

• Influencers
• Influencer Graph
• OffySpace Community

References

• Offy Handbook on GDrive