Self-Organizing a Driving Factor at Meetup

A company with a mission to help people self-organize says it needed to adopt its own philosophy to be more responsive and drive innovation.

Called Meetup, the New York-based online organization is home to the world's largest network of local groups. It believes that people can change their personal world, or the whole world, by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference.

It was also one of 44 companies granted a spot on the WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces 2010.

Andres Glusman, vice-president of strategy and community, refers to Meetup's model as an ongoing experiement to find ways to drive greater efficiency and innovation.

Like many companies, Glusman says Meetup started small and flexible, but with growth became increasingly bureaucratic.

This prompted the Internet firm to re-examine its structure and adopt the principle of self-organization.  Web developers are encouraged to self-organize into teams and develop products they believe would improve Meetup’s services.

According to Glusman, the company cultivates a strong vision and mission, but allows team members to decide how to achieve the mission.

“As a company we are going to produce much higher quality work in much higher volume if we give people the power, and help them feel ownership by giving them ownership in what they are doing,” he says.

Glusman says there are challenges to operating democratically. For example, it’s a balancing act to provide staff members with the freedom to act on their ideas, increasing innovation, while having the products and services come together as one coherent package.

In an effort to achieve this goal, the company has gone through several deliberations of the model and now has all products approved by the company’s chief technology officer.

The current model is working well, according to Glusman, who says granting staff members greater freedom over their work benefits customers.

“When you can work on things and produce things with minimal levels of bureaucracy, you are more responsive to customers,” he says.

Glusman adds that Meetup is “a very rare Internet company that is solid, profitable, growing and self-sustaining.”

“Being extremely productive with the people you have is an important part of it,” he says.

The company’s organizational design is also attracting attention from other interested firms. Glusman says Meetup has been invited to speak at conferences, and provides tours of its office to other companies.

This is the first year Meetup has been included on the WorldBlu List of Most Democratic Workplaces, an annual award that shines a spotlight on organizations successfully practising organizational democracy.

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