Blog: Ethos & culture at Sift

Sift is a strong believer in parties, with its summer sports events, out of work teams and drinks at the end of the week; but the Sift ethos is much more.  At the latest quarterly company meeting, I presented my thoughts on the Sift ethos, which I’m giving a wider airing here.

Empowering not micro-managing – A core Sift philosophy is that a business will achieve more if its staff are empowered to take responsibility for their own areas, rather than have their activities micro-managed.  You need to accept that people will make mistakes, in fact you’re not going to get innovation without it, but they’ll come back engaged, empowered and motivated.  Some managers believe it’s important to occasionally show their staff they can still sell or close or deliver or write.  Whilst I understand the sentiment, it’s mis-placed; diving in disempowers and demotivates.  Managers do this to try to prove themselves; much better to focus on helping staff to do it themselves.  Staff look to a manager to do his or her own job and manage, not to do their job.

Trust – Some people just aren’t ready to work in a trust based environment and some take time to get used to it; and trust will get abused.  Great organisations don’t respond by clamping down; they ask themselves, why did the abuse of trust occur?  Just occasionally it’s a genuine bad apple; more often it’s because people, skills, roles and career-paths aren’t aligned.  These are the things that need attention.  Trust is the result, and is about pulling together, everyone playing their roles and delivering for clients.

Encouraging people to learn & develop – I have a deep belief that people can develop and grow, which is why you’ll find so many people at Sift who’ve stayed at the company to develop their careers with us.  Two of the Sift MDs (PracticeWEB’s Richard Sergeant and Sift Media’s Tom Dunkerley) joined the company as junior sales execs and now head up business units.  And there’s also a refreshing quota of people who either didn’t get A levels, didn’t go to university or who generally underachieved through school, represented right through the organisation.

Encouraging people to speak up – This simply means that if you work at Sift, you have a voice that people will listen to, you’re expected to use it and meetings are for discussion, not lectures.  And in particular, as I say to the new starters, when you join it’s a key time for us to listen as you’ll have comments and ideas and ask questions that you’ll never do once you get institutionalized within the company.

Promoting as a preference to hiring – All three of the MDs running Sift’s business units have worked their way up the organisation.  On the one hand, we’ve missed the opportunity to bring in battle-hardened skills & experience, but senior hires often go wrong.  More importantly, promotions send a message to the whole company that staff can develop and grow careers at Sift.

Sharing the ups and the downs – This is another element in building trust.  A significant proportion of Sift’s staff spend time helping clients with their real business issues; and it makes no sense to hide things, (a) they will have ideas of their own, (b) they can be reassured that the strategic plan is sensible, and (c) they can see how they fit in.  So Sift has always been open about financial performance.  For example towards the end of 2010, we wanted to reduce our cost base so that if revenues were stagnant at £7.2m in 2011, we didn’t generate losses as we’d done in 2010 (when we’d anticipated faster revenue growth than we achieved).  There were voices around the Sift board calling for salary reductions.  I felt we could do better by involving everyone in the search for efficiencies and savings, and at the same time improve trust.  In fact, through a ground up exercise we took £0.5m out of the baseline cost base without forcing through an across-the-board pay cut (or losing staff).

Working efficiently and effectively, not late – The diversity of achievement between someone being engaged and using their brain for 7 and half hours against someone going through the motions is huge.  Of course, occasionally we all need to put in something extra or work evenings or weekends; but frankly, a long hours culture usually means a poorly managed business.  Just ask around in any local hiring environment!

Decent rewards – This doesn’t just mean reasonable salaries, fair bonus schemes and commission arrangements; there should be recognition and celebrations as well.

No blame – The only reason to review what went wrong is to capture learnings and plan how things can run better next time.

Management humility – A fundamental belief that no one deserves special treatment and in one-class citizenship.  The Sift car park is also a Ferrari-free zone!

A few years ago I would have also included the word ‘fun’, but these days I see humour as an enabler, rather than a specific ethos in its own right!