Imagine a company where there are no managers, no‐one has a private office, there is no clear organisation structure, and employees choose who they work with, what projects they work on and what hours they work. Perhaps this sounds like an ideal workplace for you, or maybe it sounds like chaos.

It may be a surprise to know that this is the organisational approach of one of the world’s largest computer games design and social entertainment platform companies. The company is Valve and is famous for games series such as Half‐Life, Left 4 Dead, Counterstrike, Portal and Team Fortress. They are also responsible for Steam, which is the world’s largest online gaming platform with over 35 million active users. The game engine Source is also part of the Valve Corporation’s stable of products and services. So with no managers to plan, lead, control and organise, how does the company achieve its enviable record of growth and innovation? The short answer is that they hire the right people and work together to develop a corporate culture that rewards performance and innovation. In reality, however, the answer is more complex.

The kind of person that Valve looks to employ is someone with a broad range of skills, including the ability to work effectively in teams, coupled with expertise in a more narrow field. These could be called ‘T–shaped’ people, with the horizontal line of the ‘T’ representing generalist breadth in terms of teamwork and customer orientation and the vertical line representing narrow skill depth in areas such as programming or digital art. Most importantly, however, the person must have a passion for what they do, so that motivation comes largely from within rather than from external sources. Valve hires staff from around the world, and because they have such a large fan base of active gamers who interact in online forums, attend conventions and create modifications for games, they have no shortage of suitable applicants knocking on their electronic door every day.

To build the right organisational culture, the company issues each new employee with The Valve Handbook for New Employees. The handbook reads a little like a ‘game guide’ and is structured around frequently asked questions and explains how the company performance reward system works, the history of the company, how they can move their desk on wheels, how to prepare for the annual company vacation and how they can participate in choosing the next group of new employees.

The company does have a structure, which is based around multidisciplinary project teams called cabals. The teams exist to ship products to consumers and the ‘lead’ person for each team emerges rather than being appointed by an external authority. Temporary structures that set expectations on deadlines, roles and tasks do emerge, but these exist only as long as is needed. Some former employees have criticised this as being a little like high school, with hints of bullying, and a clear line of the ‘in‐group’ separating the ‘out‐group’. 

While there may be some healthy scepticism that the flat organisational structure of Valve is really as flat as claimed, the reality is that the company is a leader in innovative games design and games delivery. The company is growing with over 330 employees, however, there are sometimes struggles to agree on who the next new employee should be. In attempting to emphasise company culture over structure Valve may be having some success, but the company’s continued growth may eventually limit this approach. Problems are emerging as customers complain that their favourite game is not receiving enough development focus but it remains to be proven whether this is related to the employees’ freedom to choose the projects they work on. The development of the company, however, remains a challenge to traditional ways of thinking about company structure and may be an indication of the direction of companies of the future.

QUESTION

Do you think that having no designated managers in an organisation is a good or bad idea? Justify your perspective.

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