Meet the New Boss(es)

Just as democracy takes many forms, depending on which country is practicing it, Massachusetts’ democratic workplaces use a range of internal structures and procedures to pursue their aims. What they share, though, is a deep commitment to their novel approaches, even in industries in which a traditional org chart would be the much more obvious route.

Take the South Mountain Company, a Martha’s Vineyard homebuilder. Clearly, you can’t put up a house by committee, letting individual carpenters construct each room by their own whims—and accordingly South Mountain’s sites are run as dictatorships. “Our people would be terribly distressed if there was a crew on a job and they sat around and drew straws to decide who should build the stairway,” says cofounder John Abrams, a soft-spoken 57-year-old with glasses and a bushy beard. “A culture of expertise really rules.” But during the 1980s, when his two best workers came to him saying they were willing to spend their careers at South Mountain—but only if the company would pay them more than just an hourly wage—Abrams had a choice to make. He opted to turn South Mountain into a cooperative, offering any employee who’s been with the company for five years both an ownership stake and a seat on the board. “When the people who are making a decision are going to bear the consequence of that decision, better decisions result,” says Abrams, who writes about his experience in The Company We Keep. “I no longer have to be right all the time. And what a relief.”

To qualify as democratic, a company doesn’t have to be employee owned, and egalitarian practices can fit into a white-collar firm as easily as a blue-collar outfit—both points proven by Continuum, a business-consulting shop in Newton. When CEO Kory Kolligan commissioned a brand analysis of the firm itself upon taking over, he discovered a familiar complaint: Employees felt management was too secretive. “The more you scream there’s nothing hidden, the more people think there is something hidden,” he says. So he opened the company’s books to employees, implemented a monthly town meeting in which no question was off-limits, and had Continuum’s offices remodeled into one big shared workspace.

When the circumstances are right, a company can do away with more than cubicle partitions. It can choose, like Amherst-based copy chain Collective Copies, to dump any semblance of hierarchy whatsoever. In 1983, its founders, then employees of another copy chain, went on strike to protest low pay, lack of benefits, and dismal working conditions in a hot, dark basement space. The company simply packed up and left town a few months later, so the employees bought the equipment and reorganized, with one major change: no bosses.

When customers come into a Collective store, they are served by whichever employee is free; if the order is something the employee doesn’t know how to do, he consults with his nearest colleague. If it sounds like anarchy, well, it is. But anarchy turns out to have its advantages in the copy business. “It’s an odd thing, but it’s one of those industries where things run better when you don’t have to run things through a third party,” says Steve Strimer, a Collective Copies “member.” And because there are no management costs, Collective can pay from $13 to $20 an hour (this in an industry where the starting wage at Kinko’s is closer to the $7.50 minimum), which helps limit turnover.

Regardless of how it’s set up, no democratic workplace can completely eliminate employee conflict. To deal with such discord, Collective has a “judicial branch” with the Orwellian title of Intra-Collective Communications Committee (ICCC). Members rotate through assignments to the committee alphabetically, and interview both sides in a disagreement before issuing a binding judgment. In the 10 years he’s been at the company, Strimer says, he’s seen the ICCC convened three times: once for chronic tardiness, another time for “anger-management issues,” and once (in an “only in the Pioneer Valley” situation) when employees clashed over political differences after 9/11. “I know it sounds utopian,” he says. “I’m not saying there isn’t conflict and cliques and people who get along better than others. The missing component is a boss who becomes the scapegoat for a lot of problems.” And without that outlet, workers either have to accept the status quo, or make the effort to fix things themselves.