Organisation

What held a company together at thirty people no longer carries at a hundred and fifty. Usually there is no dramatic moment: coordination takes longer than the work, decisions are taken twice, meetings fill calendars without moving anything, and the values on the website have little to do with daily life. This is not cultural decline. It is growth without deliberate design, and it can be changed.

Roles, accountability, decision paths

The starting point is almost always the same: establishing who decides what. I work with you on the organisational design: which units exist, how they connect, where responsibility sits and where it has so far only been assumed. Alongside that, decision paths that create pace: which question needs whom, who decides alone, what genuinely belongs in a committee.

That includes an honest review of the meeting structure. Most companies can cut a third of their recurring meetings and end up better coordinated.

Culture that lands in daily work

Values take effect where decisions are made: in interview questions and evaluation forms, in feedback and performance conversations, in how managers explain what they do. So I develop values with the people meant to live them, and anchor them there.

For values to show up in daily work they need occasions and instruments: rituals that set the rhythm, formats in which the leadership team explains what is currently being worked on, and simple ways for people to make appreciation visible to each other. At Cliqz I built this culture from the ground up: values developed together with the team, plus the rituals, formats and instruments that hold them in daily work, among them value cards and a quarterly format with the whole team.

Part of this is the question of why. Alongside the strategy, team members should know the purpose of the company and their own contribution to it. That is the basis for values landing in every area rather than being quoted in recruiting.

And I make it measurable. With pulse surveys, clear indicators and honest conversations you can see where the organisation stands and whether what you are doing is working. In difficult phases that is the difference between steering and hoping.

Recruiting with pace and quality at once

In growing companies recruiting is rarely a resource problem. The time is lost to internal waiting: unclear role profiles, too many rounds without their own purpose, feedback that sits unanswered.

I start with an audit of your funnel data and real interview processes. Usually two or three bottlenecks emerge. Then we rebuild the process: role profiles that describe what the person should have achieved in twelve months, evaluation forms that make assessments comparable, defined interview stages each with one purpose, and a work sample that shows how someone thinks. Because the best process fails on bad interviews, I train the people who run it.

The target is verifiable: time to hire under thirty days for most roles, counted from application received to offer accepted, hires who deliver at six and twelve months what the role expected, and separations during probation as a rare exception.

Arriving, developing, staying

What happens after the offer decides whether the effort paid off. Onboarding is one of my core topics, and I build it as a programme of its own, cut to the company. All new team members go through the same programme and get insight into every area: what happens there, why the department exists and what they need from each other.

That has two effects. New joiners get an early picture of the whole and have to ask their way around less. And they grow together as a group and build connections across departments from day one. After that comes guided onboarding inside their own team, with clear goals per phase. The aim is that new team members work effectively on their own after two months at the latest rather than after six. In one company that was the case after the change. The biggest lever remains the direct manager.

I first developed and introduced a programme like this at Cliqz; it was taken up so well that colleagues from other companies in the Burda group joined it. At HolidayCheck I built it again.

After that it is about development: feedback that happens in daily work rather than once a year on a form. Performance conversations with clear criteria and no surprises. Ways to grow that do not require becoming a manager.

And about retention: I look at your attrition data for patterns, which teams, which phase, which managers, and translate that into actions in a sensible order. People often tell the truth for the first time in an exit interview. Listening earlier is better.

What changes

Accountabilities are settled, including the uncomfortable ones. Decisions come faster because it is clear who takes them. New joiners are productive after two months and know it themselves. Attrition falls first where it hurts most. And the values on the website describe what actually happens.

The results show what that has looked like in numbers. If you first want to know where your organisation stands today, the Organisation Readiness Check is the quickest way in. If the work needs more than a project, a fractional CPO mandate is the better format.