by Janus Boye
Would you like flexible working hours, working from home when you want to, unlimited vacation and no more uncomfortable salary negotiations? Or perhaps it sounds too good to be true?
Our Frankfurt-based member byte5 has been living out several of these elements since before the pandemic with a specific no-pain focus. It has helped shape their company culture and recently they have taken it to the next level, but what is the secret and how has it really changed work?
byte5 works on business-critical web projects, in particular based on Laravel and also using other tools like Umbraco. Their radical approach to work has been featured by Handelsblatt, FAZ and other notable German news outlets.
Together with quite a few of our German members, I’ve been following their journey and recently I sat down with byte5 COO and Partner Christian Köhler to learn more about their progress and to finally share their story with our broader international community.
As with any proper case study, let’s start at the beginning.
Trust was suffering and pain was a part of it
byte5 was founded by Christian Wendler back in 2004 to reliably lead the development of mission-critical Internet solutions. With an enthusiasm for open source, most of their customers are large, complex and global.
Like many other entrepreneurial firms, byte5 found that the culture changed as the company grew and not only for the better. In particular they noticed that trust in the team was suffering and the power distance between the management and the rest of the team was growing.
Notably, they introduced the no-pain policy in 2017. The no-pain policy is really at the core of the byte5 values. The point is simply, that the freedom of each individual to design his or her own employee experience, is only limited to the point where it negatively impacts others. This also applies externally, where no-pain is also at the core. More about the external impact later on.
Flexible working times and location was also implemented pre-pandemic in 2018.
To achieve no-pain in the workplace, they work with more internal communication, openness and transparency than what I’ve experienced at other firms.
With Chris Köhler in Odense in 2019
In 2019 they also introduced “trust vacation”, again with the only limit being their no-pain policy. Longer vacations (>4 weeks) or sabbaticals still needs to be agreed and the management team expects that people coordinate in their teams. When they rolled out this initiative, they even let employees choose between the old-school vacation policy or the trust vacation. After a year 70% chose the new vacation policy and today that number is at about 80%.
Interested in learning more about unlimited vacation? byte5 has more details in this post: Unlimited Paid Vacation at byte5: a First Assessment. We will continue here with how it impacts recruitment.
Being a great place to work helps recruitment
Attracting the right people or just finding suitable candidates at all, is a big challenge at the moment and something that was brought up in pretty much every peer group meeting here in the beginning of 2022.
At byte5 they have tried using headhunting firms, but have been doing their own recruitment for the past years and with success. The no-pain policy has helped attract a different breed of talent and recently they’ve also seen a surge in applications as other Frankfurt-based companies are forcing employees back to the office. This clearly makes employees think whether they are in actually in the right place and look for new opportunities.
Back in December, byte5 became certified with Great Place to Work and as a part of the 2022 awards earlier this month, they came in among the best employers in Germany in these categories:
best place to work among IT vendors
best place to work in Hessen
best place to work among small and medium enterprises
This naturally also serves as an additional stamp of approval in the recruitment process.
Going one step further, they also have a dedicated and monthly perk-budget, so that you can tailor the employee experience further to you own needs. Whether it is a train ticket, an additional gadget or perhaps something else, this can help both reduce pain and offer some additional freedom for new and existing employees alike.
Finally, and similar to other organisations, byte5 also offers a talent bonus. That is a tangible financial reward for arranging job interviews and a larger one when a position is filled based on a referral.
No pain also when working with customers
As mentioned earlier, it is not just about removing pain internally and between colleagues. To make this happen, to really have a no-pain policy, they also take a somewhat different approach to working with customers.
It starts even before a contract is signed. byte5 has long stopped doing competitive pitches or lengthy proposals. They also don’t offer fixed pricing or other arrangements that leads to disappointment, renegotiations, and a lack of transparency. They also don’t do subcontracting, as this doesn’t work when they have their own values.
According to Chris Köhler, having their own approach, also means that they can better guarantee the project outcome.
This naturally needs to go both ways, so that if the customer likes to play political games as known from some large, global organisations, then it doesn’t work and it’s better not to embark on a partnership.
Finally, when it comes to no pain: Many customers have experienced that the pain is real, if they ever have to change their implementation partner. To address this, in byte5 projects, the source code is always owned by the customer and each project has plenty of knowledge sharing focused on enabling the customer to continue on their own or with someone else.
The Pay Panel - rethinking the salary model
During 2021, byte5 also introduced what they call their ‘Pay Panel’ - a way to tackle the usual stressful salary negotiations.
Basically byte5 wanted to move away from basing salary on the negotiating skills of individual employees. This means that those who perform similar work in a similar position are also paid similarly. Deviations from this are based on individual factors, such as expertise or responsibilities.
The Pay Panel is a committee consisting of five people: four selected team members and the management. Representatives are recruiting, a team lead, a developer and the back office. The representatives from the latter two areas are elected each year by the entire team.
There are different triggers for a meeting of our panel:
Once a year, the panel meets to vote on a blanket percentage increase for all employees. In addition, employees' salaries are automatically reviewed in various situations. These include, for example, role changes or the end of the probationary period. If none of these situations occur within a period of three years, the employee's salary is reassessed at that time at the latest. If, in addition, there is a pain and the desire for a salary increase, the panel can be commissioned to carry out a reassessment at any time, either by the person concerned themselves or via a third party.
Based on the results of the feedback interviews and the reference salaries, the Pay Panel submits a salary proposal. If the employee accepts this, the process is complete. Otherwise, all criteria are reviewed again and a solution is sought together.
Finally, the reference salaries are tracked with the help of various tools. In order to prevent structural discrimination, byte5 only consider those of men when calculating reference salaries. Because for byte5, it's performance that counts, not gender! In addition, all salaries paid in one's own team can be viewed anonymously in the form of salary ranges. This makes it easier to classify your own salary and that of your colleagues.
For more on the pay panel have a look at: Our Salary Model at byte5: The Pay Panel
Learn more about pain at work and the byte5 approach
The local newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine wrote about the unlimited vacation back in 2019.
byte5 has generously hosted us a few times, including back in 2017, where we held a ‘Shaping the digital workplace’ masterclass with speakers joining us from BASF, Dropbox and other organisations. Looking at the piece now, 5 years later, it also has a no-pain angle: Give the employees the tools that they want.
On the topic of pain: Max Bailey from Airbus made a thought-provoking point at our 2018 conference:
Rather than try to create ‘happiness at work’, we could open the eyes of people to the pain and suffering that they most likely already experience, BUT at the same being ready to connect with deep empathy
Read more in this post: I Will Forever Be Known As The ‘Pain Guy’ In That Crowd
Last, but not least, byte 5 are active contributors to our community and members of our CMS Experts and Future Workplace community. We look forward to further following their progress!