Q. How do you institutionalize
the process?
When every new employee
comes in, they sit down with
every manager of the company
and they are educated on those
managers’ responsibilities in
their departments. As part of
that, they sit down with [CEO]
Joe [Kennedy] and myself, and
we go through Pandora principles. That is where all this sort
of pedagogy is articulated.
Then we talk about it. We talk
about decision-making not being personal. We talk about
making decisions with the
smallest number of people possible. It’s kind of like a crash
course in the company culture.
It’s not something they’re
going to absorb entirely immediately, but it’s a framework
that helps them understand
how and why the company
operates as they get to know
the company. It’s like a frame
of reference to them.
Then, as part of your responsibility as a management team,
you have to manage to that
pedagogy. So you are setting up
an expectation among employees, and the management team
itself has to remind itself to
revisit them regularly.
Q. How does employee
empowerment benefit the
company?
You become much more nimble. So you are able to make
decisions quickly, which is
important. You also make people’s work lives more efficient
because they spend less time
on the things they aren’t really
needed for.
A lot of time in companies is
spent trying to reduce the
amount of information you get.
This creates, ironically, the
opposite problem, because if
we err on any side, it’s not giving you enough information.
The flip side of this whole
strategy is you have to be very
proactive about informing people when you do make decisions — especially when you
think a decision will impact
them. But you don’t have the
problem of spending all day
long on administrative e-mails
and reading stuff that’s just not
important to you.
So it saves people time and
makes them more efficient,
which makes them happier. It
also gives people a real sense
of ownership.
HOW TO REACH: Pandora Media Inc., (510) 451-4100 or www.pandora.com
