Danone is engaging all 100k employees in the running of the company | Hacker News Reader

Danone is engaging all 100k employees in the running of the company

qz.com

69 pointssohkamyung13 comments

This reads like a PR piece, there is really nothing about what happens when the rubber meets the road. Lots of talk about voting (not how much/ impact), Glassdoor ratings, and nice environmental ideas.

It seems like a very French thing to make the 'conquered' (or in this case, employed) part of oneself.

Antithetical to any other way of merely being the administrative authority over the employed.

Schneider Electric (again a French company) is doing this as well... is there a need for such cap raise? It seems like they're unloading risk onto their employees, from a cynical perspective.

I see this also as a move to avoid a confrontational relationship between employees and management, which happens so easily in France—especially with highly political unions.

In the US, I would say an analogy is Delta Airlines which has been running a more inclusive style of management so as to avoid unionization of their workforce.

But in Danone's case, it also goes along pretty well with their business goals and can be a good differentiator if they play their cards well.

Having ‘skin in the game’ the leitmotif of the 2020s years.

AKA co-operatives. But that would mean giving those employees actual power and ultimately proportional compensation (i.e. you can no longer justify paying the C-level staff orders of magnitude more than the majority of the workforce, at least not without that majority signing off on those paychecks).

I agree with you that organizationally companies may end up having to go in that direction, but I think there are some interim steps to have employees feel more like they have a voice.

For example, we run internal prediction markets at companies where employees get to make bets on relevant outcomes (will we beat sales targets this quarter, will this project get done on time, etc.) that drive decision making. We also run internal Kickstarter-style crowdfunding campaigns, where a chunk of money is literally distributed to employees to spend on ideas they come up with themselves. So for example, we're working with a nuclear lab and they distributed $1.5M to about 500 employees. Ideas they came up with that the "crowd" funded to their "tipping point," the lab agreed would turn in to actual projects. Normally these decisions would have been made by executives only, now they've been completely democratized.

What platform do you use for prediction markets; is it open source/publically available?

From his profile, it looks like his current company[0] is the platform and he's talking about clients. Cool concept, I know someone involved in engagement in a large public company who's trying to handle the culture of execs vs employees.

[0] cultivatelabs.com

That’s a good point. In my company they have started to solicit ideas and even ways to fund them but this breaks down because it’s still the execs deciding on the winners and there is no financial benefit for the employees who provided the ideas. So as employee you become very cynical when you win a contest and the only thing you get out of it is some pizza with a VP and more work.

Well, you should be cynical. A lot of companies at this point are basically LARPing as cooperatives but revert to the usual hierarchies as soon as it comes to who owns the company and who gets to call the shots or compensation.

It’s the same with loyalty. They still speak the language of commitment and “we are a family” but they don’t act accordingly.

Can they vote on executive compensation?

Does Danone still run Odoo?

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