Open Book Management

Open-Book Management is a philosophy that focuses on educating our employees on the company’s finances in order to empower them to make informed decisions and see how their actions impact the overall success of our organization. This practice provides employees with the necessary information to make them a part of our decision-making process and a partner in our business. Additionally, because employees play a stake in our success, we believe they should also enjoy in the benefits of our prosperity and be rewarded for their influence on our success. We utilize two specific tools to make Open-Book Management a part of our business model.

The first is by creating “games” that teach methods for financial success, track the results and reward when the goals of the game are achieved. It starts with our management teams teaching their staff what it takes to reach desired goal and why we have set this as our goal. Then the information must be transparently tracked, clearly and with an appropriate frequency. It must be incorporated into the daily operations and interactions with employees. Lastly, a reward is chosen by all involved parties that is commisurate with the amount of work and time put into achieving the target outcome. This helps drive competitiveness among the staff and illustrates the benefits of placing our financial success into the hands of our employees. This “teach, track, treat” style of game helps us embed our finances into the decisions of our operational teams in an engaging, easily digested format with clearly documented results.

The second way that we incorporate Open-Book Management into our organization is through a teaching methodology that explains the impact of our decisions from a financial perspective. Though decisions are not entirely made from a financial standpoint, putting them into this context and explaining the cost of our actions in real terms provide employees with the knowledge needed to make their own judgement calls. This is an active process that should take place every time an action in-store happens that affects the financial outcome of the company. By doing this we empower employees to take accountability and financial intelligence into their own hands. And this is truly the definition of Open-Book Management at its core.

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