Michael Hollauf is co-founder and CEO of Meister, a SaaS scaleup that creates productivity tools for teams. The company is currently in a stage of rapid growth but has equality firmly in its sights. In fact, Meister recorded an impressive 52% female hires in 2021. The secret, according to Michael Hollauf, is a culture of openness, honesty, respect and constant learning.
I founded Meister from a desire to be my own boss. Together with my co-founder, we first positioned Meister as a consulting company. We tried our first product, did some mind-mapping in a browser, and it immediately got traction, so it was a no-brainer decision to keep going. This was 15 years ago, which was right when SaaS technology first emerged. It was the first time that software could be sold over the internet, so we jumped on the trend and never looked back.
Autonomy to define culture
When we first started, there were just three of us, so our company culture was very horizontal. We’d go to lunch every day, we knew each other inside out. This culture persisted as we grew, but once you reach 50 or 60 people, it becomes a challenge to maintain the same degree of horizontality. Now (spring 2022) there are 140 of us, so we’ve had to introduce new communication channels, sub-teams, and a tranche of around twenty people to manage the additional people and processes.
Despite our growth, we really want to keep our culture alive, which is why we invest so much time and so many resources into defining our company values and arranging team meetings. Usually, these occur offsite, because it stimulates those vital social interactions. We have to be realistic about what this growth means for the Meister culture, especially with so many team members working remotely: if we keep growing at this rate, eventually we’ll reach a point where people won't know everybody’s name. That’s probably unavoidable, but what we can do is give each department a degree of autonomy when it comes to defining their own culture. That’s really important.
Sustaining a culture? It’s about keeping your ear on the ground and knowing how people are feeling. Are they still happy? To find out, we conduct a monthly Happiness Survey, and we take those metrics really seriously. We also try to promote a healthy work-life balance wherever we can, and we invest in training, leadership courses, and other aspects of personal and professional development. In the end, the goal is to nurture an environment of full openness, honesty, respect and constant learning.
The road to 50/50 gender parity
Reaching the milestone of 52% female hires in 2021 was huge for us. Yet 50/50 gender parity relies on creating a culture that encourages female-identifying team members to stay at Meister, not just to join. This started in a small way, but has grown to a formalized diversity program. For example, we began by taking inclusive language seriously, even internally in development projects. Our users are referred to with neutral pronouns – so “they” instead of “he”– which means that when female developers are involved in those discussions, they feel more included.
After that, we looked at the way we recruit, which involved intensive unconscious bias training. Likewise in our leadership team, which consists of nine people, three of whom are women, we’ve all read the book Symbiosis. It’s mandatory reading, because it taught us so much about unconscious biases and how to counteract them. We also actively try to promote women into management positions. This is actually more important than we thought, as we found that men tended to be more pushy and convinced of their abilities.
I also want to give big kudos to our Head of People Culture. She’s a star. The reason we’re performing so well when it comes to Diversity & Inclusion is largely thanks to how she runs the topic within the company, creating widespread awareness, and being a role model and an inspiration for the rest of us.
Not there yet
We are pleased with our achievements so far, but we have many ambitions regarding diversity in the years to come. For example, many of the women at Meister work in marketing and sales, as there is still a big difference between the numbers of men and women on the market for technical roles. In engineering, we have roughly 35% women, and we really want to increase that. However, I'm super proud that we already have a female head of engineering.
Besides that, we want to look further into the future and onto the next generation of women in tech. I myself have two daughters, and I see every day how they are being pushed away from technical professions like engineering, often unconsciously. I’m actively trying to fight that. For example, next week we're taking part in Vienna Daughter’s Day, an event that will see thirty girls aged 11-16, including my own daughter, spend a whole day with us at the office. This is the kind of initiative that we really want to push. Naturally, we’ll invest more into the topic as the company grows. Next year we will also have a dedicated budget and dedicated resources to really formulate a Meister-branded diversity strategy.
