Increasing Transparency in a Hierarchical Organization with Talkspirit: ORS Group’s Story

Can a hierarchical organization embrace transparency and agility without dismantling its structure? While many companies turn to flat organizational models to achieve this, ORS Group took a different approach. Focused on maintaining its hierarchy while boosting clarity, efficiency, and teamwork, the company turned to Talkspirit’s governance solution.

ORS Group is Austria’s leading service provider for analog and digital broadcasting and a subsidiary of the Austrian public broadcaster ORF. Its purpose is to support the democratic and cultural diversity of Austrian society by their easily accessible services. With 280 employees, the company ensures seamless audio and audiovisual content delivery worldwide via terrestrial, satellite, cable, IP services, and streaming. In 2024, it expanded its global reach by investing in Polish company Insys Video Technologies, an expert in Cloud & Media Streaming Technologies. 

To understand how ORS Group increased organizational clarity with Talkspirit, we spoke with Markus Mantsch, Head of Business Process Management & Compliance, who has been with the company for 17 years. In this article, he shares why the company implemented Talkspirit, how teams are leveraging the platform, and the impact it has had at all levels of the organization.  

A Journey Towards Agility and Transparency

Markus Mantsch: As a highly technical company, ORS Group has long depended on structured processes. However, as our business evolved beyond terrestrial and satellite transmission, complexity increased. To stay ahead, we decided to implement the Agile methodology.

With constant new requests, we needed to become more responsive and adaptable. Agility enables us to collaborate closely with clients, developing solutions together—even without a fully defined end goal from the outset.

Also read: [Expert Opinion] Amicio’s Best Practices for Agile and Effective collaboration

Beyond improving agility, we also wanted to bring more visibility into how teams collaborate, both within and across departments. That’s when Austrian consulting firm Fifty1 introduced us to Talkspirit. We saw it as a tool to enhance organizational transparency and agility while aligning with the holacratic approach we were eager to explore. The fact that it’s a European solution was also a key advantage.

To ensure a smooth integration, we embedded Talkspirit into our “operating system OptIO”—short for Optimal Internal Organization. OptIO unites our values, projects, management practices, and platforms into a cohesive system. Talkspirit is now a core part of that ecosystem, helping us make our hierarchical organization more transparent, flexible, and aligned with Agile principles. We found this to be highly effective.

Rolling Out Talkspirit

Preparing for Implementation

To kick off Talkspirit’s implementation, we held a two-day workshop with 17 leaders from our business units and support departments. We used this workshop to map out our structure on the platform, define key circles, their purposes, and accountabilities. Using an offline version of Talkspirit, we created our organizational chart and followed an integrative decision-making process to refine it collaboratively.

This workshop helped us establish our main circles and appoint circle leads. We started with the business units, then moved to support teams like finance, procurement, and IT. Each lead then had four weeks to further define their circle’s roles and responsibilities. 

A second workshop allowed us to finalize these definitions, and by autumn 2021, the first version of the ORS Group circle—our organization’s core structure—was complete.

Launch and Adoption

We officially launched Talkspirit during our annual employee gathering. It was the perfect opportunity to introduce the platform, activate accounts, and assign employees to their roles.

To ensure a smooth transition, we ran training sessions for circle leads and employees. We also introduced a structured alignment process to keep the entire organization on the same page.

At ORS Group, we operate on three levels: top management, C-level executives, and operational teams. Twice a year, C-levels and management come together to define strategic priorities. Every four weeks, they hold service design meetings to share updates and decisions with circle leads, who then pass the information down to operational teams. This ensures that everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals. 

Overcoming Implementation Challenges

Shifting mindsets

One of our biggest challenges was shifting mindsets. In a hierarchical organization, employees are used to a traditional top-down system rather than a role-based approach. However, while we’ve kept our hierarchical structure, we’ve transformed the way we document and visualize it, making it far more transparent and effective.

This shift doesn’t mean that circle leads lose their authority. They still set objectives for their teams, but now they coordinate closely with management to ensure alignment. Sometimes, this requires extra communication, but overall, the system works well for us.

Also read: Driving Culture Change with Talkspirit: Insights from Welser Profile

Restructuring the Team After a Merger

Another challenge arose when we acquired Insys Video Technology, a Polish company with its own established ways of working. Marketing activities were scattered across multiple departments, leading to a lack of coordination. When we launched a company-wide rebranding, we saw an opportunity to streamline and centralize the marketing function.

Using Talkspirit, we created a dedicated marketing circle, clearly defining roles, responsibilities, and transversal activities for all team members—whether they worked at ORS Group or Insys.

Marketing is the first department to take this step, but others will soon follow.

How We Use Talkspirit to Improve Organizational Clarity and Agility

Talkspirit has become a central tool for structuring our hierarchical organization and streamlining decision-making. Here’s how we leverage it to enhance transparency, collaboration, and agility.

Documenting Roles with the Org Chart

One of the most valuable features for us is the organizational chart, which serves as a dynamic, role-based map of our company structure. Unlike a traditional hierarchical chart, it doesn’t just show reporting lines—it helps us visualize how people work together across departments and what they are accountable for. Each circle (B2C Services, IT, Marketing, Finance, etc.) has clearly defined roles and accountabilities, helping teams understand how they contribute to shared goals. 

This documentation has been particularly valuable for onboarding. New hires can instantly understand what’s expected of them, and who to reach out to when they have questions. We also use the role descriptions created on Talkspirit as a foundation for creating job descriptions, which significantly speeds up the hiring process.

Aligning Goals with OKRs

To ensure strategic alignment, we implemented the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) methodology using Talkspirit’s OKR feature. Every five years, we define our company vision for the next seven years. In 2023, we worked on our 2030 strategy, conducting several strategic meetings to determine our long-term objectives. We chose OKRs as our framework to break these objectives into concrete, measurable goals.

Since this was our first time using OKRs, it was necessary to guide teams through the difference between OKRs and KPIs and what makes an OKR truly effective. Despite the learning curve, we successfully defined four company-wide OKRs, and each customer-facing circle then set its own aligned OKRs to ensure a clear connection between company strategy and operational execution.

This approach has proven highly effective, as today OKRs are fully embedded in how we operate. 

Simplifying Decision-making with Meetings and Proposals

To enable more agile decision-making, we rely on Talkspirit’s Meetings and Proposals features. 

For smaller changes, any employee can make a proposal asynchronously. If no objections are raised by the people concerned, the change is automatically approved. This eliminates the need for extra meetings and helps bring more transparency to organizational evolutions.

For major decisions, such as those related to the merger, proposals are added to strategy meetings, where they are presented to management for discussion and approval.

Some circle leads also use the meetings feature to structure tactical meetings, ensuring that operational teams stay aligned with broader organizational priorities.

Key Benefits to Using Talkspirit

Talkspirit has been key in clarifying roles, responsibilities, and cross-team collaboration within our hierarchical organization. This was especially crucial during our merger with Insys Video Technology, as it kept teams aligned and maintained motivation. With a clear structure, employees understood the reasoning behind our rebranding and how we would work together moving forward.

Beyond bringing organizational clarity, Talkspirit’s flexibility allowed us to tailor Holacracy’s principles to our needs without strictly following them by the book. We embraced self-organized circles with clearly defined purposes and accountabilities, allowing circle leads to assign roles without requiring HR approval. While we don’t conduct governance meetings, we’ve standardized Talkspirit’s meeting structure across all departments.

This has transformed how we conduct meetings. Before, meetings were not as efficient as expected—attendees weren’t always the right people, and making quick decisions was a challenge. Now, meetings are more structured, roles are clearly assigned, and decision-making is more efficient.

Another aspect we truly appreciate is Talkspirit’s responsiveness to our feedback. The team is highly receptive to improvement suggestions, and we’ve seen many of our requested features implemented over time. This level of collaboration makes Talkspirit not just a tool but a true partner in our organizational evolution.

We’ve been using Talkspirit for four years now, and while adoption varies across teams, we continue to encourage widespread usage—particularly among managers—to further improve transparency and efficiency across the organization.

A Final Word

ORS Group’s experience demonstrates that even a hierarchical organization can achieve greater transparency, agility, and collaboration. All you need is the right platform (Talkspirit!), the right framework, and the right support. 

Beyond improving efficiency, Talkspirit plays a key role in strengthening ORS Group’s impact and helping it stay true to its mission of ‘supporting the democratic and cultural diversity of Austrian society.’ By fostering better collaboration, decision-making, and team integration, the platform enables employees to work seamlessly while aligning their efforts with the organization’s broader purpose.

If you're looking to achieve similar results, we invite you to schedule a demo to explore how Talkspirit can support your transformation. We also strongly encourage you to connect with our network of coaches for expert guidance throughout your journey.

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