More than three decades ago, AIT was founded as a family business specialising in the design and production of communication and advertising solutions. For many years, AIT operated under a traditional management model: departments were clearly divided, instructions flowed from the top down, and people performed their individual roles well, but did not always see the full flow of work or the value they were creating together.
This way of working had once been appropriate and had supported AIT’s growth. But as the market increasingly demanded greater speed, flexibility and creativity, bottlenecks in the system became more visible: cumbersome processes, a lack of transparency and connection between functions, decision-making that depended heavily on certain individuals, inflexible cost and budget management, and technology that had not kept pace with the business. There was also a deeper cultural issue: when problems occurred, people could easily fall into a pattern of blame, avoiding responsibility or focusing only on protecting their own department’s territory.
AIT recognised that the problem was not a lack of capability within the team. On the contrary, the company had people with considerable experience and ability. The problem was that the management system and the way work was organised did not create enough conditions for those capabilities to be fully utilised.
With the guidance and support of Teal Unicorn, AIT has embarked on—and continues to pursue—its transformation towards Open Management, changing how it leads, makes decisions, collaborates and organises work so that the business can achieve better results and people can work with greater enjoyment.
1. Leadership: From Control to Empowerment
One of the most important changes at AIT has started with its leadership team.
Leaders have actively empowered managers and the teams they are responsible for, while placing greater trust in employees and giving them opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities and contribute ideas. Instead of every issue having to be escalated for a decision, those closest to the work are encouraged to make decisions within their areas of responsibility.
But empowerment is not simply about “delegating and walking away”. AIT’s leaders have become more present, regularly holding one-to-one and team conversations to understand employees’ difficulties, pain points and concerns throughout the transformation.
The role of leaders has increasingly shifted from directly controlling work to supporting and enabling the team: removing obstacles, providing resources, creating a safe foundation for people to experiment and step forward.
Leaders have also deliberately created space for employees to take the lead. When the team is able to make a decision, the leader steps back; when the team encounters obstacles, the leader steps in to support.
The most difficult change was not asking employees to become more proactive, but for leaders to learn not to intervene when the team was already capable of making its own decisions.
The way mistakes are handled has also changed. Rather than attacking individuals, leaders work with the team to understand the causes, find solutions and draw lessons for everyone. Fairness, transparency and respect for people’s feelings are balanced with clear expectations for results and accountability.
AIT does not see openness as removing discipline. Instead, its leaders are learning to balance closeness with clear boundaries, understanding with standards, and trust with accountability.
From concentrated authority to wider ownership and initiative.
2. From “Working More” to “Working Better”: Better Work, Better Life
An important development in AIT’s journey began with a very simple wish shared by the whole team: to have more time to rest and recharge.
AIT did not choose the simple option of merely giving employees an additional day off.
Instead, the question was:
How can we work fewer hours while still creating, or even creating more, value for our customers and our business?
To answer this question, AIT recognised that it needed to change the way the system operated.
The objective was not simply to reduce working hours, but to eliminate waste, simplify processes, increase initiative, transparency and accountability, and build a more effective and sustainable way of working.
AIT calls this spirit:
Better Work, Better Life.
AIT believes that when people have greater balance, work can also become better. But for this to happen, the organisation needs a system in which everyone understands the objectives, can see the work, takes the initiative to organise it, and takes responsibility for the results.
Therefore, changing working hours became part of a broader redesign of the system, rather than simply an employee benefit.
3. Redesigning Work Around Results
AIT is shifting its focus from managing time and presence to managing through results.
Each individual, team and project sets daily and weekly objectives on Kanban. Work, priorities, progress and bottlenecks are made visible so that everyone can see them and adjust together.
Teams make their commitments on progress, productivity and quality visible.
When a project or department does not achieve the expected results, responsibility does not automatically fall back to the manager. The team is expected to review how it is working, adjust resources and time, and find ways to bring the results back on track.
This creates a new principle:
Empowerment always comes with personal accountability.
AIT is also actively removing activities that do not create value: unnecessary approvals and reports have been eliminated, while waiting time and unnecessary steps in processes have been reduced.
Alongside this, AIT continues to optimise processes and apply technology and automation to create greater value with less time and fewer resources.
Decision-making is brought closer to where the work happens, information closer to those who need it, and accountability closer to those who create the results.
4. A New Way of Organising Working Time
On this foundation, AIT has introduced a more flexible approach to organising working time.
The working day has been reduced from eight hours to seven and a half hours. Customer work is prioritised from Monday to Friday, with weekend work avoided wherever possible except in unavoidable circumstances.
The production team operates a rotating Saturday arrangement so that each person has two Saturdays off per month. Office staff work online on two Saturdays and have the other two Saturdays off, rather than everyone having to work every Saturday.
When overtime is required, teams proactively arrange time off in lieu where appropriate to ensure people have sufficient time to rest and recharge. More importantly, teams and managers have the autonomy to organise their working arrangements in the way that best supports effectiveness.
Additional time off is not treated as a benefit separate from results. If a department or project falls behind schedule, the Saturday-off arrangement may be temporarily adjusted until performance improves.
AIT is therefore building a new relationship between time, autonomy and results.
In practice, people are working fewer hours while achieving better results.
5. Measuring to Improve Together
For this model to work in practice, AIT does not rely on perceptions alone.
Effectiveness is assessed against project objectives, daily and weekly, through Kanban, with very practical questions:
Is the project on schedule?
Are deadlines being met?
What is the quality of the output?
What is the error rate?
How often does work have to be repeated?
Are customers satisfied?
Teams are responsible for collecting data so that the organisation has a basis for reviewing and adjusting its work after each project. Measures of progress, quality and customer satisfaction are incorporated into the evaluation process.
The aim is not to create another reporting system. On the contrary, AIT is working to reduce reports that do not create value and increase the data that genuinely helps teams make decisions and improve their work.
6. Reducing Dependence on Individuals by Building System Capability
One of the challenges AIT previously faced was its heavy dependence on certain individuals. To address this, AIT has strengthened cross-training and capability sharing across the team.
Project leads are responsible for training new members joining their projects. Team members are encouraged to develop the ability to take on a wider range of tasks. Cross-checking mechanisms are used to ensure quality, while department managers remain accountable for the overall quality of their areas.
AIT has also established arrangements to cover for people when they are on leave, so that work does not become stalled simply because one individual is absent.
The goal is not for everyone to do everything. The goal is to ensure that the organisation is not “locked into” a few individuals, and that capability can be shared, developed and used more flexibly.
7. From a Culture of Blame to a Culture of Learning and Accountability
System change will not be sustainable without cultural change.
AIT is gradually replacing the question:
“Who made the mistake?”
with more useful questions:
“What happened?”
“Why did it happen?”
“Where is the system not working?”
“What do we need to change so that we can do better next time?”
This does not mean overlooking mistakes or reducing individual accountability. On the contrary, everyone is expected to take responsibility within their area.
But responsibility no longer means finding someone to blame.
When a problem is identified, the aim is to resolve it as early as possible, understand the root causes together, and make improvements so that the problem does not happen again.
This is how AIT is building an environment where people can talk about problems without fear of personal attack, while not using that sense of safety as a reason to avoid responsibility.
8. Changes That Are Already Creating Results
These changes are not limited to people’s perception of a better working environment. During the first phase of improvement, AIT recorded clear results:
Revenue increased by 30%.
Profit increased accordingly.
Overtime costs decreased by more than 50%.
Work efficiency improved.
Working hours decreased, people’s quality of life improved, and the culture improved.
These are early results of a journey that is still continuing.
What is particularly significant is that AIT did not achieve these results by asking people to work more. Instead, the company is testing a different approach: creating better results by making the system better.
When work is more transparent, priorities are clearer, bottlenecks are identified earlier, decision-making is closer to the work, and activities that do not create value are removed, people can devote more energy to the work that genuinely creates value.
9. A Journey Without an End Point
Everything described above has already been implemented at AIT and continues to be operated, measured, adjusted and improved.
The company continues to review its processes, develop capabilities, improve technology, refine measurement, strengthen collaboration between departments and look for better ways of working.
This is the important difference in AIT’s journey.
AIT began by recognising the distances that existed within its own organisation: the distance between leaders and employees, between departments, between information and decisions, and between responsibility and results.
Open Management is helping AIT gradually close these distances.
By changing the role of leadership, AIT has gone deeper into how work is organised, how results are measured, how capability is developed, how time is used, and how people respond when problems occur.
From a business that was heavily dependent on individuals, AIT is building a system that creates broader ownership and accountability.
From a culture of blame and avoidance, AIT is building a culture of transparency, trust, accountability and learning.
And from a simple desire for more time to rest, AIT is turning this into a bigger question about how a business can create more value without requiring people to work more.
Better Work, Better Life is no longer simply something AIT aspires to. It is becoming a principle through which AIT designs the way it works, leads, collaborates and grows.
AIT does not consider this journey complete. But through the changes already made and the results being created, AIT has demonstrated that a family business can change the way it operates without losing its values—instead, creating an organisation that is more transparent, more autonomous, more effective and happier.