I was meeting with an experienced and successful entrepreneur and my business partner today. The entrepreneur said some intereing things:
"All of my employees are permitted to work a maximum of 3 days a week at the office... and nobody gets their own office. "
When asked why he responded:
"If you can't trust someone to work at home you really can't trust them to work at the office either. So you shouldn't hire them in the first place. And if they do work from home they usually work uninterrupted and productively."
He also went on to say that the lack of offices with doors at his company was due to:
"If you have an office someone can come in and turn a 3 minute conversation into 30 minutes of wasted time. If you work out in the open then someone stopping by to chat has to talk in front of everyone which puts a lot of pressure on them to talk about something with real substance."
Finally, he said that he had no secretaries because:
"The whole point of a secretary is to schedule meetings for you, you can't work if you're at meetings all day so I don't have a secretary."
Now this is a guy I could work with! I'm all for empowering the employee... it's amazing the capabilities that each individual has in terms of creativity and productivity. I strongly believe that it is the system that hinders the employee from fully unlocking the potential of the human person as a thinking, creating and analyzing machine (for instance Toyota is destroying GM because the employees are empowered with a kill switch for the whole production line. If they find something wrong with even one part they are encouraged to stop production so it can be fixed. As you can imagine the error rates have dropped significantly. GM has had no such system.) Any corporate or work structure/system needs to be designed to work for humans, not vice versa. The system should be a tool for the human, not see the human as a tool for the system.
Oh and he also bans sticky notes because:
"Sticky notes cost 3 times what paper does and besides you can just send an email or write it down in the computer for free."
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Tags: entrepreneur, human, machine, productivity
Well... chaptor is looking for work... what does this entrepreneur do? Seems like someone I could work for too!
I have been on distributed teams for around 5 years... Denver, both US coasts, Canada, Brazil, UK, India, Australia... it makes for interesting meeting times. It is very fun too! I got good at con calls, NetMeeting, WebEx, and the old standbys of email and IM.
For one account I traveled to sunny CA for "War Room week" at the beginning of a test cycle. I thought it was important to be there in person to facilitate the tester/developer/BA interaction. As it turned out, most of the developers attended the "war room" from their desks 30' away! That bothered me at first, but then I realized that they could get more done, I could get more done, and they were just a short stroll away. Plus, when I went home we already had good distance communication in place.
It did not reduce my productivity to work from home. My company then decided that we had to BE in the office 3 days a week! (Yup... just the opposite of your friend's company!) They said that it was because we would miss all of the symbiosis that occurs around the water cooler and coffee station... well... I occasionally said hi to someone I knew from previous gigs, I often nodded my head and said G'Day! to 1 or 2 people a day... and that only cost me a 25 min drive 6 times a week... hummm... I agree Greentheo... the commute is a lot better at home!
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greentheo Reply:
January 9th, 2009 at 11:38 am
ha kind of funny!
I found that to be irritating too... most people at most meetings owuld just dial in from their desks. Obviously this is a clue that the meeting should likely not be held at all... or that it's too long (or the right people weren't invited in the first place). Meetings are really most effective when the people are face to face and everyone is actively participating.
That being said, most meetings are more for show then they are for productive brainstorming... in otherwords PR "yes I'm doing my job... see I'm holding meetings to let everyone know just how important I am to the organisation!"
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