Why work doesn't happen at work

Watched this interesting TED talk by Jason Fried of 37Signals fame, author of Rework (which I am in the process of reading). He is one of the guys who is not afraid to say out loud what he thinks, even if it is against the conventional wisdom.

My intention with this post is not to explain or transcribe what he said in his TED talk, but to evaluate what I have been doing so far as a manager and a business owner in managing a team and getting work done and also to explore what I can do differently based on his observations.

First, I wish to place it on the record that though I am a big fan of his work and his style of doing things, I do not think it should be followed blindly. I am more of an copy and adapt person who would like to experiment and take on things that are more in line with my style and level of comfort.

Basically Fried says that for each person there is a time of a day or a place where they are usually productive. And that time may not necessarily be between traditional office hours and the place may not be the office. It may be some other place, their homes, a coffee shop, etc. And the fact that people are consistently getting disturbed in office, by office gossip, a co worker tapping them on the shoulder to clarify something, a ringing phone and worst of all, by managers, whom he identifies as people who have nothing particular to do so they keep disturbing the people who do the work.

I can identify with some of the things. And quite honestly I might be guilty of checking up on my guys from time to time. But let me put things in perspective.

First of all, let me say that for starters we are not very strict on working hours. It is true that our guys come to work around the same time and leave office around a particular time, but we are not clock watchers. We are not promoters of burning mid night oil. We do work our butts off at times, but that is when the push comes to the shove. Otherwise, we plan to have each guy work a decent amount of hours a day.

Then we are open to remote working. If there is something that needs to be done, and it’s gonna take the guy more than what he can do before he needs to go off, I usually give them the option to finish the task from home, if that is possible. Secondly, we already tried allowing one of our guys work a week a month from home. While we may not go for full time tele-workers any time soon, once a guy puts in some time in the office and we are familiar with each others work, we are certainly open to allowing them to work from home partially, if the need arises. But we want to have them in one place, specially at start of projects since we value one to one collaboration at initial stages.

One thing that we do not have is private offices for each person. I personally believe that coding is a team effort, although a person writes his or her code individually, there is much collaboration that needs to go on. So the risk of them getting disturbed by one another is there. But what I have observed is, that though they spend time socializing, when they need to concentrate they usually put their headsets on (headsets are given by us) and play some music and get on with their task. So apart from me who sails to the room from time to time, and tap them on their shoulders to ask how things are going, they manage fine without getting disturbed.

One thing that I want to point out about me checking up on them is that it is not done with the intention of managing them, but more with a intention of collaboration. If they are stuck with something, and are lost with ideas, I can, maybe, bring in a fresh perspective and offer a solution. Not to boast, I have unstuck the guys when they are stuck, quite a few times.

And finally I must say that we are very much interested in developing ‘whole’ software engineers. We try to develop if there are any areas that they are weak in. The idea is to develop them so that they become fully fledged ‘software engineers’ who are conversant not only with technology, but in general areas as well.

While our strategies are not as radical as those Jason Fried suggests, we sure are taking the cues from his philosophy where it fits our way of doing things.