37Signals are one of those companies that you either love or hate, I guess. I like them a lot, with their cheeky, no-nonsense approach to things. It’s true that a lot of problems come down to doing the right thing so you have to ask – what are the barriers to doing the right thing? … Continue reading “Workplace Experiments”
37Signals are one of those companies that you either love or hate, I guess. I like them a lot, with their cheeky, no-nonsense approach to things. It’s true that a lot of problems come down to doing the right thing so you have to ask – what are the barriers to doing the right thing?
Here’s an example
At our company-wide get together last December we decided that 2008 was going to be a year of workplace experiments. Among other things, we discussed how we could make 37signals one of the best places in the world to work, learn, and generally be happy.
They’ve implemented the following so far:
- Shorter Work Weeks
- Funding People’s Passions
- Discretionary Spending Accounts
Love them or hate them you have to admit it’s pretty forward thinking. Some people will dislike the environment in a 4 day week and you could follow the pattern recursively until down to a 0-day week and then they’d be happy. You’d be out of business soon after and then they’d be sad. But they’d blame you.
The last two points deal with money and my opinion is that if it can reasonably be counted as a work expense then it probably should be one. For example, woodworking and pilots lessons would not, but driving lessons might, as should cooking, because really, everyone benefits from cooking lessons.
I think that it should be standard practise for a technology company that is established to have some sort of account with O’Reilly or one of the other book vendors so that the staff can get reasonable access to decent materials like these. If there’s an IT conference, let them go. (in comparison, getting just paid leave to go an IT conference is difficult in $BIG_CORP even if you’re paying your own travel and subsistence).
Why not just pay a higher salary?
Well, for a 4 day week, you’ve just got a 20% bonus. And if you provide a higher salary, people will adjust their lifestyle to fill it and still want work to buy books. And then you have to consider the tax implications. It quickly gets to a point where you’re going to pay people more money just for a third of it (or more) to go straight to the government. And no-one likes that.
My interest in this comes more from the work-life balance. I’m more interested in the results from a 4 day week or from the opportunities to be gained from remote working or working from home. In my experience it made me a lot happier. I missed out on being in the office but my team was virtual anyway – we only spoke over the phone or via email/IM.