We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.Derrick Jensen
There is so much talk today about sustainability. Ecology of the planet, conservation of energy resources, health of ecosystem, protection of species, and so on.
Allow another to be added: sustaining the humans who work for us.
Employees often believe they are being flexible when they offer their team company cell phones, laptops, and secure VPN connections. What they’re really saying is — be available 24/7. What flexibility is there in being on call every minute of every day? Same with companies that offer barber shops, in-office doctors!
Reflect on your vacation preparation. Laptop Check? Cell Phone check? VPN? Are our work and home lives even barely distinguishable?
Menlo is consistently awarded on workplace flexibility. But we don’t offer wild, flexible work hours, telecommuting, or work-from-home options. So, why? At Menlo, we know the people who work the smartest, who produce the best results — are people who know when to work and when to rest.
Choose a Sustainable Work Pace
We work 40 hour workweeks. Long days are uncommon. Usually our office is dark and locked by six pm. Everyone starts off with 4 weeks of vacation time per year. If a team member is tired on the same project for too many weeks, he or she can simply request a switch to a new project. And there are sabbaticals. Family comes first.
Honour People over Process
We make no assertion that low attrition is a sign of healthy culture!
Out of Office
There’s no replacement to all team working out of one location. Being in same space, with the sound of your peers all around, greatly increases the possibility of innovation and collaboration. We are a one location, single room company.
We do allow tele-commuting in rare exceptions. Our process is important, but choosing process over people is not one of our core values.
A Ready State for Starting
You can’t have sustainability without flexibility.
In XP Explained, Kent Beck doesn’t say, “Get along with change” or “Learn to live with change” or “Tolerate change.” He says, “Embrace change.” We embrace things we love. So we need to learn to love change, be open to flexibility, and understand the difference between flexibility that breeds chaos and flexibility that promotes sustainability.
Most companies are very unpracticed at starting new initiatives. Starting a new initiative is so difficult that this inability to begin often leaves even the best of ideas stalled. If the initiative does kick off and gets off to a bad start, each day that goes by makes it more difficult to get back on track. This is a key reason most companies are frozen in place and can’t figure out how to try anything new: they don’t know how to begin.
Flexibility
At Menlo, flexibility is ingrained in every facet of our system.
SPACE: Inflexible work space can defeat new initiatives. Don’t put “permission asking” bureaucracy.
INDIVIDUALS: Our pairs switch every week. Team members flexibly adjust to the personality and style of another Menlonian. Having to adjust to these differences every week produces a flexible mind-set in every team member. The weekly switching may also include changing projects, domains, or technologies. Part of being flexible means staying in learning mode. Practicing how to learn keeps us a learning organisation, which contributes to the team’s continuous mental adaptability.
COGNITIVE DIVERSITY: We don’t offer referral bonuses. We do not recruit only from local universities and talent pools. We thus gain a cognitive diversity of people who have been taught in different ways by different professors. People from all age ranges, with varied life experiences, all work together to keep us flexible.
WORKWEEK: We accomodate part-time workers. Scheduling is tricky but this also is center of our Org flexibility.
DOMAINS: We do not pigeonhole team members.
ROLES: People, not skills, are our most important resources. People move between roles. This attitude towards roles gives us a more flexible team. Our pairing approach ensures that experienced role models are available as pair partners to help those who are switching roles to come up to speed quickly.
TOOLS: We use simple, cheap, and usually paper based tools. We do simple prototyping.
COMPUTERS: We do not standardize our equipment. This may also put us at risk for creating software that works only on one type of computers. Each week, as the pairs switch, they will likely have to switch computers, too. This ensures no one can say “it worked on my machine!” If we are to build software that is user friendly, we need to keep ourselves flexible on what equipment we use as well.
Flexibility Produces Capacity That Is Ready When You Need It
Overtime is the only option for additional capacity? Hiring may not be an option too! In our world, pairing is a central element in building this capacity. Each team member’s immersion in our belief system and the willingness of the leaders to trust people to step out of their typical day-to-day role and into a new role create a different kind of joy that emanates from the trust shown both in the people and the system.
altLearners 