How to make your employees feel that work is also a cool place to hang out
Scenario 1 :
9 AM to 6 PM office hours. Very strict office hours.
Employees (ah, we pay them) have to be in for eight hours every day because we pay them for that.
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Ordinary work day:
One hour lunch break, one hour of Facebook, one hour of chat, one hour of other extremely interesting links plus e-mail. Ten minutes of waiting for files to get attached, ten minutes for attachments to be downloaded, meeting. Yaay! Two hours over important issues and processes. This is fun. Coffee/smoke breaks are just nice, keeps people fresh, you see. And we need people to be fresh. Have to talk to colleagues. We do not hire the socially challenged. Evenings should be spent outside. Next day has to be fresh again.
In the time that’s left, we have so much work to finish.
Alarm goes off. Urgent meeting. Let us increase productivity. Bam! Goal set. But how?
Block all social websites. Hold on, what the heck? Let us just block all the sites. If they have to visit a site, they’ll ask for permission! No personal e-mails either. Limit attachments to 2 MB. Sad that we can’t take out lunch time. What? Proxies? Block those too. A lot of sites are still accessible. But how? We really need to put up an elaborate system to block all these and make sure nothing else except work happens on their computers. They don’t like it? Not really our problem. Why are people leaving? Let us work on employee relations. What? Output still hasn’t tripled? Not doubled, even? That is very strange. Something’s wrong somewhere. Definitely.
Scenario 2:
We tried something different at 1st December.
No office timings, strict or otherwise. Turn up whenever. Leave whenever. We know the amount of work we have, so we judge the time required to finish it ourselves. We are and do hire grown-ups, and an average grown-up should be able to make that judgement. No hierarchies. Only short meetings to set goals for everyone. One common e-mail id. No forwarding, receiving, CC-ing (Bcc-ing either) and no missing out on mails. Everyone knows what’s going on. It is a good thing.
Let’s not block any site. There’s too much inspiration, knowledge, help and people online to ignore. This also helps in saving the time spent in communication and waiting for unblocking a blocked site, which was a silly idea in the first place!
So along with open Facebook, deviantArt and Youtube windows, work happens too. Along with a call, we send mails too. While we are discussing a project, we open up inspirational sites, play loud music, download attachments and maybe have coffee. If we finish work early, we leave early. Or maybe still hangout and watch a movie or check out interesting links. If the week’s work is over in the first four days, we take the fifth day off. When you’re not tied up inside and someone’s not counting your time spent inside, office naturally becomes a better place.
Simple as that.
Result: We come to work in shorts. We may have a drink at the office in the evening. We play games when we get bugged. Projects happen faster, frustration levels are lesser, work is also a cool place to hang out, and about the so-called productivity, make a guess.
This works for us. There are no rights or wrongs. Really. Depending on your organization’s size and nature, there might be something else that works for you. The key is to identify and dare to go that way.
Rajaram Rajendran
The writer is an entrepreneur, designer, digital artist, wannabe musician and a jack of all who thinks black & white photography is very cool.
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are that of the author and does not represent the magazine's.
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