The Way We Work
We’ve spent a lot of time at soma identifying and removing roadblocks to worker happiness and productivity. I would like to share with you some of the things we do to make work and life easier for ourselves and improve the quality of results for our clients.
Traditionally, how do people "work?"
This is a tough question to answer because everyone has different jobs and different circumstances surrounding that job. However, there are several things that are common amongst many jobs. Things like waking up, getting ready, eating breakfast (or other timely meal), driving to work for a certain time, trying to focus, putting out any fires that arise, and then coming home to de-stress.
What’s wrong with this picture?
There are several issues with this traditional work method that increase the likelihood of worker burnout and decrease productivity. We start by asking questions that challenge even the most basic work-related assumptions.
- How can I do my job better?
- What do I need from my team in order to do better work?
- How can I be happier in my work vs. being angry or depressed?
- Why do we have daily or weekly meetings?
- Why do I have to be in the office in order to be considered "at work?"
- Why does work start at 9:00AM?
Many times things are done simply because that’s the way they have always been done. We go along every day and perform the tasks without looking into why and how. If this is the answer to any of the questions above, we dig deeper and look for solutions.
Why does a person have to "go" to work?
Clients can’t believe it when we tell them we don’t have an office. Not a traditional one, anyway. A traditional office is too slow. We live in an interconnected, up-to-the-second world and needed to radically change the way we work in order to reflect that.
Is there a better way?
soma is currently spread out over a few cities/villages in the Guelph, Waterloo, Cambridge, and Kitchener area. We work virtually, using cutting-edge online communication tools to keep each other in the loop. When a message comes in from a client or another somaTEAM member, we all receive notifications whether it be through our Blackberries or through E-Mail.
We’ve had somaTEAM members working across Canada and around the the world. If we stuck to traditional business rules, we would have had to force those people to move to our area so they can arrive every morning in our office or simply go without their talent. That’s just not good enough.
No rent, no garbage collection, no 9AM daily start, no locking the doors at night. Each somaTEAM member works from their home office, which we help to outfit with high quality gear. Or they can work in a forest. Or they can work on a park bench next to Speed River. Whatever makes them happy and most productive.
What about group work?
The type of group work that needs completion dictates our location for the day. We are very agile and take advantage of the low-cost or managed solutions available to us rather than running it in-house. It’s fun finding innovative solutions that are already available, all around us.
If it’s a discussion, we sit in a booth at a cafe. Someone else pays for the cafe, we pay for the coffee with no strings attached. If it’s a presentation, we can use somaICE on the Nintendo Wii at a co-work location in the area. If it’s time sensitive and we’re on the road, one somaTEAM member will drive and another will work in the passenger seat using a Blackberry tethered to a laptop for Internet access, no matter where we are.
The somaTEAM usually gets together in person twice per week to chat and work side-by-side, going over anything that needs discussing. But even this is not a required gathering.
Breaking the mould
Any time that technology and critical thinking break a social norm in order to make progress is a time to celebrate. Doing something the same way as yesterday simply because it’s the way you did it yesterday doesn’t help anyone. Keep looking for neat ideas to help you and your team achieve success faster, whether large or small.
The next step
Are our methods scalable? Will it work the same whether we have 100 somaTEAM members or 1000? To some degree, probably. What’s more important is to remain open and agile enough to know when something is not working and to try innovative solutions in order to solve it.
For those future somaTEAM members who are outside our current geographical area, it may help to incorporate a Second Life or OpenSim office or make better use of video chat. This way they can see and interact with the somaTEAM with an avatar or using body language which is sometimes better than text communication.
In the meantime, we’ll continue to make use of the wonderful facilities available to us in order to do our work to the best of our abilities and with a minimum of roadblock fuss.
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