How, when, and where we work together.
We believe in bringing our whole selves to our work practice. Our personal and inner lives will affect our work, and vice versa. In order for us to work well together, it helps to know how we're doing beyond just project updates.
In this spirit, we do a daily checkin in the #daily-checkin channel on Slack. For each of the three categories personal, work, and inner, we give a 1-5 rating (1 = terrible, 5 = awesome) and some brief words about how we're feeling in each of those areas.
Anything safe for work can be shared, with the understanding that anything shared during checkins is strictly confidential unless explicitly stated otherwise.
We also do spoken check-ins at the start of every tactical meeting.
With the exception of partners that need to be on site to support learners, we are a remote team. There is no location requirement where a partner must do their work.
All weekly tactical meetings are held remotely via Zoom. We agree to show up on time and ready for these meetings.
These meetings will be scheduled ahead of time by the Secretary and all participants will receive a calendar invite with a link to the Zoom room.
We use all-remote meetings because it is smoother to have every participant logged into a video conference than to have one group in person with the rest remote.
In order to maximize working productivity and quality of life, partners can expense the cost of a monthly coworking space membership (flexible or dedicated desk), if they prefer not to work from home.
The amount of reimbursement may vary by city, but should align to typical membership costs for a partner's location (use WeWork or Impact Hub's location-based rates as a guideline: https://www.wework.com/locations / http://www.impacthub.net/where-are-impact-hubs/)
"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together"
Full-time can mean very different things for different people and organizations. Our goal is to develop a healthy pace for the long haul.
We recognize that for the company to achieve its goals, we need to be productive, efficient, and resilient. It is easier to fill time with any work than to prioritize work. One hour of focused labor on a core competency is better than two hours of distracted work that is misaligned with our current strategies.
We agree to work as much as we can and feel inspired to do, but not so much that it erodes our ability to maintain pace, or depletes our lives outside of work. As a general number to aim for, we use 40 (full) hours a week.
Managing time is a skill; especially when working remotely, it is difficult to not work too much or too little. We have to hold ourselves and each other accountable to find our balance.
We seek to avoid the Cult of Productivity anti-pattern. Too often, organizations reward quantity of work and idolize members who burn the candle at both ends. This not only distracts from the more important metrics of quality and accuracy (to org mission) of the work, but is a prime recipe for burnout.
tldr: Work when you're most productive. Work smart on stuff that energizes you rather than depletes you. Aim for roughly 40 hours a week.
A remote, flex-time, holacracy-driven organization means we don't have an opportunity to spend "tribe time" together we nurture our professional and personal relationships as a team outside of a work context.
To make room for this, partners are required to attend around five residential retreats a year. Length of the retreats will vary from 2 to 5 days.
We encourage partners to be available for communication (either in person or on Slack) as much as they wish and feel is appropriate for their current task. This can mean leaving Slack open all day, or logging in for set periods a few times per day.
Communication, as they say, is the key to every relationship. Working remotely makes synchronous communication a choice, not a requirement. While the benefits of being able to "go dark" and focus on a task without risk of distraction are great, we must also make time to be explicitly available to the team.
In some companies, nobody talks to each other unless they schedule a meeting first, even if it's just for a quick question. Let's not do that please.
For quick conversations, just reach out!
The best place to do so is on a public Slack channel. That way, other partners can chime in to provide useful information.
If the conversation needs to be private, the next best option is to either (a) send them a private message in Slack or (b) give them a phone call.
If you know that you'll need to spend some more serious time with them (more than 10 minutes or so), or you want to book time in the future, then it is a good idea to schedule a meeting.
For 1-1 meetings with other partners, we use Calendly. Every partner has an account, which makes it easy to book time with them.
For meetings that involve more than 2 people, the best option is to create an event in your Google calendar and invite them by email. Use our group email addresses to invite lots of partners at once.
All partners in Learners Guild commit to practicing Getting Things Done. The Holacracy constitution requires that partners be responsible for tracking their next-actions and projects in a database that is constantly updated and reviewed.
Getting Things Done (GTD) is a well known and effective personal productivity system that formalizes this process. We all use Asana for GTD, and we even have a bot that automates tedious tasks and helps us use it better!
Check out the Getting Things Done section of the Guide for more information.