office

Friday

We have a little tradition in the office where I work now. We call the last working day of the week – Friday. It doesn’t really matter which day of the week it is really. If there are some public holidays ahead, then, even Wednesday can be a perfect Friday. Sometimes we refer to such Friday as an Early Friday.

A good example of this is today. Even though the calendar on every electronic device around me says “Thursday”, my colleagues are walking around with smiles on their faces. “It’s Friday finally”, they say. That is because tomorrow the Republic of Cyprus joins Greek in celebrations of the Ohi Day. It is a public holiday which usually also features a military parade.

Interestingly, we don’t have a similar tradition for Late Monday. Even though it would be logical to call the first working day of the week Monday, we don’t. I think that is because Mondays are special. They are tough and ugly and nobody likes them. Calling another day of the week Monday is an insult. Whereas calling another day of the week a Friday is a compliment.

With that, happy Early Friday to all of you guys!

Office snapshots

The Web is full of inspiration office snapshots from the companies that care about their people – Google, Yahoo, and a few others. However, until now, I’ve never thought of finding an index of such office designs. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a location-based and company-based indexes with pictures from all such office around the world? I thought it would. And, apparently, there is such a collection already. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Office Snapshots. Have a look around the world and, for what it’s worth, don’t get too depressed about your own office. You are in the majority here.

Brick wall office

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to work in an old building with naked brick walls. My current office building is not very old, but it being a design company office before we moved in, it does of course feature some nrick walls. But somehow knowing the fact that these walls aren’t real, that these bricks are for design and decoration purposes only, it all feels fake. I still want to work in a brick wall office. But I want real brick walls, not decorations.

On working hours

I’ve recently started advocating for flexible working hours in all the offices I can get my foot into. With our recent power cuts there was an extra possibility for a few companies to try remote working and more flexible schedules. It went very well with some, and so well with others. The lack of self-discipline is often mentioned as a primary roadblock to such flexibility. I used to agree with that. But now I don’t. I think that internal company communication tools and channels have a much larger impact on whether flexible schedules and remote work will work or not.

Why am I suddenly speaking about flexible hours? Because I came across this blog post by Zach Holman, one of a few GitHub employees.

By allowing for a more flexible work schedule, you create an atmosphere where employees can be excited about their work. Ultimately it should lead to more hours of work, with those hours being even more productive. Working weekends blur into working nights into working weekdays, since none of the work feels like work.

Read the whole thing, it’s not that long and it is well written.

On working remotely

Here are a few notes on working remotely from a person who has first hand experience with that:

In terms of communication I think remote employees are a massive benefit to a company, it is easy in an office to forget about proper communications channels because you can bypass them and tap somebody on the shoulder, which leads to confusion as people are now out of the loop and without information they need to work, this problem becomes even worse as your company grows. Working remotely is impossible without proper communication channels, seperate mailing lists for different working groups, bug trackers, project management tools and chat rooms for quick messaging. Everyone will be forced to use these as a part of their daily workflow which helps combat the usual lack of adoption with office tools, when I am working remotely I feel a lot more confident I know what I need to do than in an office. There are times when its easier to work face to face particularly with more high level discussions and planning so I make sure to use as much of my time visiting the office to get these done.

I wish more people considered it.