Germany trialled a new four-day work week with great success, as 73% of companies will continue to only work four days out of the week.
They call it the ‘100-80-100’ concept. This means employees will retain 100% of their salary, work 80% of the time, but contribute 100% of their output still.
I feel so many times that instead of having a meeting I could just write a email with a link to the documentation I wrote for the purpose of everyone in the project following it. People could read it when they have time and ask questions via email and I would answer them asynchronously and everyone would be up to speed.
In reality when I do that the email gets ignored by 95℅ of the people who should know about it and that leads to many problems because we can’t align on how to run the project. And I get it I also get so many email and it’s not always clear if they are important for me or not and I have so many things to do so I’m happy to ignore the not so important things.
A meeting, as bad as it is, forces you to take one hour out of your schedule and spent it in this specific topic. On top of it when we go through the documentation together it’s easy to understand what parts of it are more important and which less, etc.
And because there are many people in my situation in the project each of them needs to create a meeting just to be able to cut through the loud voices in the email and deliver their message so that I end up with more than 50℅ of my day in meetings.
We got rid of our stand-ups in favor of a morning slack check-in in the group channel.
We even have a little bot that lets you input them at any time before the scheduled deadline and reports them all at once so you don’t have to put it in in the morning (many people prefer reporting on their day at the end of the day).
This combined with a robust pull request system means that a lot of work can get done async.
We have occasional meetings but they’re pointed and specific between only the people that need to talk so nobody’s time feels wasted.
It took like 2+ years to develop this culture but it’s worth it.
I feel so many times that instead of having a meeting I could just write a email with a link to the documentation I wrote for the purpose of everyone in the project following it. People could read it when they have time and ask questions via email and I would answer them asynchronously and everyone would be up to speed.
In reality when I do that the email gets ignored by 95℅ of the people who should know about it and that leads to many problems because we can’t align on how to run the project. And I get it I also get so many email and it’s not always clear if they are important for me or not and I have so many things to do so I’m happy to ignore the not so important things.
A meeting, as bad as it is, forces you to take one hour out of your schedule and spent it in this specific topic. On top of it when we go through the documentation together it’s easy to understand what parts of it are more important and which less, etc.
And because there are many people in my situation in the project each of them needs to create a meeting just to be able to cut through the loud voices in the email and deliver their message so that I end up with more than 50℅ of my day in meetings.
We got rid of our stand-ups in favor of a morning slack check-in in the group channel.
We even have a little bot that lets you input them at any time before the scheduled deadline and reports them all at once so you don’t have to put it in in the morning (many people prefer reporting on their day at the end of the day).
This combined with a robust pull request system means that a lot of work can get done async.
We have occasional meetings but they’re pointed and specific between only the people that need to talk so nobody’s time feels wasted.
It took like 2+ years to develop this culture but it’s worth it.