His is the first in a series in which We Are Mammoth team members, most of whom are distributed nationwide, share how they set up their home offices for remote work.
As more and more employers around the country embrace remote work and flexible scheduling, we felt it was important to show exactly how this arrangement looks in practice.
Setting up a home workstation may not be as intuitive for people used to going to an office, and everyone’s ideal workstation setup is different.
“Desks, chairs, shelving, trinkets, whiteboards, wall paint–there are lots of personal decisions to make with a physical environment that is 100% yours,” Ka Wai writes.
Let this guide serve as a companion to that series. If your company allows remote work, or if you have just begun working for yourself from home, here is a checklist of all the details you will want to consider for your home office design.
In an upcoming post, we will then explore remote work from an employer’s perspective.
Take Inventory of Your Infrastructure, Tools and Technology
Chefs use the phrase “mise en place” to describe the prep and organization of ingredients that will go into the day’s menu items, and that’s a useful metaphor for envisioning your workstation’s preparation.
Below are the key tools you will need to be productive at home. We will organize and optimize all of these tools later on.
Basics: A Computer and a Connection
Every remote worker needs at minimum reliably fast internet access and a good computer. This probably sounds obvious, but do not take access to reliable IT for granted, especially for team members who live in small towns and exurbs.
“A lot of our staff live in small cities or rural areas in the U.S. All of them have abysmal internet connections that often impact their work.
“To take one example, Rod is our lead video trainer and lives in a small city just outside of Cincinnati. There’s no cable or fiber connection, so he uses DSL. His home internet connection is often a slow as 5 mbps down and 0.3 up.”
Access to fast internet may be unavailable or prohibitively expensive in your part of the country, though that is finally changing.
As a rule of thumb, anticipate that you will need download speeds of at least 20 mbps and upload speeds of at least 5 mbps. If you work with rich media or video, probably double that upload speed.
Also, if you will be working from a personal computer, make sure it’s fit for work. You know your machine and will recognize when it’s underperforming. If spreadsheets take a whole minute to load or web apps continually crash, it is probably time for a new computer.
Once the hardware and tools are sorted, you should determine where exactly you will work.
A few criteria go into this decision:
Whether the room you choose is big enough for your needs
Whether it is properly ventilated
How close it is to busy, disruptive spaces such as the kitchen or perhaps a window overlooking a busy street
Whether you have enough wall sockets to support your devices without having to run extension cords
Whether the room will require you to buy a WiFi extender
Whether a nice view is important to you
Obviously, those criteria assume an abundance of options. Most people don’t have a collection of empty rooms in their homes they can claim as an office. Instead, they have to repurpose rooms that are available.
Organizer Regina Leeds points out that home offices frequently do double duty as a guest room.
“Do you have the space appropriately divided for each activity to be performed here?” she writes on designer Carla Aston’s site. Thus, the repurposed guest room might need some work to accommodate the office. “The most common culprit I find with this combo-type is a large bed that’s rarely used but eating up valuable real estate. Why not consider a futon or Murphy bed?”
“Don’t locate your office in the frigid attic where numb hands and frozen feet will be a constant issue. Likewise, you don’t want to be hot and sweaty when you’re trying to meet a deadline. If you don’t have an option, choose a way to control the climate with either a space heater or an AC unit.”
Room Lighting
Lighting is easy to overlook, but anyone who has spent even a day in an office lit mostly by overhead bulbs knows what ocular exhaustion around 5:00 PM feels like.
This starts with letting in lots of natural light for ambience, but task-specific lighting is also called for.
“When a room is consistently lit, your eye bounces searching to find the brightest spot creating eye strain and headache,” Valley Lighting’s team suggests. “It’s better to create layers of light with different light sources and intensities.
“Try setting pendants at different heights, use a dimmer on overheads or diffuse your lighting by angling it toward the ceiling. Ceiling fixtures should be located so the light falls just in front or to the side of your desk. This is especially helpful if your desk has a high gloss finish that would create a glare if the desk were directly under a ceiling fixture.”
The Room’s Organization and Functionality
Professional office organizer Kacy Paide has an excellent guide to setting up a home office from scratch, and in it she makes an important point about leaving room to spread your work outward from just your computer and desk.
“The offices I’ve enjoyed being in the most have all had designated space for spreading out and creating,” she writes. “This can be anything from an Idea Paint wall, a vintage chalkboard, or an oversize vision board. Create a space for visioning and outlining the goals you hope to accomplish from this office.”
Matt Perman, who writes about productivity and leadership from a theological viewpoint, suggests dividing up a workspace into six or seven task-specific areas:
The desk
A reference area
A storage area
A shelf for materials about ongoing projects
An area for meetings
A brainstorming area
A lounge area
The last three areas — for meetings, for brainstorming and for lounging — can easily be external spaces. For example, you could lounge and brainstorm in your living room and take any meetings outside of your home.
That leaves the initial four areas for a minimalist office:
You need a good desk.
You need a place to store reference materials such as industry publications.
You need a permanent place to store your tools and materials.
You need an extra space onto which ongoing work materials can spill over.
Getting Organized
Once you have found a place for all of your larger items, organization becomes a matter of finding homes for all of your smaller, everyday items and developing habits to maintain that order.
Apartment Therapy has a great post on organizing your desk drawers, which will be the natural home for all of your smaller tools. The key takeaway here is to establish a hierarchy of drawers so that the most used tools are easiest to access.
“Clutter can easily accumulate, and when everything is important, nothing is …” Apartment Therapy’s editors write. “This is why junk drawers always seem to be the highest drawers in kitchens and offices.”
Notice how organization relies so much on first establishing a mental model for where things go. That’s because being organized is as much a mindset as it is a set of actions.
“We invented pulleys — and notebooks to capture our thoughts! — specifically so we didn’t have to work so hard,” he writes.
“You might get by with a filing system that consists of piling papers precariously on the corner of your desk and only throwing stuff away when it mounds too high for you to see your monitor, but it’s silly to argue anything but that you’d get by better if things were put away properly. I have never met a creative person who was disorganized that wouldn’t have more time to be creative if their life wasn’t a tornado of chaos and clutter.”
Comfort
If you work full-time from your office, you are likely to spend as many as 2,000 hours in there each year. It is worthwhile to invest in comfort and ergonomics for this space, both for productivity’s sake and for the sake of your own health.
Ergonomics
The Mayo Clinic has some useful and precise information on office ergonomics:
The clinic’s staff recommend that any desk at which you sit should be at least 19 inches deep, 30 inches wide and about 34 inches high for the average person (adjust that last dimension to accommodate your own height — most important is that your wrists are at a natural angle when typing).
Your monitor(s) should about an arm’s length directly from you, with the top of the screen slightly below your eye level.
Your chair is an equally important factor in your ergonomics, which The Wirecutter’s Kyle Vanhemert discusses at length in his review of the Steelcase Leap.
UK retailer John Lewis also has a helpful guide to buying an office chair on its site. That guide has one nice insight to keep in mind if you will be chair shopping:
“The longer you’re using the chair, the more adjustable features you’ll need. All the adjustments should be within easy reach and you should be able to operate them, while seated, with minimal effort. Lumbar support is essential if you’re going to use the chair for long periods.”
Of course, this discussion is somewhat moot if you opt for a standing desk. Tech In Asia has one of the best guides for buying a standing desk that we’ve seen. “No matter which desk you choose, one long-term decision you can’t compromise on is ergonomics,” Tech In Asia’s Terence Lee writes.
“Pick a desk that’s not just height adjustable, but also adjustable to your exact body profile. The ability to bring a monitor up to your eye level is something that, in my opinion, shouldn’t be compromised.”
“If you have a home office, I recommend painting it noticeably different from the other rooms in your house,” Ka Wai writes in his post. “A strikingly different wall color helps make me feel like I’m going to a very different place, rather than going to that ‘room next to the kitchen.’ It helps me separate work from home.”
Stacey Leibbrandt, a home and living buyer from Mighty Ape, tells New Zealand’s Stuff something similar. Leibbrandt even ties room color to productivity.
“But usually vibrant contrasting colours will liven up your workspace — great if you require visual inspiration,” she tells reporter Erin Boyle. “Or, for a calm and focused mind, a monochrome palette might be the way to go.”
Don’t get overwhelmed with visual decor, though. The main goal is to make you feel comfortable and able to focus.
If you’re stuck for inspiration, check out a few of these Pinterest boards:
Other senses benefit from stimulation, as well. Tikva Morrow at The Muse recommends aromatherapy as a tried-and-true method for improving a room’s atmosphere.
“Essential oils like lavender and jasmine can actually give you all sorts of great natural boosts,” Morrow writes. “Try a fresh-smelling potted herb or plant, or simply add a scented candle.”
That said, Jennifer Parris at Mashable offers some perspective for those who feel they could get carried away with the whole decorating process.
“Your home office exists so you can make money, not spend it,” she writes. “All sorts of little things can break or stop functioning the way they once did, but spending more money on your home office isn’t always the best approach. If you must buy something, check out second-hand shops and reuse stores before buying new.”
Dealing with Distractions and Remaining Focused
Here is an unfortunate reality: Once you get your office set up just so, following every piece of advice in the 2,000-plus words above, your biggest obstacle still looms.
Simple distractions that you might otherwise never notice can derail any train of thought when you are working from home.
How to Deal With Other People
Friends, family, neighbors and even door-to-door salespeople can find surprising ways to intrude upon your productivity.
“When I first started working from home, I didn’t turn down social plans,” Get Rich Slowly’s Lisa Aberle writes. “You want me to come over for coffee? Sure!”
Aberle says she found relief in simply creating a schedule and forcing herself to stick to it. “While I deviate from the schedule sometimes, both from planned outings and emergencies, I have to find another hole in the schedule to replace my work time.”
A Zirtual assistant named Kelly Schulz writes about the challenges of dealing with strangers on the company’s blog.
“If you do live in an area that receives frequent visits from salespeople or people trying to convince you to vote a certain way, you may find yourself being constantly distracted from your work,” she writes. “The best way to handle this distraction is to either get good at telling people to go away as nicely and as quickly as possible or just get a sign for your door.”
Your Own Home as a Distraction
When you have a moment of lost concentration, even things such as dishes in the sink or dirty laundry can pull you away from your work.
This goes back to Ka Wai’s reasoning for painting his office a different color than any other room in his house. Your office needs to mentally get you away from the rest of your home.
“If you don’t separate your workspace and your home space, you will always feel like you are at work,” Jack Wallen writes at TechRepublic. “That feeling will do a serious number on your psyche. Don’t let it happen.
“Unfortunately, not everyone has the luxury of a spare room to serve as an office. In that case, do what you can to separate your work area from the rest of the home. This may mean using curtains or a standing screen to block your office from the rest of the house — or working in a basement. If you can’t do that, at least make sure to step away from your work desk at the end of the day and don’t look back.
A Word About Procrastination
Without colleagues and bosses around, you only have yourself to answer to in that moment when you feel the desire to slack off.
It’s easy to procrastinate when your time is unstructured and your train of thought has gone off-track.
“Procrastination is an enemy of everyone with a deadline and working at home means it is liable to be on your top 5 list, too,” entrepreneur Kent Isakson writes at LinkedIn. “Divide your time so you only work when it’s time to work. Don’t stop to do the dishes or vacuum the house — take breaks at scheduled times only.”
If you find yourself susceptible to procrastinating and enjoy a little irony, one of the best resources is Wait But Why’s classic post “How to Beat Procrastination.”
Now, mentally step out of your home workspace and embrace the bigger picture.
Technology has enabled millions of people worldwide to earn a living and get work done from the comforts of home.
Author, speaker and entrepreneur Jurgen Appelo argues this is not a fundamental shift in how we work, though. It’s just a question of shifting which spaces we occupy.
“When you have no specific reasons to get together at an office, and you’re able to work anywhere, then I believe your work does not deserve a special attribute such as ‘remote,’” he writes at LinkedIn.
“You’re just a worker. Instead, in the 21st century, working from anywhere will become the norm. And to the people who are tied to an office, the future generations will say, ‘Oh, you are an office worker? How fascinating! Yes, I think my parents once told me about that concept. Sounds challenging!’”
My first solo Kin trip. Destination: North Carolina, with stops in Durham and Charlotte. Purpose: to visit with customers, some of whom I’ve been working and speaking with for nearly two years! The trip was a great success – I learned first hand how Kin helps keep operations running smoothly, where we can improve the app, and I squeezed in some time to explore the cities where these folks have built their awesome companies. A huge bonus was how seeing how much loyalty and confidence our customers have in Kin; I was blown away by them asking how they can help Kin succeed even more!
Day One – Smashing Boxes
I landed in Durham, got my car, stopped by my hotel, then was off to pick up some pies from Scratch Bakery. I could never show up empty handed :) Then, off to my first stop at a digital agency in the heart of Durham, Smashing Boxes. I sat down with Founder, Brian Fischer, and Team Coordinator, Lauren Hogge.
Paid time-off was the hot topic for Brian and Lauren. This is the primary feature they’re using in Kin and had recently implemented updates to Smashing Boxes’ time-off policies. They shared how Kin has helped them tremendously with managing and most importantly, communicating time off with the team.
Brian was particularly interested in the dynamics of Kin’s very distributed team and how that affects not only our culture, but how we handle everyday processes virtually. I shared the tools we use to keep everyone connected, how we’d just completed our first design sprint, and some of the experiences we’ve had transitioning to a remote culture. They’re planning to open an office in Montreal, which would be their first taste of having a remote team.
We also had great conversations on the pains of creating a company handbook. I shared a couple of great resources from Inc. that I used to help Kin create our own handbook.
To round out the visit, I checked on the status of the pies – demolished! – and Lauren gave me a great recommendation for dinner at The Backyard BBQ Pit, featured on Man v Food.
Day Two – Chordoma Foundation
My second day in Durham started with an early morning stop at the Mad Hatter Bakeshop for the goodies I’d bring to my next customer stop, Chordoma Foundation. They’re a nonprofit organization improving the lives of chordoma patients by accelerating research to develop effective treatments for chordoma, and by helping patients get the best care possible.
I met with Tammy Silverthorne, the Director of Operations, and we got right down to it! We reviewed her time-off policies and some questions she had on employees’ time-off balances. We’re currently working on a new layout for how time-off data is displayed, so I gave her a sneak peek of our updates to get her feedback.
The Chordoma Foundation is also a widely distributed team, with employees in Durham, Pennsylvania, and New York City. Tammy shared a great idea with me with how she uses Kin’s files feature, which I gotta say is awesome! Ok, the idea – so you know all of those wonderfullabor law posters that employers need to have posted for all employees to see? Well, she scans them into Kin and shares them with everyone…brilliant!
On my way out, I got to meet a new hire that was just onboarded using Kin, Larry. I was happy to hear that he had a great onboarding experience using Kin with two thumbs up! Not to mention how impressed he was with his new employer’s onboarding process :)
From there, I was on the road to Charlotte!
Day Three: iTek Graphics & MODE
I awoke in Charlotte with one thing in mind: cupcakes. First task of the day was to find some, and find some I did! I made my way over to Jewell Treats to gather up some goodies for my two final customer visits.
iTek Graphics
First up, iTek Graphics, a graphics communications firm with services ranging from printing to web hosting. I met with Owners John Rawlins and Julli Goodwin along with Tina Cox from Accounting.
As a new customer (only about 2 months at the time), they had a fresh perspective with a lot of great questions and feedback on using Kin, as they’d just recently rolled it out to their team. They shared some great ideas that will definitely be of value to the entire Kin community.
John did mention he had a bit of confusion on using files and the onboarding feature in Kin. Setting up and beginning to use the onboarding feature can be a tad intimidating, I know! We reconnected when I got back to Chicago and I helped get him up and running with Kin’s onboarding tool. So far he’s onboarded one new hire using Kin and it was a success!
MODE
Now off to MODE, a seasoned branding & interactive agency with a brand new office in Charlotte. I sat down with one of the Founders, Tyler Hawes, who was an early adopter and friend of Kin. We chatted about how they’re using the tool, mainly to manage paid time-off, but also to onboard new hires. When I asked how using the onboarding feature was going, his response was something like “I have no idea because now the Office Manager can handle it all in Kin.” Perfect.
Tyler and I also talked about the many similarities MODE, Kin, and We Are Mammoth (Kin’s mothership) have as a workplace and culture. We started off similarly and grew quickly, sharing the same growing pains. It was reassuring to hear how Kin has benefited MODE’s workplace administratively and culturally, and how it helps people like Tyler focus on other parts of the business.
Day Four – UNION
On my last day in Charlotte, I stopped by UNION, a digital marketing agency, before heading to the airport. I had met the partners of UNION, Banks Wilson and Christy Holland, a couple of weeks prior at a happy hour event for Owner Camp hosted by We Are Mammoth. We got to talking and realized they were located in Charlotte and that’s where I was headed!
Christy and I went to get some lunch at RuRu’s Tacos & Tequila where we talked benefits, managing time-off, and a whole bunch of other operations chatter over some amazing tacos. We quickly learned we have quite a bit in common personally and professionally. After lunch, we headed back to the office so I could give her and Banks a demo of Kin. They’re getting to that point where having HR software like Kin is a necessity. They’ve quickly grown to 32 employees!
While at UNION I also was introduced to Katie Fogarty, the Partnerships Director. We had a great conversation on both of the companies we work at, the roles we play, and the satisfaction we get from our jobs. It’s refreshing to meet someone else who truly loves what they do and who they work for :) And I can’t leave out Pixel, the Director of Distraction. I was able to sneak in a couple of snuggles with him while I was there too!
Other fun things I did…
In the evening, I strolled around downtown Charlotte and picked up a bite to eat. It just so happened to be the Speed Street 600 Festival leading up to NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 race. I checked out the festival, posed with a race car, and did lots of people watching.
I already had my BBQ splurge, so I went on the hunt for a burger. I found my fix at Cowbell Burger & Whiskey. I mean, come on, their motto is ‘eat more cowbell’. I also played some trivia and sang (rapped) a tune at the best dive bar in America, The Local. My favorite lunch spot? Pure Pizza located in the 7th Street Market.
By Alex Yohn
Jun 2, 2015
I took a trip out to Boston recently to visit a few Kin customers. Boston’s one of my favorite places in the world. It’s where I met my wife, where I got a degree in musical composition, and it’s where oysters, history, excellent bike makers, and Kin customers converged into my 2.5-day adventure.
The excursion started with an early morning bike ride with a friend and fellow product designer named Richard Banfield. Richard owns a company named Fresh Tilled Soil, writes books, and knows his way around the northern reaches of the metro Boston area. We did a little mixed terrain riding which included some nice trails through Minutemen National park – I never thought I’d ride a bike past the spot Paul Revere was captured by the British.
We started and wrapped up the ride at an awesome coffee shop in Lexington called Ride Studio Café. Someone at some point realized there’s a need for coffee, bikes, mechanics, and baristas who don’t cover their noses when filthy cyclists walk in. This is that place!
First up: Rock & Roll Daycare
My first stop was to Rock & Roll Day Care – a company owned by a husband and wife duo who wanted a good place for their kids to begin their early education. Most folks might start shopping around for a preschool. Chris Vuk and his wife, Zaure, decided to roll their own – complete with music classes and a streak of montessori philosophy.
They’re split across three locations in Cambridge. I know this because I went to the wrong one, causing a few minutes delay in my meeting with Chris.
Chris and I have a couple of things in common: we both graduated from Berklee College of Music, we have (too many) kids, and we dig the Montessori way of learning. So, not only did we dig into Kin a bit, we also discussed his vision to expand Rock’n’Roll Daycare’s music program, and this super cool initiative going on in Paraguay called the Landfill Harmonic.
Next up, Intrepid Pursuits
Next up was a trip to a mobile app development shop named Intrepid Pursuits. Like Rock & Roll Daycare, they’re located in Cambridge – across the river from Boston.
I spent time with Intrepid’s Director of Talent, Andrea Garvey, who told me about their killer apprenticeship program that not only provides a hands-on way to pick up mobile development chops, get a head start on a start up, and to learn the ropes of working in client services – and for many, to land a killer gig at Intrepid :)
We’ve been using Help Scout‘s awesome customer support software for DoneDone and Kin since day one of both companies. Their service and support are role models for us at Kin, and their product has helped us be the best we can be with our own customer support.
So, we were kinda flattered when we saw them sign up for Kin. When we started using Help Scout, they were just a couple of folks building an awesome customer support tool. Now, they’re 21 employees spread around the world, and Kin is helping them run a tight ship operationally as they continue to grow.
I met with product manager Nick Francis at their office in downtown Boston. We talked about the old days of Help Scout starting up as a company (DoneDone was an early customer of theirs), product design and management, and the incredibly awesome content these folks put out every single week.
When in Rome
Seven Cycles
Did I mention bikes yet? I took my titanium-steed with me on the trip. It has its own suitcase. It also was made just outside of Boston, at an awesome company called Seven Cycles. They’ve been building custom bikes by hand for about 18 years and they’ve mastered the experience of having a bike designed around an individuals riding habits and unique physiology. Before I got my Seven made, I had three bikes. I now have four – three of which sit gathering dust in the closet. This year alone I’ve put almost 3,000 miles on my Seven and a huge part of my motivation to get out on the road is because of the awesome ride I have beneath me.
A fella named John Lewis gave me a tour of their production floor. These folks got their process down. They don’t batch produce, rather, each person in the production process pays attention to one frame and one frame only until their work is completed according to their rather high standards.
SoSo Unlimited
A few weeks ago, we hosted a group of company owners from around the world here at our Chicago office for a few drinks and conversation. They were all in town for Owner Camp – if you don’t know what that is, it’s three days of awesomeness that you can read up on here. One of the fellas I met, John Rothenberg, owns an art and technology studio called SoSo – they were right up the street from where I was staying in Boston.
What I lacked for in daytime nutrition however, I more than made up for in my evening intake, namely, at Neptune Oyster in Boston’s North End. It’s one of my favorite places. Period.
By Alex Yohn
May 27, 2015
Be humble. That’s a piece of advice common among most philosophical and religious traditions. In an earlier post, WAM co-founder and Kin product manager Craig Bryant argued that it is even fundamental to building a team’s culture.
Humility, however, is a messy thing.
It forces company founders to face the possibility that their visions, their strategies, their whole business’ reasons for existing could be flawed.
It forces us to deal with the humanity we share with our employees, our customers, and our competitors. That can be a big distraction when we would much rather be courageously blazing our companies’ trails forward, swords and shields in hand.
But humility is not a distraction. It is a virtue. It is a trait that founders, CEOs and executives should have if they expect their organizations to carve out a place in the world.
Below are 15 founders and CEOs, from across various industries, and the first-hand lessons they learned about the need to remain humble.
Humility Will Attract and Encourage Talented Team Members
Kevin Chou, the co-founder and CEO of Kabam, a massive multiplayer game company, told Fortune.com of how he once stood in awe at the sheer amount of creativity a senior vice president was capable of.
The SVP is also a playwright, and Chou said this about attending one of his sold-out performances:
“I was part of a standing ovation cheering his writing last night,” I thought, ‘Who am I to judge this man’s creative output at work?’”
Chou contrasted this moment with a belief earlier in his career that “the CEO was the one who had all the answers.”
“It’s more important (and realistic) for the CEO to ask the right questions, build a great team, and be open-minded when making decisions,” Chou said. “For me, this meant checking my ego at the door and instead focus on serving my team to the best of my ability.”
PiinPoint VP of Sales Rajen Sanghvi even talks about the need for building a “creativity machine” within a company, and that is something that can only be built when a CEO or a founder is comfortable in letting ideas — even criticism — flow freely.
“If your team sees you trying new things, staying open minded to feedback and taking responsibility for your mistakes, they will continue to support you,” Sanghvi wrote. “Your team will empathize with you, help you come up with the solutions and even celebrate the entire learning process when you do in fact succeed.
“Humility enables you to remain objective, by allowing those around you to feel comfortable in challenging your ideas and opinions. This leads to more creativity within the startup.”
Even more directly, a CEO or a founder demonstrating humility in a job interview can stick with a potential hire who might be on the fence about moving to a new company or taking on a new role.
Deirdre Cerminaro, a systems designer at IDEO, tells the story of how she was impressed by CEO Tim Brown’s default behaviors.
“I traveled from Connecticut to Boston to interview with Tim,” Cerminaro writes at Medium. “After the interview, he asked if I knew how to get home. I explained that I’d taken a cab to the office from the train station, but was planning to take the subway back.
“Instead of giving me directions, Tim replied, ‘I’ll walk you there!’ Surely, I thought, the CEO of IDEO must have something more important to do. But before I could protest, he’d grabbed his jacket and hit the elevator button.”
Humility Will Also Build Trust With Those Talented Team Members
Everplaces co-founder Tine Thygesen points out that most CEOs will almost always be in a position where the employees under them either have more knowledge about the company or will have taken on some risk by joining that CEO.
“When you enter from the outside you have a starting period (100 days in my way of thinking) where your employees know more about the business then you,” Thygesen tells TechLady.com’s Alexandra Anghel.
“This is a challenging time where you as the CEO have to listen more than you talk, and where you have to be careful to double check your decisions because you don’t know the history of the company and what has been tried before.
“On the other hand, when you build a company you have the chance to build the culture from scratch, you hire your own team, and you know more about the business than anyone else. But here you have to attract people who are willing to take a risk with you, so that requires humility as well.”
Tony Schwartz, CEO of the Energy Project and New York Times contributor, writes that a leader’s humility, and the vulnerability that communicates, also allows everyone in an organization to be less vigilant around one another.
“I make missteps and mistakes as a leader, and they’re often a reflection of the same overused strengths and blind spots I’ve been struggling with my whole life,” he confesses in the paper’s DealBook section. “That’s a humbling recognition, and sharing it with others on my team requires vulnerability, which can feel unseemly, uncomfortable and even dangerous.
“But when I acknowledge to my colleagues that I’ve fallen short in some way, I can feel them relax their own vigilance.”
“With my team, I listen,” Vaynerchuk writes. “I listen a lot. Even though I am talking quite a lot, I’m listening when they talk and, on top of that, I’m listening when I talk by watching how they react to the conversation.
“But that isn’t what you see. You don’t see this humility right now. And this is what I’m most proud of. This is why I love the marathon more than the sprint. In sprints, I lose. You don’t like me in that ten second clip. But in a marathon, when you take the time to get to know me, I win.”
BuildDirect founder and CEO Jeff Booth argues that much of this trust is built on how founders and CEOs deal with failure.
“A bad leader cuts somebody’s legs out from under them when they fail and that either erodes trust or limits possibilities,” Booth says. “When that happens, you never see failure again. It is still there, but you just don’t see it anymore. Part of the organization dies under that leader, and value is lost.
Humility Can Untangle Your Ego and Its Needs From a Business’ Success
Rodney L. Anderson, CEO of the Pancheros Mexican Grill chain, took a page out of IKEA founder Ingvar Kampard’s book and performed every job within his restaurants at some point during the first years of business.
He cooked. He washed dishes. He ran the register. He mopped the floors.
“In the restaurant business it is very important to realize and understand that what you are doing is probably not groundbreaking,” he said. “You’re delivering a product and service that most people are most likely already familiar with.
“Sure, there are small things that differentiate you, but the experience as a whole is one that people are accustomed to. You need to be humble enough to continue executing and executing well on the most basic things, like excellent quality food and superior customer service. If at any point you feel as though you are above these fundamentals, you will likely fail.”
Similarly, being able to simply say “I don’t know,” then proceed to ask for advice was how Lara Morgan built her toiletries company Pacific Direct, which she sold in 2008 for 20 million GBP.
“I had never sold in the hotel market,” Morgan said in an interview with Easyspace. “I had never sold a bar of soap in my life. Never shipped anything. Never been in logistics. Never had any knowledge about freight.”
But her humility and her willingness to find out brought her success during the 17 years she led that company.
“Find experts and phone them up and pick people’s brains using quality manners and a begging technique and just an approachability, a willingness to learn,” she advised. “An interest in learning, a respect for other people’s knowledge — those things are priceless.”
Dave Carvajal, CEO of his own headhunting firm, argues that a good founder or CEO should be able to trust others on the team with decision-making.
The next step is to let go of a need for control.
“In The Founder’s Dilemmas, Noam Wasserman distinguishes between the drives to be ‘Rich versus King’ or the ‘profit’ motive and the ‘control’ motive,” Carvajal writes on Medium. “He says that by opening up our decision-making processes to others, we lose control. More importantly, we also build stronger businesses and experience greater rewards.”
Sometimes, These Lessons Are Learned the Hard Way
Dave Balter, who founded BzzAgent in the early 2000s, admits he let his company’s success go to his head.
In an op-ed for Inc.com in 2011, just after he sold the company for $60 million, he said his ego almost ruined the company’s great fortune:
“My entire style evolved from confident to cocky. When I heard rumblings that members of my family were put off by my ‘inflated self-worth because of BzzAgent,’ I chalked it up to being shortsighted. When I interviewed job candidates, I was less conversational and more confrontational.”
That was 2007. The next year, a global recession began to spread, and BzzAgent’s upward trajectory flattened out. By 2009, more than 40 people had to be let go, and numerous other talented team members took jobs elsewhere.
But the problem wasn’t strictly economical, Balter wrote.
“Board meetings became tense as we recognized the problems stretched beyond the economic climate, but struggled to identify the root cause. After one such meeting in early 2010, our chairman pulled me aside and said it was the worst meeting we’d had in five years but not because of how the business was faring. My attitude was the problem. That was the wakeup moment.”
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings notoriously demonstrated a lack of customer awareness in the fall of 2011 by announcing that his company would spin off the DVD division and then up the prices for customers who wanted both streaming services and disc delivery services.
“A 60% increase in the middle of a recession was arrogant,” Hastings later told Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky. He also noted that Netflix began placing much greater emphasis on listening to customers after that scandal.
Finally, Humility Puts the Work You Do in Perspective
David Gillis, former partner at design firm Teehan+Lax and now a product designer at Facebook, has digested that same lesson Hastings learned from Netflix customers.
Gillis, however, ties that lesson back to individual growth in a post on Medium.
“True feedback can be painful because it jumps past all of the care and cleverness we put into our design decisions and focuses relentlessly on the outcome,” he writes. “Avoiding or ignoring feedback can be tempting, but don’t do it! Don’t cheat yourself out of the opportunity to learn about your own limitations, to create something that’s bigger than yourself, and to ultimately grow as a result.”
Dana Severson from Startups Anonymous shares a piece at Pando.com from an unnamed founder that would have been helpful advice to BzzAgent’s Dave Balter in the mid-2000s:
“Read more history and philosophy. Philosophy humbles you and history gives you perspective. Then you might see how many ‘special’ people came before you and how little anyone remembers them. Also you might see how arbitrarily our world is put together by people who didn’t really know what they were doing, and that everything can be rearranged by anyone.”
True as that may be, we won’t end on such a harsh note. Instead, let’s finish with some wisdom that designer and Big Medium founder Josh Clark shares on his Medium blog:
“Be gentle to yourself when your work fails your demanding standards. You are not your work. Your immense value as a human being is completely unrelated to the worth of the things you make. The success or failure of a project, the presence or absence of attention, the silence or applause of an audience… all of these things are useful commentary on your work — but your work is outside of you.
“Apply that feedback to the things you make, not to your self-worth. Success doesn’t make you a better person, and failure doesn’t make you a worse one. There is no rest or satisfaction in thinking you will finally be happy if only your work is a success.”
An interview with the team at SoundwaveBy Lindsay Sanders
We’re jammin’ out over here with May’s customer spotlight, Soundwave. A company whose accomplished, diverse team along with a space that fosters creativity, is keeping people connected through music. Learn more about the team at Soundwave via Community & Digital Manager, Leanne Fitzgerald.
Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?
[LF] My name is Leanne and I am the Community and Digital Coordinator at Soundwave. My role is to be the connection between our global Soundwave community and the team at HQ. My favorite hand-held food is definitely pizza!
What’s the story of Soundwave?
[LF] Soundwave was founded by Brendan O’Driscoll, Aidan Sliney, and Craig Watson. They took the simple idea of creating an easy way to share music with friends and turned into into a fully-fledged startup company!
The Soundwave app tracks what songs people are listening to on their smartphones and where in real time. Users can plug into different groups of people and locations in real time to see what songs are trending and discover new music as quickly as it is played. At the moment, Soundwave is featured in the Editor’s Choice section of the Google Play Store and it was previously voted Best Innovation in Music 2013 by Apple.
What’s great about working at Soundwave?
[LF]One of the best things about working at Soundwave is the people. Everyone is so very talented at their jobs, but are also accomplished at a variety of activities outside of work. From sailing to fencing to opera singing, everybody has something unique and they’re not afraid to share with the group! This is what makes Soundwave such a rich and dynamic team.
Additionally, we have a large open-plan office with smart paint on the walls so folks can freely brainstorm ideas as they come. With spaces like our Mario-themed treehouse, the colorful mural and the on-going foosball league, the Soundwave office is really a creative space for the whole team to enjoy!
Please share some insight into Soundwave’s approach to employee and workplace operations. How has Kin played a role?
[LF] It sounds like a simple task, but we struggled with scheduling employee time off for a long time. Most HR tools that we tried over-complicated things or relied on one person to keep everything up-to-date.
“This is why we love Kin! It’s simple to use and everything is so clearly organized.”
Using Kin is also a really great way to welcome new hires to the company. The simple onboarding page allows us to introduce a new employee to the team before they even start, making their first day a little less daunting!
Anything notable going on lately?
[LF]We’re always up to something at Soundwave! Currently, we’re working on some designs for the Apple Watch that we’re pretty excited about. The best way to keep up with us is by following our Medium blog publication! Members of the team submit a post every week and give their expert advice on everything from design to app development.
By Alex Yohn
May 6, 2015
A couple of weeks ago the Kin team gathered in Chicago to run its first ever design sprint. We modeled our week after the Google Ventures Design Sprint, which challenges teams to research, design, build, and test a live prototype with customers – in five days.
The product we worked on was an employee reviews and objectives feature which we’re building this spring. Much like time-off management, there are as many flavors of performance reviews as there are birds in the sky. Unlike time-off management however, software is often part of the problem in the review process – existing products have a tendency to get in the way of people improving as individuals and as part of a company. We used the week to envision a tool that facilitates more productive employee reviews, rather than yet another piece of technology that pushes humans farther apart from one another.
Jen the Pen reports for duty as the sprint’s facilitator.
We also wanted to change the way we build things here at Kin. The team we have today is different than the team we started out with two years ago – in body and spirit. The current development team, composed of Brandon, Jes, and Ka Wai, haven’t built what we call a “primary feature” in Kin yet. They’ve been working together for about six months and, while we’ve shipped new features and improvements during that time, we haven’t started from scratch on a new concept. This is the first time we’ve worked together in this capacity – so it made sense to shake things up a bit and ensure everyone climbs on at the ground floor.
How we’ve done things in the past
What precipitated the design sprint wasn’t necessarily the quality of the end-product we’ve shipped in the past, rather the challenges we’ve experienced in the process of delivering the final goods.
In the past, we’ve often had to make very fundamental design decisions after a feature’s first iteration is already built. That’s resulted in significant changes to the product late in the game which, aside from being inefficient, is bad for morale and revenue. So, while we tailored our development cycle to be more accommodating to smaller changes, we also arrived at the Google Ventures Sprint as a way to root out the flaws that created the proverbial mess to begin with.
Change happens, and we embrace that. With design sprints, our aim is to be more responsible about the size of design changes later in the cycle by doing the largest discovery before we write a single line of code.
Build a better product. Build better trust.
The Kin team is composed of seven folks: three engineers, a product designer, two account and support peeps, and myself. This specific approach to design sprints is designed to include every discipline from an organization, and it just so happens that the size of our team was a perfect fit for the sprint. Not too many, not too few.
Given the mutual inclusion of every discipline, it’s natural that the exercises within the sprint are designed to enable everyone, regardless of skill set or role, to contribute to the design, even as low-level as UI. The experience had no bias for visual designers or coders or CEO-types. The playing field was leveled for everyone.
A spirited conclusion to day two. Yeah, I just wrote that.
The fact that everyone at Kin contributed revealed an under-utilized quality in our team: depth in our bench. Every team member scraped together mock-ups, mind maps, concepts, and ideas. Every team member reasoned in favor or against certain ideas. Overall, we had seven approaches to employee reviews which canvased a whole lot more territory than we would’ve otherwise covered in a closed-door session with just one or two team members.
Knowing that everyone on our team can design a feature is a powerful tool. It’s built trust in the team as a whole, and instilled the confidence in each of one of us that we’re capable of it.
How’d it pan out?
We hit Friday in stride. The team succeeded in getting a pretty big concept out the door and tested in front of live customers.
The feature is broad though – a drawback in that we meandered off topic from the feature story at times. But, the silver lining is we have plenty of purview into how the broader feature will be structured.
The interviews themselves went well – Jason and Lindsay each conducted 2 customer interviews, leading the discussions and exploring the viability of the feature. One piece of prescient feedback from Jes after the interviews was that questions from customers exploring details beyond this week’s feature story should be approached as chances to discover customer needs, rather than challenges to the product’s viability. That’s something we’ll need to grow accustomed to in subsequent sprints.
Favoriting sketches and ideas via sticky little dots.
Will we do it again?
We’re not out of the woods yet in understanding the real impact this specific design sprint will have on both the quality of the product and that of our process. There are other facets of this feature that still need design and research (perhaps even design sprints), let alone the remaining work and iteration needed based on customer feedback. So, while we all feel that the first sprint was valuable and productive, we’ve yet to go through the motions of getting its output into production and out the door.
What I can say is that having everyone involved from the get-go means there is very little mystery in what we’re building, and little to no personal hang-ups about it either. That tells me there’s much less baggage heading into feature production for us as a team, and we’ll have a cleaner build, less testing, and less iteration toward the tail end of the experience. If that’s the case, then we’ll consider design sprints to be a fundamental part of the Kin product design process moving forward.
We started and wrapped up the ride at an awesome coffee shop in Lexington called 
