Working Together

How, when, and where we work together.

Working Remotely

With the exception of partners that need to be on site, we are a remote team. You are not required to work in our office.

All weekly tactical meetings are held remotely via Google Hangouts. We agree to show up on time and ready for these meetings.

These meetings will be scheduled ahead of time and all participants will receive a calendar invite with a link to the Hangouts 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.

What Full-Time / Flex-Time Means

"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 35 (full, productive) hours a week.

Managing time is a skill; 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.

Productivity means different things to different roles. For example, if your job involves dealing with outside parties, you will need to overlap your work hours to the hours of the outside world (i.e. 9am to 5pm). Not doing this makes you less productive, and does NOT match the spirit of this flexibility.

tldr: Work when you're most productive. Work smart on stuff that energizes you rather than depletes you. Aim for 35 hours of productivity a week.

Scheduling and Availability

We encourage partners to be available for communication (either in person or on Slack). Essentially, slack is "in the office." If you're not logged in on slack, then its assumed you are not working.

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.

Open, Permissionless Communication

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.

Scheduling Meetings

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.

Todos and Assignments

If you need someone to do something, assign them a task in Asana. Make sure that if you assign a person a task, they understand what the task is, where they can find the information or resources you have available to perform the task, and what is expected of them as output on the task.

Giving a person a task that does not explain what they are supposed to do, makes it hard for a person to get something done for you.

If you assign a task to a person, and they reject it, you should find out why, do it yourself, or assign it to to someone else.

Getting Things Done

All partners in OMALAB 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.