hedgehoglab

Dan Pink is an author and speaker who despite having worked in politics, has a surprisingly interesting take on managing employees and how the modern workplace should function.

I watched a recent talk of his at TED after being pointed to it by Herb Kim. I would advise anyone who is considering running their own business or has already been running one to watch the talk, which makes a strong fact-based argument for radically re-defining the way we motivate employees at work.

In both his talk at TED and his thought-provoking book A Whole New Mind, Dan talks about right-brain thinking and how creativity is now an essential competitive advantage in the workplace. Like the talk, the book is a must-read for the insight it provides into creativity and how simple it can be to instil it into both your personal and work life.

At hedgehog lab, we have always taken pride in our left-brain strengths and developers with strong logic, reasoning and language skills. Our entire hiring policy and ethos has been surrounded by the fact that we are a company for developers, by developers. Sure there is a lot of creativity and abstract thinking involved in general software development but our work practises and hiring processes were geared towards left-brain focused developers.

We did have processes in place to encourage creativity, like our Lab Days, which were informal internal hack days. Unfortunately, the pressures of every day work and deadlines meant that this process was woefully managed and resulted in very little. In retrospect, this was a necessary but unfortunate path to becoming a sustainable small company.

Meanwhile, in the past year, we turned down around 10 different designers who applied to work at hedgehog lab because I was absolutely convinced that our in-house team had no need for a permanent creative member of staff. Why hire a full-time creative person when we could focus on our core competency[sic] and outsource graphic design and creative work to freelancers and companies skilled at this?

The problem with this was that, although it was good traditional business wisdom, it did not take into account the exponential benefits a creative person could bring to our team and products while changing the monotonous composition of the team. It was becoming clear to us that the advantages of having an in-house designer far outweighed the negatives.

This is where Dan Pink and his theories come into play. To tie in with our recent office move, we took some time off to think about how we can inject some of the creative principles and right-brain culture in hedgehog lab. This essentially culminated in the following new practises that have been brought about at the lab.

Switching to a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE)

ROWE is an extension of our existing working practises to focus on results and move the focus away from time spent on a particular task. We have always had a liberal working policy at hedgehog lab but we have often been guilty of focusing too much on measuring and evaluating the amount of time spent by individuals in "doing stuff". Although results were still more important than time in the past, a formalised ROWE process gives us better guidelines and tools to measure and motivate employees in the future.

Monthly "Hog Camp"

Hog Camp is essentially our version of the Google 20% time (where each engineer gets to spend 20% of their time working on interesting and non-core projects). Unlike Google however, our growth rate is far slower, which means we could not afford a day a week from employees' time. Hog Camp is a monthly internal 2-day BarCamp where the team gets together every month to hack on interesting ideas and code fuelled by plenty of pizza and beer. Our first Hog Camp is in September and we will posting the results of this soon.

Hiring a designer

We are now actively looking for a creative designer for our team. If you are someone who loves producing beautiful and usable interfaces and "gets design", then please get in touch with us. Alternatively, if you know someone who is looking for a new challenge and is happy working with geeks, let them know about us. We have no specific and rigid criteria as long as you have the right aptitude and principles to fit into hedgehog lab. A creative job application could help too.

No doubt, I will be reporting in a few months what impact these changes have had at hedgehog lab and if there were any negative results.

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