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.
It has been a very quiet 2 months on the lab blog as we go through a hectic phase of growth and changes at the lab HQ. I wanted to take a minute (or 30) out of our frantic schedule of product development and daily grind to provide a quick update of what's happening at hedgehog lab.
Office Move
When we started hedgehog lab 2 years ago, we had a grand vision of the type of office we would like to work in and the nature of office space that would enable us to get the best out of our employees. Unfortunately, as a bootstrapped company, we had to make compromises with the space due to restrictive costs and company size. In some ways, we just got comfortable with our current office and decided to cram as many people in as possible, so we could focus on the business at hand.
Fortunately, hedgehog lab is going up in the world and both our revenues and employee count has increased steadily in the past year, which meant we needed to re-assess the space we had and look for a larger space that suits us. Anybody who has undertaken an office search knows that this is a painful and drawn out process, and it took nearly 6 months to find our ideal office.
Therefore, I am pleased to announce that the lab will soon be moving to new premises at The Kiln in Hoults Yard in Newcastle. Hoults have some fantastic space with all the right facilities and have a great team to back it up with exceptional service. I would recommend anyone looking for new office space to try them out.
The Aerons have been ordered and the IKEA furniture delivered, so we will be moving our postal address in the coming 3 weeks. Keep an eye out for pictures on our blog of our new office.
New employee
Ever since we launched hedgehog lab, we have been very keen to enter the mobile space and bring our unique blend of enterprise understanding and user experience love to the table. However, our product strategy and existing demands meant that we were never fully able to make mobile products a core strategy other than dabbling in bits and pieces of R&D.
I am please to announce that with our most recent hire, Jonathan Williamson (or Jonny as we call him!), we now have a full-time mobile developer and the making of our dedicated mobile team at hedgehog lab. Jonny will be working on defining our mobile strategy and on a mobile app or two that we will be announcing soon.
Products update
We have been firing on all cylinders in terms of our product development roadmap with massive progress being made on both fixx and solomon. Due to current customer demand, fixx has been prioritised a bit higher to resolve key bugs and implement some exciting new features. We are working hard on fixx 1.9, which is another feature loaded release after 1.8.
The original idea was to stop new feature development at 1.8 and continue with 2.0 but customer demand and the increasing popularity of fixx has meant that we wanted to deliver some key features in the 1.x stream.
Unfortunately, this means delays in getting a beta of solomon out but rest assured that solomon is not vapourware and the heavy interest and demand for this means that, quite honestly, we cannot afford to not release it soon.
As always, keep an eye out on our blog for more updates as soon as we settle into our new office space.
When we released fixx 1.8 a couple of months ago, we were elated to deliver the biggest set of functionality in fixx since launch. With 50+ new features or
enhancements, it was inevitable that the changes would impact some of our customers in a large way.
Unfortunately for us, some of the improvements manifested as critical upgrade issues for a few customers and we would sincerely like to
apologise for this. We should have anticipated and put in additional tests for these but we did not and I would like to apologise to those customers that have had
to postpone their 1.8 upgrade because of these issues.
To be clear, the critical problems only apply to existing customers who upgraded from 1.7 and we have worked hard to resolve these
problems in the past 2 weeks.
As a result, we are releasing fixx 1.8.1 which addresses these critical upgrade issues and some major bugs reported from our 1.8 release. We would
advise all customers (even those on 1.8 already) upgrade to 1.8.1 as soon as possible.
