James VanDyke

37signals the makers of BaseCamp and RubyonRails shared some changes to their work environment recently. Here are three interesting ideas.

•  4 day work week - If people rest for 3 days, they will be refreshed and do better work in four days rather than 5 days of work and 2 days of rest.
• Pay for personal learning/hobbies - This encourages workers to pursue things beyond work. Balanced workers make better workers?
• Let people spend discretionary money - If you’re hiring the right people they will want to the organization to do well and spend money appropriately.

I think the last issue is the most important. Businesses should empower their employees to take risks. If you’ve hired correctly then you shouldn’t be worried about delegating the investment of company resources. This also takes away the bureaucracy of small purchases that can cause employees to go without rather that navigating the red tape.

Marketing work

Companies are artificially secretive about their accounting to internal audiences. Typically granular information about a company’s books is not available to it’s employees and only a small precentage of the company knows exactly how the company is earning and spending money.

I offer this suggestion. Be completely transparent about your company’s spending including how much everyone is paid. Post it all online for any employee that wants to look. This does mean that you will have to be able to justify expenses and salaries but if you can’t justify it then it should probably be questioned anyway.

I previously worked at a company where sharing your salary information with a fellow employee was a fireable offense. Since then, I’ve wondered why this secrecy is necessary, other than it gives the company the upper hand in salary negotiations.

What do you think? Do you see potential pitfalls or problems?

Business Business, work