1617 - Anonymous employee Poetic Systems Employee Review

The above reviewer talks about not getting as much “credit” when they complete tasks quickly as well as getting a project right after they finish the one they’re working on like it’s a chore. Good people take pride in completing tasks quickly and they are eager to tackle new projects. They don’t think about dragging their feet to get more “credit”. We are all paid on salary (not hourly) with great healthcare benefits and a very generous amount of vacation. I’m not sure what they are talking about when they refer to “not being paid for meetings” and the random Apple reference. We've grown quite a bit over the past few years. Larger projects, bigger budgets, bigger teams, etc... When we started Poetic, we had a mission to do the best work of our lives with people we like to work with. The larger we grew, the less focused on this we became. We started hearing about about noise levels being too high and people not putting forth their best effort. When we needed to meet a deadline, the same key people were staying late to pick up after those who didn't pull their weight. We used to have a work hard, play hard atmosphere. We ended up with work and play all day. We thought long and hard about how to get the company back in shape. We thought about adding more rules to make sure people were getting their work done. This would mean strictly enforcing office hours, watching closely what people were working on, paying closer attention to vacation days, not allowing people to work from home, etc... However, we knew good people always get tasks done before going on vacation. They also work remotely to focus and knock out a task. I never worry about them getting their projects done because they always over perform. The rules were going to hinder our good people in an attempt to get the rest on par. This didn't make sense. We instead decided to get rid of all the rules and give everyone more freedom and more responsibility. Good people thrive on the freedom and love responsibility. We got rid of our vacation policy, we got rid of official office hours, we told everyone to just "be responsible". That basically means if people are depending on you, be there for meetings and be present online if you are working from home. In lieu of the rules, gave everyone a metric to aim for that lets them know they are pulling their weight. This metric is "1617". There are 251 work days in a year once you remove all the weekends and holidays. From there we subtracted 20 additional days for vacation/sick days. We took the remaining 231 days and assume that 7 hours a day will be logged which comes out to "1617". The 8th hour each day is for random tasks and the couple short meetings we have each week. We presented this to the company and since have made a channel on our Slack for discussions about the initiative. I am proud to say that it has been received very positively. The day after we rolled it out, the office was much quieter. We were doing great work and the conversations were intelligent and relative. We were happy and the good people on the team were happy. Since 1617, we've had more people working from home. We can take as much time as we need for vacation/sick days. People are able to take care of personal things without needing to log it with HR. The office is abuzz with creativity and productivity. We cheated the "system" and now have a company without rules and one that gives good people freedom to excel. Most importantly, we are doing the best work of our lives with people we like working with!