Posted
by
Michael Trythall
on
January 31, 2013.
Filed under
business
One perk Lincoln Loop and other companies with remote staff regularly cite is the lack of a commute. Nothing beats taking the Pajama Freeway to your home office. While reviewing my time entries for last year I started to wonder what the real impact to my available time was by not commuting.
Lets look at some numbers. I am American so lets use those statistics.
I logged a total of 1772 hours last year. This is more than the Lincoln Loop average, but is very much in line with the 1787 average annual hours worked by Americans.
In order to consider the impact we need to figure out how much I am not commuting. Most Americans work – including me – roughly 8 hours a day. So:
1772 / 8 = 221.5 days
We know I would be commuting roughly 221.5 days, but how much time is saved? Some quick Googling tells ...
Posted
by
Peter Baumgartner
on
January 17, 2013.
Filed under
business
In our last installment, I introduced our distributed workplace and why we prefer it over a traditional office. Over the years, we’ve learned a lot about how to make a distributed workplace, well… work.
The single most important we learned was how to work asynchronously. In other words, we strive to create an environment where people can complete their tasks at any time of day and without waiting on anyone else to do so. This removes timezones (and personal work habits) as a constraint for doing business. Tasks that aren’t asynchronous become road blocks to productivity in the form of, “I can’t do X until Joe does Y.” Here’s a few of the most common road blocks we hit and how we dealt with them:
Asking for permission. This is a killer and we’ve all but eliminated it at Lincoln Loop. We hire trustworthy people ...
Posted
by
Nicolas Lara
on
October 9, 2012.
Filed under
business,
presentation,
remote working
Whenever I have a conversation with someone about how we work at Lincoln Loop, people tend to be quite surprised, intrigued and skeptical, but mostly, they want to know more.
A while back we started blogging about how we do business, and I love pointing people to these articles to learn more about the details of our (un)management style. It’s particularly interesting hearing back from them about their impressions, questions, problems. Some of the most interesting ones for me are:
- Few people know that there are more companies out there working in an unorthodox way, getting better results and happier people (yes, it’s not only us!)
- It’s very easy to see how it would be hard (or imposible!) to apply these ideas to any other organization, but most people fail to realize how easy it is to actually do it: a culture of trust and motivation ...
Posted
by
Peter Baumgartner
on
August 20, 2012.
Filed under
business,
remote working
Here’s a map of our current offices at Lincoln Loop:
That’s 10 people, 5 timezones, and 3 continents for those of you counting at home. I use the term “office” loosely because we don’t have a central office in the traditional sense. Instead, Lincoln Loop is a distributed (people work where they want) asynchronous (people work when they want) workplace.
Why?
Compared to a traditional office, we think our distributed workplace is better, not only for us, but also for our clients. The biggest improvements are:
Better Talent
When I started Lincoln Loop, I wanted to work with great developers. Living in a small mountain town with no tech scene to speak of, my only option was to hire people remotely. As we’ve grown, we’ve continued the trend, hiring based solely on talent and compatibility rather than proximity. Hiring remotely has resulted in a team ...
Posted
by
Graham King
on
June 15, 2012.
Filed under
business,
remote working
When your client is hundreds of miles away, but your bed only three feet, it helps to understand motivation.
The first thing to understand about motivation is that it’s not something you do to someone. That’s called coercion. With enough power you can make anyone do almost anything, but you can’t make them want to; and typically creative work done by people who want to do it is better. The tl;dr of motivation is this:
If you want to build a ship, don’t start by collecting wood, sawing planks and assigning tasks, but awaken in people’s hearts a yearning for the beautiful deep sea. – Antoine de St Exupéry, Citadelle
Extrinsic motivation (especially contingent rewards such as bonuses) has been shown to only improve performance on menial repetitive tasks, and to decrease performance on even slightly creative tasks. There’s a good summary in ...
Posted
by
Peter Baumgartner
on
May 31, 2012.
Filed under
business
As mentioned in my previous post, everyone at Lincoln Loop sets their own salary. It’s another radical divergance from the business norm that we borrowed from the book of Ricardo Semler.
Every six months, I meet with each of our developers to discuss their salary for the next six months. I stress that it is not a negotiation and that they should come ready to tell me what they want to be paid. In a couple of cases, I had to talk people up to the number they really want. We used to be more informal with the process, but we do better (read: give more raises) when we force everyone to have the discussion. I chalk those issues up to years of taboo around salary discussions.
Prior to the discussions, I prepare a profit and loss sheet for the previous six months (all our finances are open inside ...
Posted
by
Peter Baumgartner
on
May 21, 2012.
Filed under
business
Maverick by Ricardo Semler was an eye-opening read for me a while back. It is a detailed account of his (highly profitable) company which is a radical departure from the traditional workplace. Rework (published over 20 years later) reads like an illustrated summary of many of Semler’s ideas.
One of the most radical ideas in the book is that every employee has full access to the company’s financial records. Nothing is sacred, not how much the owner takes from the company or how much money your boss makes. This sort of information is carefully guarded at most companies. At Lincoln Loop, it’s different.
Shortly after reading Maverick, I asked everyone for permission to open our books (including their pay history) within the company. After a brief discussion, we unanimously decided to try it out. I migrated everything to Xero and setup everyone as a user in the ...
Posted
by
Peter Baumgartner
on
January 23, 2012.
Filed under
business
Development is a creative endeavor. Often developers are creating something where there was once nothing. For most us, the thought of being productive for 8 consecutive hours 5 days a week is laughable. 2–3 hours on a single problem is enough to turn most people’s brains to mush.
As a company, we understand this and have abolished the 9 to 5 work week. People work where and when they feel they’ll be at their best. We don’t require people to be working during business hours. In case of urgent issues, we can call people on the phone, but in practice, that rarely happens. To many traditional companies, this sounds like anarchy. Surprisingly, it isn’t. We still collaborate (usually some combination of IRC, Skype, and Ginger), we still discuss problems as a team, and we can still pair program.
If you’re wondering how we make ...
