English

Long routes from home to work take energy, physical and mental, and after weeks and months (or years) leave you without enough energy for a productive day. That means quality work is a low priority.

As you slog along day after day, with just enough strength to do the high priority tasks, you take less times to discuss important topics. You don’t try to be creative and pick the first possible solution. Quality becomes a luxury and customer satisfaction a fata morgana, impossible to reach.

Noise in the office is another culprit. It takes energy and makes concentration difficult, leaving you with less for what you’re working on. Open spaces are usually more noisy, but small and crowded offices can also be difficult to work on.

Unfinished projects, lots of issues to handle, unreasonable clients consume your energy even if you don’t handle the problems. Actually because you don’t handle the problems you have even less energy for the ones you do handle.

There are three things you can do to start saving energy for your team:

• Build momentum
• Plan for breaks
• Reduce high energy tasks

How to build momentum?
You’re not in a sprint. You’re not alone. You’re in a group marathon. Handle your group’s energy if you want the team to go the whole distance. An african proverb says: If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Breaks can recharge your team’s batteries and build momentum. Coming back to work next week you can use inside jokes and funny things you’ve learned with the group. This helps going over tough moments, diffusing tension and improving relations between team members.

Take the time to listen, no matter who you’re talking with. Feedback can come from management, colleagues, or customers. Try to see things from someone else’s perspective. It will change how you see things yourself and allow you do better work. Apply your learning to push the team further.

Planning for breaks
Now that’s a strange and unproductive idea, right? Why would you do that, aren’t people supposed to work all the time they’re payed for? But ask yourself this question: If they do that, working continuously from 9 to 5, when will they recharge?

When will they learn something about your product, maybe from another team or from the customers? When will they take feedback on what they’re doing?

This need highly depends on the nature of the job, but creative people, product people, strategic people need breaks to think. To take different perspectives. To learn.

Reduce high energy tasks
High energy tasks are like huge deserts, you want to eat them but can’t. Or you feel tired and maybe sick afterwards. What you really need to do is split the cake in smaller bites, eat just one small bite after lunch and leaving the rest for the next day. The same way you need to split huge tasks in smaller ones.

One system is to estimate a task’s difficulty by using t-shirt sizes: XS is very easy, S is easy, M is a bit difficult, L is quite a piece. Stop there. Take all the XL and XXL and bigger tasks and split them in tasks of smaller sizes. It doesn’t matter which length they’ll have, as long as the biggest task is less than a week, ideally less than 2 days of work.

Try sports, learning groups and brainstorming
You could recharge your batteries by playing a sport with team mates or friends after your lunch break or in the evening. You could start a reading group at work, planning to read a chapter individually over the week and discussing it on Friday at a coffee. It could be technical, marketing, business strategy or cooking.

As long as the group is engaged with the subject a good way to build a momentum and improve communication is to have these discussions. The subject can be made to fit a work problem, if needed, but even the existence of the group is very important for your team.

Another productive break can be participating in the marketing team for the product being developed and understanding how the marketing team works, what do they need and maybe even help them. Coming back to your team, you’ll have new perspectives and better understanding for other business aspects.

The goal is to save energy and recharge the team
To do this you can start here:
– build and sustain momentum
– plan for regular breaks for learning and getting feedback
– save energy by splitting work in smaller tasks

Want to learn more? Sign-up to our newsletter and get exclusive content.

Rent increase is making you consider renting new offices?
Prices falling while you’re trapped in an office that became expensive, and it’s not even so great anymore? Tough year, less money or bad economy make you consider moving to a smaller office?

Before moving to a new location, would you say keeping your colleagues and employees happy with the office location important? Then read on.

Keep your team in mind while searching for a new office
You begin your search by having someone looking for new locations, maybe near to the old one, or more comfortable for you. But did you think about other team members, some very important for your business or who won’t be able to go to a farther location?

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to compare how the new offices compare to the old ones from the point of view of the employees? At least to make sure you won’t worsen the daily commute for most of them.

Make a map of your team commute
Wouldn’t be nice if you could look up in Google Maps to see how your team goes every day to the office? Like the globe maps that focus on Russia or China, showing the world upside-down (from our point of view), things will also look different from your new point of view.

Because after an office move things will change.  Some will have to go later to work to avoid longer commute, so they will also be going home later and might need to delay some evening activities, like taking kids from school. Or skip others altogether, like the regular walk or jogging.

Accepting a longer commute doesn’t mean people are happy
For those that just have to accept spending more time on longer commutes, getting more tired every day will accumulate and stress them out, make them more irritated and less productive. Family issues may occur because they’re no longer able to be there for kids or unexpected events.

Do something about it before it’s too late
If you’re a team lead, manager or in charge of the office move, you could do something to prevent these problems, or minimize their impact, as much you can, as your position allows it.

You could buy a city map and have an assistant try to pin all employees addresses on that map and evaluate the impact of the move. Or use Google Maps in the same way. There are also online platforms and software that can help you calculating commute distances especially in big cities around the world – MapZen, TimeTravel, BaseMap, MobilityLabel and others.

Our plan is to look at different ways to estimate the office location’s impact on employees, while building an easy to use and simple service.

Sign up to our newsletter if you want to estimate your team commute!

The office move was complicated, as it always is. In ways you cannot expect. You’re tired, but you’re done. Your first weeks pass along and you begin to find your way to the new office.

You tried some different routes, then left a bit earlier or later, until you think you find the best trade-off. What about your teammates?

Are your colleagues happy with the new office?
Is it the same as the old office for all of them? It seems to be farther for a couple of your colleagues. Or busier at the time they usually came to the office, so they need to adjust the time they leave for work. And sometimes the time to go back home too, as a consequence.

If you’re concerned or responsible for your team you can do something: you can estimate how happy the team is with the new commute and then compare with the old one.

Compare the old office commutes with the new ones
Make a list of your teammates. Work with your manager’s assistant or HR responsible to make the list. Then calculate the best routes each one had for going to and from work, at each one’s usual times of arrival and departure.

The duration is important, that’s the first thing to compare. Calculate average, minimum and maximum and total duration. Then do the routes calculations for the old office. Compare the two tables. Compare the average, minimum, maximum and totals.

Keep track of the commute scores every 3-6 months, and for new employees. If you did what was possible to be done and the trend stays flat or improves, that’s a success.

Better do the comparison before the move
Before or after the move, after you do the comparison you have something to discuss, first with your team, later with management, if needed. You often find that some people are much more impacted than others. Talk to them, and try to improve their commute: car pooling, public transportation are always possible in big cities. Remote programs, full or part-time, are another possible solution for them.

Summary
1. Calculate team commute avg/min/max/totals
2. Compare numbers between new and old offices
3. Act for the team, then for the most affected people

Why is visual balance important for any user interface? Ask a designer and you’ll hear that interface needs balance to serve its users. The visual weight of different design elements reveals hierarchy and composition of menus and content. Break the balance and the users won’t see or won’t be able to do important actions.

Like a complex interface, your team implements a process which solves customer problems using tools and actions. Keeping your team in balance ensures they can deliver value to your customers and grow your business.

Everyone’s daily work/life balance affects the team
Team balance is a result of the internal organization, processes and people roles. From an individual perspective, each member’s individual work/life balance can affect the team. You need to check whether each member has enough time for their daily activities: – sleep and rest – eat – work and learn – spend private and family time

How everyone is spending their days? Is the team stable, improving or feeling good? Is a part of the team tired by long commutes or working too many hours? Are they feeling less and less motivated? Answering these questions helps you understand your current team balance and take steps to improve it.

Balance allows a team to deliver a reliable, quality service
Your team is building and delivering a valued product, bought by real customers. Your team members are also real people, the ones showing up, doing the work, and having families and lives outside work. Taking care of them is taking care of your team and your business.

Delivering a reliable service requires a strong product, a good support channel, and a team producing quality work. You need a team capable of learning, adapting, taking on challenges and handling all the work. To do this, the team needs energy and a stable environment. For each member, this means enough time to rest and energize physically and mentally.

How to bring balance back for your team
Analyze the situation for each person on your team, without overstepping their privacy. Personal work/life balance can be estimated by looking at how someone’s spending their days, in average. Start with the working hours, lunch and other breaks, and estimate their commute duration. They use the rest of the 24 hours for resting, breakfast, dinner and private time.

Work with your human resources, assistant manager or team leader. Get some individual estimates for these activities and make some calculations. If everyone is using too much time to get to work, they will have to cut back from their private life, from sleep or from proper lunch time. And that will show in time in their work or will wear them off and might make them leave the team.

Check and adjust your team’s balance when doing office changes
Changes like relocating your offices have a direct impact on the time people spend getting to work every day. This impacts their private lives and the actual time they can work. Instead of guessing how much time your colleagues spend commuting, ask everyone to get an average.

For bigger, remote teams, or when you have multiple teams, ask each team leader to do the calculations for you. You can also use our online calculator to enter all addresses and use real data to understand how your office location affects your team.

Isn’t work/life balance a private matter, and not a team issue?
Of course the way we spend our time every day is our own private matter. But work-related decisions make a big impact on our lives. Having to spend 10 more minutes going to work makes you loose 20 minutes from doing something else. It’s in the team’s interest to try to estimate and limit the impact some decisions have on each member.

Traffic and individual working hours are critical for big city teams
Working in a big city has its advantages, but also disadvantages mostly related to stress and longer commutes. When your company is located in or near a big city you need to take into account the commute duration, not only the distance. Actual traffic can be estimated too, using mapping solutions.

Yay! Nicer restaurants! OMG the traffic!
Your company decided to relocate and find a new office. Compared to the previous one, you have bigger space and access to some very nice restaurants. The problem is most of the people spend 10 to 30 minutes more going and coming from the office every day. So is this change good or bad?

Commute duration will make your colleagues adjust their working hours. Otherwise they would have to spend less time with their families or they will sleep less. Using estimated traffic to calculate predicted commute duration for each team member gives you a more accurate commute duration for the whole team.

Summary
Team balance is strongly affected by everyone’s work/life balance. To deliver a reliable and quality service a team needs a stable and calm environment. How to bring your team back to balance? Check and adjust when doing office changes with your team in mind.

Get real and prepare your office relocation not only on the business side but also on the people side. Calculate commutes to the new offices, check available transportation, parkings, restaurants and make sure your team will be happy in the new location.

How do you think about your team balance and which methods are you using to limit the impact your business decisions have on their private lives?