Most likely every company doesn’t fully utilizes employees work time. There are always periods when personnel is less overloaded and doing nothing. It’s an obvious and non cutting-edge thesis. The question is how many companies and in what manner do they manage this slack time by design? And most importantly how does it look at KISS digital?
The “slack time” term I’ve borrowed from our office’s neighbor Pawel Brodzinski. Pawel (CEO at Lunar Logic) set this term as a part of their corporate culture. As for me I was never aware of the importance of free time in a company. Indeed, our employees used to have periods of time when they wasn’t loaded with a ton work and could do things not directly related to the job. But it was never named. And often this time could be lost completely for unproductive actions.
After I realized that I tried to figure out how to direct those activities in the correct way. The way which could help the organization in smart development as well as could help employees in their personal development. As a result a list of preferred activities and a rule of “free resources” was established. Pretty simply and effective.
The rule of “free resources” says that there are always a few people who are not involved in any ongoing project. Pawel defines it as about 10% of employees but in KISS we speak about 1 or 2 people per every team. Yes, that’s all – the rule just says that in every team we should have a person not working on any commercial project. Instead of this, he or she should be involved in one of the preferred activities.
So what are those preferred activities during the slack time in KISS? I always persuade our team members to learn new things like programming languages, tools, methods and everything that can broaden their (and our as a team) horizons. This is action number one in KISS and for instance one of our developers is becoming the Xamarin expert right now. So, while you are on your slack time – learn, develop, expand your knowledge, build your strengths.
But of course there are many other possibilities. In your slack time you can:
1. Learn new things (mentioned above).
2. Create in-house tools that help KISS to develop, i.e. by automation processes.
3. Do R&D work not necessarly related to your major job description.
4. Prepare your presentations, workshops, and lectures if you want share your knowledge.
5. Just teach your colleagues.
6. Test ongoing projects. You can make a code review or write unit tests. This is an excellent way for upgrading quality of our software.
7. Birth amazing ideas on how to improve our work.
8. In rare cases you can be assigned as a fireman to a project that goes behind schedule. :)
What are major benefits of maintaining the slack time?
1. The organization is more flexible because there are always free human resources. You can assign an employee to an urgent project or even you can start a new project earlier then it’s needed.
2. You can develop internal organization’s processes and tools that always have been put off because of more significant needs.
3. Employees have the possibility for personal development and, as a result, they are more committed to the organization.
It just looks as good investment therefore in KISS digital it’s a part of our work organization.
Laz^H^H^H slack time!
