Following some conversations I recently had at my 20th high school reunion, I have decided to talk this time about an important topic in companies: work-life balance.
Former classmates were very surprised when I told them how our company is organized. They complained that there was no work-life balance and were literally amazed when I talked about our schedules and internal activities.
So I am going to talk about our evolution as a company in this regard. How we were and how we understood we had to evolve. I hope to reach many entrepreneurs and help spark a change that I believe is unstoppable due to the upcoming generations, which are nothing like ours and even less like our parents’.
[Tweet “Happy employees, happy clients” #worklifebalance]This is one of our mottos. Our goal has always been to ensure that our team does not come to work demotivated.
Our Beginnings
To understand them, it is important to give you some context. Dos Setenta is a company that was founded 7 years ago. There were only two partners, and we worked from home. Then we moved to a coworking space and had our first team member. A little later, we rented an office from another company, and the following year we moved to our first office. At that point, we were already six people.
- Schedule: Our schedule was 9 am to 2 pm and 4 pm to 7 pm. This almost always meant leaving at 7:30 or even 8. Growing slowly, we couldn’t avoid checking the clock when someone left on time. It put us in a bad mood.
- Communication: Like most companies, in addition to email, we had a WhatsApp group where work-related topics were also discussed.
- Organization: We started with a Community Manager service and charged clients a fee for maintaining their social media, without tracking the time it took. It got more complicated over time. New social media platforms appeared, new features emerged, and it meant much more work for the same fee.
- Work: We still couldn’t afford a dedicated admin person. We were juggling everything! I remember coining the concept that entrepreneurs belong to the league of extraordinary men, inspired by Sean Connery’s 2003 movie. Don’t call me arrogant — I don’t mean supernatural talent, but the fact of being in multiple departments, doing many tasks, and putting out fires all day long.
As the company grew, we began to visualize the company we wanted. All partners had worked in other companies where “chair warming” was common or where the general rule was to work well over 8 hours. These were some reasons why we decided to create our own company. Today, we are 13 people, and two years ago we moved to our second office — open-plan, in the prime business area of Madrid, on Orense street.
Another of our mottos, borrowed from a talk by influencer and speaker Josef Ajram, is the theory of the three eights:
“Eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work, and eight hours of leisure.”
For us, happiness lies in balance. We learned this in a Coaching and NLP course, where we were introduced to the Wheel of Life. Another area of interest is personal development, so every year we do something in this regard — a book, a course, talks, etc.
Returning to the Wheel of Life, I will explain what it is and how it relates to the three eights theory.
Wheel of Life
It is a coaching tool to quickly identify areas for improvement. We self-evaluate each area from 1 to 10 (as seen in the photo). If you get a strange shape, the wheel cannot roll. You lack balance, and if you score low in many areas, it will be harder to be happy.
Its relation to the three eights theory and work-life balance is that if we work more than eight hours or have an inflexible schedule, it is very difficult to have a balanced Wheel of Life.
As we want to be happy and want the same for our team, we saw that the only way to achieve this and survive was to focus every day on being more productive, flexible, and efficient.
Our Company Now
Here’s how we are organized today to maintain good work-life balance:
- Schedule: Our current schedule is 8 am to 2 pm and 3 pm to 5:30 pm Monday to Thursday. This gives us two extra hours over four days, and on Friday, we work 8 am to 2 pm. Many times at 5:30 we are the ones telling our team to log off. We have an emergency system with clients in case a fire needs to be put out outside these hours. The team responds quickly.
- Organization: To maintain our “don’t warm the chair” philosophy, we must measure ourselves as a company and individually. At Dos Setenta, we constantly report using a tool what we do, for which project, and for which client.
- Productivity: We all have position-based goals for hours to bill each day. Those who achieve them receive an individual bonus, plus a team bonus if everyone meets theirs.
- Efficiency: To be more efficient, continuous learning is necessary. Our working hours include time for training. In addition to training, we document everything so repeating a task takes half the time. We even have text documentation and videos I made for new hires explaining the company’s values, mission, vision, and philosophy.
- Communication: WhatsApp can interfere with professional life. Receiving messages during vacations is stressful. We want to avoid that for our team, so we use a desktop and mobile app for work communication. Emails are reduced, and WhatsApp is only for leisure.
- Remote Work: We offer flexible telework. It should make sense — five days at home without reason is unhealthy. But if needed, such as a plumber visit or sick child, it works perfectly. Some employees live elsewhere and benefit greatly from this flexibility.
- Productive Work: Tracking our time helps us know how long tasks take, even internal ones. This allows us to optimize processes, delegate, or outsource tasks below our hourly rate.
These are some of the practices we follow. I hope you liked it, but more importantly, I hope this inspires some entrepreneur to improve their employees’ work-life balance. I believe if we understand this in general, it will benefit our country. Less working time means more productivity, more time to consume, and thus a better economy. And, of course, happier people mean a better country to live in.
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