Work less, get more: New Zealand firm’s four-day week an ‘unmitigated success’
Reduced hours for same pay increased work-life balance by 24%, cutting stress levels and boosting commitment
Author: Mike Dunn
In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben writes about how trees communicate with each other — sharing nutrients and even warning each other of impending dangers. So at our Network Convergence, we had many conversations about how we could learn from each other’s networks, observe patterns, share what has worked and hasn’t worked. Christine Lai, who is a collaboration catalyst and connector for networks like Village Global, The Ready, and Delivering Happiness, likes to call this “mycelium.” Mycelium are fungal threads that form networks underground in order to pass on water and nutrients in a symbiotic relationship with trees and other green plants. How can we be mycelium, then, and distinguish the lifeblood of thriving networks and the practices that make a difference, in order to share them with and nourish our wider ecosystem?
I love this metaphor. Exploring the ecosystem
Having a library of design components can sometimes give the impression that all the design work has been completed. Designers or developers can revert to using a library as clip art to create “off-the-shelf” solutions. Projects move quickly into development.
Although patterns do help teams hesitate less and build things in shorter amounts of time, it is how and why a group of patterns and components are stitched together that results in great design.
Since when did failure become good business?
In the end, if you decide that you want to embrace failure, do it upfront as a conscious part of your strategy. Conducting small, well-designed experiments where failure is expected will help you maximize learning from failure and better control the outcome.
How we made a 9 day fortnight a reality
At Edo we recently began offering a 9 day fortnight, as part of our journey toward being a next-stage organisation. I wrote about it for Corporate Rebels:
Last month, our Head of People Claire shared the exciting news that we were going to offer the option of working a 9 day fortnight. With the new financial year on the horizon, everyone would be able to choose between receiving a pay rise, or having every other Friday off.
Edo is a design and technology consultancy in Bristol, UK, with a permanent staff of about 25. It’s always been a good place to work, with a healthy work/life balance. But we knew some of our approaches were informed more by how we thought things should be done than what we really needed.
There was too much process and hierarchy. Our journey has been influenced by Frederic Laloux and sites like Corporate Rebels. Less hierarchy, more autonomy, and greater wellness and purpose at work began to feel like the solutions we needed.
Read the rest at Corporate Rebels.
Banner Blindness Revisited: Users Dodge Ads on Mobile and Desktop
On the web, the hot-potato scanning pattern occurs when users gaze at an item in which they are not interested, then look away and avoid fixating on that area on that page, and sometimes on other pages on the website, and even on completely different websites.
