Why We Don’t Own a Ping Pong Table
If you check the “uber cool” offices of IT companies nowadays, you will often see ping pong tables, fun rooms, play stations, fridges with free beer etc. In fact, I’d say this has become so common that, if you don’t have it, you’re either really old (Ok, boomer?) or don’t care about your employees.
Well, we don’t have a ping pong table.
Should we even have an office?
I’ve been working remotely for abroad clients since 2013. The Covid-19 situation in 2020 made a lot of companies work remotely. Why is this cool? Because people have learned the culture of working remotely, of respecting each other’s time, of scheduling stuff etc.
If we apply rules of working remotely in everyday life, then we don’t need an office. These rules are simple:
schedule time for meetings and calls (don’t just tap people on the shoulder)
keep meetings and calls to the point, ideally to a predefined agenda
be honest about when you are online (on chat and available to respond) and when you need to be off and have the entire team do this
be clear when defining tasks – who is in charge of what, when they are working on it and when it is due
have a team culture where people will stick to deadlines
have a team culture where people breaking deadlines will notify the team in advance
By applying these rules you don’t technically need an office. We do have team members who find it impractical to come to an office on a daily basis.
Why we actually do have an office
I was working from home from 2013 to 2015. It was awesome for the most part. But it happened to me way too often that I’d end up just glancing at emails when I woke up, while waiting for the coffee water to boil. And then just answer one of them. And another. And then do a task. And then see that there is a problem, and start solving it… And then it was 10 pm, I was still in my pajamas, ate delivered pizza and not showered.
Working from home requires discipline. You need to know when to start and you need to know when to stop. For me personally, I love computers, so even when I am not working, I am studying something, writing, reading, just browsing the web etc. Then notifications come in from work and I often look at them. And then, especially if they are simple, I take care of one thing. Then another… And I catch myself working all the time.
While one can do this if they want to push forward, and while I often do this being the company owner, it is not optimal. And, if you are an employee, then it is definitely not optimal, because in their contracts employees trade their time, culture, person and knowledge for their salary. Taking away more of their time is not fair.
A few years ago I became a father. And I love it, it is the most amazing thing ever. However, it requires time and commitment. This is why for me working from home is becoming more and more difficult. As soon as the kids come back from kindergarten, they want to play. Which is awesome, unless you’re working at that point.
So, we opened an office in 2015. An office can be just a small space, nothing fancy, but it needs to be business focused. It needs to have good ergonomic equipment (as you will be spending a lot of time there!). It needs to have coffee (because developers are machines that turn coffee into source code 🙂 ).
But most of all, it needs to be a place where, when you come in, your mind automatically takes that as a mental note preparing it for focusing on work.
So – where is beer and ping pong tables?
The beer is in the bar downstairs. Actually, there is a small children’s playground just 50 meters from our office building and there are ping pong tables there. Any employee is free to go use any of these when they feel like it.
But not in the office. The office should be a place of focus. Come in, focus on the work, do it as well as you can and by the time the work day is over, shut your computer down and leave.
If you want a friendly game of ping pong with a colleague, go for it. If you want a beer after work, go for it. But then do it properly – don’t do it while your mind is still focused on the code in the IDE that is open in the next room or while you hear Slack notification noises mixing with the ping pong ball hitting the paddle.
Is not having a ping pong table a perk?
Ping pong tables in companies are cool, Google has them, it makes you look like a loose friendly environment as opposed to a stuck up company… This might be true.
But at Intellegens we do have a loose and friendly environment, we just create such an atmosphere in a different way. But one thing that is important to us, and it will always be a huge part of the company culture is respect for everyone’s time.
People working in a company should be working for the agreed amount of time. Not more. Owners – they can be working as much as they can put in, 20h days if necessary. In my opinion, the same should not be expected from employees. Employees have their own things, families, hobbies, part time gigs… And it’s good that they do, it’s healthy! Their time needs to be respected.
One thing I always say to people on job interviews is that in the past 10 years we have rarely needed to stay overtime, literally less than 10 times. And the thing I like the most was that at some of those occasions I (as the owner) would be the one saying “Hey, go home, I’ll finish this up” and the team would go “Nope, we’ll stay and help you, we know it needs to be done by tomorrow“.
That is company culture and that is a true team. Not people playing ping pong with each other.
