As our team grows, it’s become apparent that not everyone is necessarily ready to drop bombs at 9am sharp. During one of our recent retrospectives, we identified several “sacred cows” that were regimenting our work. One of them happened to be our nine-to-five workday. So we decided to slay it.

And since we LOVE experiments, we decided to to break our highly controversial, never imitated, nine-to-five workday to see if a less structured schedule would improve morale and help us work more effectively.

The basic ground rules are simple:

• We’re still working 40 hours per week, slackers!
• Come in whenever you want, or work from home
• When working, you must be hanging out in the Campfire room
• Ask for help if you are blocked - still no heroes here
• Our weekly iteration goal is whatever our natural velocity is
• Dave Huntington Banks, the Product Manager, controls task priority
• When you start your day, tell the gang what you did yesterday, what’s blocking you, and what you’re going to do today
• Check the calendar for important company events so you don’t look like an ass walking into someone’s presentation
• If you are not in the office for an important event, we’ll Skype you in

And most importantly...

• Be here Mondays at Noon if you want to participate in our world famous company lunch!
• Be here every second Friday for our retrospective

The team is responding quite well to this experiment, and we definitely have an interesting mix of early risers, with others coming in later. (Personally, I’m mixing it up to find my groove.) We’ve also noticed some pains, but nothing mission critical yet. Watch for a post-mortem once we’ve let the experiment play out for a few more weeks.