Becoming A Pokémon Friendly Company

The PokémonGo app has swept the nation and national media this past week. It seems that everyone is talking about it and everyone is playing. When you work with a bunch of young and brilliant engineers at the best IoT companies on the planet, Pokémon is bound to sweep into your life like a sweet wave.

I must confess, I never played the first Pokémon. I am in my late 30s and missed that whole fad but as our VP of Architecture Kelly pointed out one morning at scrum, our generation got to play the very first atari, which is way cooler. A lot of interesting things happen at scrum.

Each morning we stand in a circle with the entire company and say what we worked on the day prior and what we plan on working on that day.

Coming from outside of the Internet of Things, this is something completely new to me. I have never done something like this at any other company I have worked.

It is a great way of keeping employees not only accountable for what they are working on but it often helps us troubleshoot any problems that may come up before they are bigger problems. It also is a great way to remind yourself what you should be focusing on during the day, when the natural force of the day starts to take over.

So naturally it was at scrum last week where I first heard about the new PokémonGo app. A few engineers were talking about it when one of our embedded software engineers phone went off playing the theme song to Pokémon.
Then just this past Monday during scrum, the majority of our team had their phones out trying to capture some crab character. One of our engineers Gabrielle Trotter even managed to capture the moment in a Tweet.

That was it, I had to investigate this thing for myself. Later that morning I downloaded the app and checked it out. As well as do a little product placement.

And it is pretty freaking cool. While the whole things is still a bit confusing to me, I have managed to make it to level 5 and now have to find a Gym to fight in.

Of course some more traditional companies fear this type of activity like a disease. But countless studies have shown that employees need to let some steam out and are so much more productive when they have fun at work.

According to BizJournals.com “workers who participate in such activities will still likely get their assignments completed anyway — they’ll just compensate for time spent on non-work tasks by shifting their hours or staying late.”

As working professionals in 2016 most of us spend more time at the office than in our own homes. So shouldn’t it be a fun and enjoyable environment.

Our CEO Felicite Moorman reminds me often that is why she hires and works with adults.

So, it is more than ok that we have a Pokémon channel on our company Slack. You don’t have to fear that your employees are suddenly going to stop working and dedicate 8 hours a day to a gaming app. And if that really becomes a problem then you have more serious problems regarding the decision making process when hiring employees.

However, a lot of companies still have this mindset and mentality.

Moorman also reminds me that company leadership isn’t in place to police workers, they are there to enable greatness out of their team.

If you are an engineer seeking an environment where you can really make an impact and work to your full potential, please consider working with BuLogics or StratIS. We currently have some great openings located at http://bulogics.com/about-us/jobs/