Agile workplace
Has been three months after the official launch of Hive. With daily work ritual and habits established, it’s time to reflect on the workplace design that is fit for an agile workforce — collaborative, empowering and innovative.
Our workplace comprises three types of areas — open area, squad area and private space.
Open area
The public space between the office entrance and workgroup areas is the open area. Open area brings people from different workgroups together for communal eating, table tennis, nerf war and other fun activities. A place for serendipity :)
Without communal eating, no human group can hold together — Christopher Alexander
What works well
- Full height window view, high ceilings, colourful chairs and table tennis. Fun, relaxed and inviting atmosphere brings people together
- Creative and vibrant atmosphere reflects our energetic and fun-loving culture. +1 attracting the right people
- Movable and randomly placed furniture create a casual and relaxed environment, to draw conversations. Awesome place for meetup
- Spacious area, multiple visual displays and whiteboards supports group discussion of various sizes and different formats. Perfect environment for breakout sessions
Can be better
- Change the closed pantry to a open pantry, next to the breakfast area
- For proximity reason, workgroups at the rear of the office tend to use the back door and have lesser chance for interaction. Given enough space, we will create another open area at the rear of the office that connects to the open area at the entrance
Squad area
We use agile methods — Kanban, XP, Scrum and LeSS — to deliver digital services and we are organised like Spotify. We have a few tribes and each tribe is made up of squads. Every squad is a cross-functional and stable team, not more than ten members. Squad members are collocated within their squad area.
What works well
- Product Owner collocates with the squad
- Collocation creates shared experience and improves collaboration
- Regular face time builds personal rapport and trust at a faster pace than virtual mediums
- Encourages face-to-face conversation — most effective and efficient mode of communication
- Adequate space for pair-programming, code review and daily stand-up for each squad
- Large screens to display scrum board, burn down chart and build status for each squad
- Most scrum ceremonies happen within squad area. Need not rely on availability of external resources. E.g. meeting room with projector
- Full height window view :)
Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them — Christopher Alexander
- Encourages each squad to have a definite character of its own. The quirky nature of their space helps to form a group identity
Private space
The private space is the quiet thinking space for one person to work alone and get into flow. Any person who tries to get into flow and is interrupted each time, is going to be unproductive and unhappy
The private space can be at the person’s standing desk when wearing a ear plug or at the high bar counter that looks through the full height window or Sam’s favourite bag or …
… standing hammock or the long wooden table. What’s more important is to understand that the best private space for one person is not the same as that for someone else.
We need to provide privates spaces where everyone in the team, regardless of personality or role, will feel comfortable
Appreciation
Like many before us, we stand on the shoulders of giants. The design of our workplace is heavily inspired by Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, Spotify and the companies in the Walkabout Singapore.
And lastly, I would like to call out these heroes for volunteering their time and effort
- Alvin for completing our bookshelf with angry birds and flying pigs
- @shioju for buying the table tennis table and starting the T_T tournament
- Wendy & Raphael for starting the anime and Gundam craze
- Keng Hun for making super nutritious half-boiled egg breakfast
- Viviean and Doris for tying up the loose ends after the renovation, preparing for the official launch, and going above and beyond your PA duties on all occasions
- Hudson, VJ, Wallace and Sam for getting the right gadgets for GDS. Additional hugs to Hudson for handling the procurement paperwork, kanpai, bro {_}!
- @strengthandwill and @katsuki for the 360-degree video of our Hive
- Mark for choosing the right place and living the culture — “Be happy, be awesome and help others to be happy and awesome”
- Everyone for making our workplace, less of an office and more of a home for GDS! :)
- Lastly and most important mention goes to Soy Boon and Mark for writing those request papers — the first step for dreams to come true :)
For your patience in reading this far, you deserve this 360-degree YouTube tour of Hive :)
If you enjoyed this piece, you might also like to know how we operate!
Updates — May 2016
- We are hiring. Find me if you are keen.
