Symphlosophy: Flexi-Time

If there’s anything Symph likes to do, it’s keeping its team happy. And how, do you ask, does it keep its team happy? Well, if 1) your office is smack dab in the middle of Metro Cebu where team mates’ residences are either far North or far South of the city and if 2) travelling from point A to point B will cost you more than an hour or two, then not having fixed office hours is one of the many perks of being at Symph.

Back when Symph was still in its founding days, it had been mandatory for teammates to be at the office at 8am for the morning sync. It had worked for a couple of weeks but, like any young company, the founding members discovered that they would be at the office from 8am to 2am, or any combination of those hours thereof, anyway and decided to abolish the requirement in the end.

Since then, Symph has always had this “you choose when you come in” mentality when it came to attendance and our current team of 25 couldn’t be happier about it. So why flexi-time? What’s so great about it is that we’ve kept it going for 5 or so years in operation? Does it pose productivity problems for project teams that have team members that come in at different times of the day? Let’s break it down, shall we?

Liberty is Responsibility

You can see that cheeky grin whenever a new team member find out that we’re not too strict on office hours. Don’t be fooled! Sure we’re quite lenient when it comes to what time you come into the office but that also means that you have to be there when you need to be there.

At Symph, we believe that team members should be masters of their own time and work at their own pace.

We encourage the sense of trust and accountability in a team member to not only have one less thing to worry about (like, getting to the office “in time”) but also to teach them the value of owning their responsibilities; so when a team member needs you to be at the office, be at the office.

There have been pros and cons to this rule lately, now that the team has grown more than 20 strong and all. There were times that it was difficult to coordinate with team members as they never really see each other at the office; like most developers come in at 8am and leave at 5pm while designers arrive at 3pm and leave at 12am, leaving a very small intersection for collaboration. There were even efforts to “encourage” team members to come in earlier so they can be with more people, like free breakfast for example (which still rocks btw).

But then, we later realized, flexi-time was a part of us. It was something that was a part of our daily lifestyle that we couldn’t do without, and in all intents and purposes, it guided many of our company processes and we didn’t even know it. Which brings us to our next section…

A Part of Our Culture

It’s like that annoying little sibling that just gets shoved into your arms suddenly one day. At first you’re cool with it, you kind of like having that cute bundle of smiles and giggles in your arms and you think, “yeah this is cool”. Then it starts bawling and trying to claw your eyes off, so you think, “no this isn’t cool”. But you then later learn to live with them, love them, work your days around them, and look forward to having them around most of the time.

That’s a pretty good analogy of how Symph feels like with it’s flexi-time rule. It’s had its bad days but mostly had its good ones. It keeps our designer abuzz with creativity and music in the evenings, our developers and content creators in the zone of peace and quiet in the early mornings, and our management team trying to make sense of it all during midday (which is a pretty normal case no matter what the rule).

As time passed, we later learned to schedule meetings, sync calls, events, and activities around these organic schedules that had taken it’s own lifeform. And as we grew and we couldn’t have asked for a better resolution.

It was the team and our dynamics that decided how we flowed as a company and with it, came our sense of freedom and accountability to both ourselves and to the group.

Change is inevitable in a startup. We all know that. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the ride while it lasts, right?