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Sasha Rezvina

Why You Should Stop Copying Google’s Employee Perks

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Not only is Google rated the #1 place to work year after year, but it’s one of most valuable companies on earth. And that’s by no coincidence. To get there, Google spent years perfecting their employee perks to create a positive and highly-productive environment.

Google Campus Dublin - Gasworks - Microkitchen - Floor Identity: Waterworld - Foto Peter Wurmli - © Camenzind Evolution
Google Campus Dublin – Gasworks – Microkitchen – Floor Identity: Waterworld – Foto Peter Wurmli – © Camenzind Evolution

But Google has only been able to grow into a $360 billion company by trying bold new things and constantly iterating their systems—not by blindly applying the successful models of other companies.

To succeed as a startup, you also have to be careful not to just adopt trendy fads, but rather find what works best for you through constant iteration. In fact, there are tons of companies that do the opposite of what Google does and thrive as a result.

Here are some examples of super successful startups that refrained from Googlifying their environment.

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How To Work With A Motormouth

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You walk into your office on a Monday morning and are instantly overwhelmed with the amount of work you have that week.

Just as you’ve figured out how to cram all your meetings and projects into your schedule, you look up from your desk and are instantly full of dread. Your chatty coworker is headed right toward you and has chosen you as his next victim. Well, there goes the better part of the morning.

chatty coworker

Of course, having a great social relationship can boost company culture. Once in a while, some water cooler talk can be a nice break from your hard work, but some people take this way too far.

Some will come by your desk every few hours, and even remote workers might incessantly ping you on Slack. According to a survey conducted by talent mobility company Lee Hecht Harrison, talkative coworkers are the #1 disruption at work.

Even though having a chatty worker in your office is different than difficult coworkers, you must know how to deal with them.

Here are the different kinds of chatty coworkers, and how to keep them from disrupting your day.

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The 38 Best Productivity Software Tools of 2019

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productivity-software

Productivity apps continue to pop up right, left, and center. If you’re trying to stay up-to-date, it can quickly begin to feel like you’re wasting time looking for the perfect software rather than actually working efficiently. At I Done This, we continue to improve our done lists and integrations to eliminate the need for meetings — but we realize that there are many more ways that you and your team can get more done in less time.

To spare you hours of Internet sifting, we’ve updated our collection of the 35 best productivity software tools for the New Year.

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How to Build Company Culture with No Time, Money, or Experience

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Startups are depicted as workplaces with pool tables, lego-speckled break rooms, desks adorned with Star Wars memorabilia and even in-house cafeterias. In reality, startups are two sleep-deprived founders squeezed into a co-working space with a small team and a bunch of strangers, trying to make something out of nothing.

build-company-culture

In the early days, it’s difficult to focus on how to build company culture. You don’t have the cash to invest in an office space, the time to invest in employee growth, or the experience to deal with interpersonal problems. Under these constraints, most founders focus on everything but culture and leave it as a problem to be addressed later down the line.

But the biggest existential threat to your company isn’t lack of planning or lack of resources — it’s people problems. Two-thirds of early-stage startups fail from interpersonal issues, according to Harvard Business Professor Noam Wasserman. If you don’t put effort into cementing a strong team relationship now, your company will fall apart at the first stumbling block.

Here’s how you can lay the foundation for a healthy culture early on.

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4 Subtle Signs Your Employee is Looking for a New Job

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You come into work, thinking it’s going to be just another day in the office. You have a friendly chat about your weekend with the office manager while pouring yourself a hot cup of coffee. You make your way over to your desk, and just as you start looking through your email, a nervous employee pops their head in and asks for a minute of your time.

At this point, the next sentence comes as no surprise: “I’m giving my two-weeks notice.”

employee-retention

Job-hopping has become the norm. While fifty years ago, people held positions for ten or more years, today, workers only average about four years at each job. And the stigma associated with switching jobs has also decreased. Employees that spent less than a few years at a job used to be considered flighty—now they’re considered ambitious and ahead of the curve.

The odds are stacked against you, but all hope isn’t lost when it comes to employee retention.

While some clues will tip you off right away—such as too many “doctor’s” appointments, or employees coming in dressed suspiciously well—most of the time, the signs that your employees are job-hunting are considerably more discreet. If you learn how to pick up on these subtle cues, you can nip this problem in the bud and retain some of your most valuable employees.

Here’s how to spot when employees are looking for a new job (and what you can do about it).

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How Envoy Inspires Team Motivation with I Done This

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team motivation

What do some of the most well-known companies today (Pinterest, Yelp, Box, POPSUGAR, Asana, MailChimp) have in common? They all care immensely about their brand experience. What else do they have in common? They all use a service called Envoy to extend that brand experience to their front desk, creating a warm, delightful and quick check-in process for visitors.

Envoy is a visitor registration platform that’s been a game-changer for how guests are greeted in workplaces around the world. As part of the sign-in process, they automate badge-printing, host notifications and signing of NDAs and other legal agreements. Founded in 2013, Envoy now serves 6 million visitors in over 50 different countries.

team motivation As we learned recently, the small team of 37 people was able to inspire team motivation through high morale and fast growth, thanks, in part, to their favorite productivity tool. Here’s how they use I Done This.

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Zapier Brings a Chrome Extension to I Done This

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Most SaaS companies use upwards of 20 productivity tools on a daily basis, some hitting as many as 50. We have so many tools that productivity boosters—such as Trello, Slack, email— ironically become productivity blockers. There’s only one tool that can fix that.

Zapier is a tool that lets you automate interactions between your favorite apps.You can auto-create spreadsheets, based on Salesforce data, or have Google calendar meetings automatically appear as “dones” on I Done This. You can even use it as a product management tool.

Now they’ve launched Push, a new Chrome extension that lets you access your favorite apps, without having to logging into the dashboard. You can now add “dones,” “goals,” and “blockers” to your done list without ever leaving your browser window. Here’s how.
done list

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A PM’s Guide to Managing Your Team’s Project Roles with I Done This

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Over half of all managers in the US are concerned about their team’s time management skills, according to an Institute for Corporate Productivity study.

As your employees’ heads are tucked behind computer screens and they’re clacking away on the keyboard, it seems near impossible to know how they’re spending their time. Are they in a private Slack channel chatting away about the new hire, or are they working? Should the project you assigned Linda take as long as it has? And if you don’t know what your local employees are up to, you can forget about getting insight into your remote employees time management habits.

In the internet-driven workplace, transparency feels like a pipe-dream. Not only do you have no way of telling whether your employees are slacking off, but you can’t even tell if hard-working employees are being tripped up by obstacles outside their control. The natural response to this issue is to micromanage and hover over their shoulder, but you want to empower your employees in their project team roles, not control them.

project team roles

I Done This gives your whole team transparency without any of the negative side-effects. Here’s how.

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How I Done This Says Thanks To The Open Source Community

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I Done This was built by thousands of developers, but we only know two of them.

The same goes for the majority of products popping up every day. Developers aren’t building software from scratch anymore. They’re mostly building on top of Open Source software—software whose source code is publicly available.

I Done This wouldn’t exist without this community, but we’ve never found a way to say thanks. GitHub doesn’t provide an address for thank you cards, and there certainly isn’t a “donate today” button on Stack Overflow. But thanks to a new platform called Open Collective, we finally have a way of giving back to that community.

Open Collective serves as a virtual but completely transparent bank for any sort of community— from Open Source, to Boy Scouts, to Art Collectors—to get funding. This means that the Open Source community finally has access to the resources it needs to grow and continue being the bedrock of the tech industry.

open source community

At I Done This, we’re proud to be taking advantage of this awesome platform to finally support a community we’ve long known and loved.

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Why Every Company Should Work as If They Were a Remote Company

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When you work in an office with a small team, it’s easy to cultivate a culture of co-dependence. After all, the email, the document, or the customer name that you need is just a shoulder tap away.

But relying on other people for information causes unnecessary friction in your workflow and directly hinders everyone’s productivity. Every time you tap someone on the shoulder you assume that what you need is more important than what they’re doing. It creates an entire culture around disruptiveness, where no one hesitates to interrupt their peers for their own needs.

Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to ask anyone for information? If it were just readily available, right at your fingertips? For remote companies, it has to be this way.

Because remote companies tend to have employees scattered across the world, they are forced to put truly strong systems in place. As a result, everyone in a remote company is as productive as possible, because no one has to rely on other people to get the information they need.

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