Decision making for planning

When Evan, John, and I needed to make a decision, we could usually do it pretty quickly. We were all deep every day in customer conversations, the architecture of our software, and how all the pieces fit together. We could imagine how our decisions today would play out over time. Even though we each had our areas of expertise (Evan wrote a lot of the infrastructure, John wrote a lot of the core product services, I wrote a lot of the API, web, and billing layers) we all knew enough to act as one brain. When you hold the whole picture in your heads and you work together every day, you can make progress incredibly fast. That’s the power of a small team—there are no proxies; you’re just directly solving customer problems with your code.That’s the magic that makes startups so special and so productive. There’s so little overhead to manage, the coordination energy is negligible, and people tend to have a tremendous intrinsic drive because they’re so close … [Read more...] about The “dozen-bagel” secret to preserving startup spirit as your company grows

When the test results came in, the next stage of my life was set in motion. The doctor told me that the level of stress I’d experienced for such an extended period of time was so extreme that it had physically damaged the tissues in my body. The sustained level of the stress hormone cortisol I had for such an extended period of time meant that my organs, muscles, etc. were severely weakening. … [Read more...] about Burnout put me in the hospital. This is what I learned about healthy work-life balance

New expectations around employee experience  The employee experience left the confines of the office when teams shifted to working remotely at scale in early 2020. Office culture was brought into homes, which meant employee well-being and safety needed to be fostered at a distance. As a result, employees now need to know your organization supports them as they navigate at-home childcare responsibilities, increased health risks and a weakened economy. If not, you risk losing workers to a more flexible and supportive career option.  … [Read more...] about The new top challenge for HR teams: Get comfortable with being uncomfortable

Then the pandemic hit the U.S. While we still needed to get to the same end state with our HR system, it was clear our plan needed to change to adapt to both being fully remote, and seeing a rise in stress and anxiety amongst our team. A study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 45% of employees feel emotionally drained from their work as a result of the impact of COVID-19. At Wistia, we knew many people were struggling to adapt to new challenges. As our summer review cycle approached, we found ourselves asking, How are we going to handle reviews during all of this? We ultimately ran our review cycle in July of 2020, as scheduled, but heavily adjusted the process and expanded its timeline to several weeks. … [Read more...] about How we’re revamping our review process to be kinder on our employees

The idea is that you can program the individual keys on these peripheral devices to replicate multistep keystrokes, launch apps, and do all sorts of other cool tricks that might otherwise take you a handful of clicks or some finger gymnastics to pull off. I do a fair amount of video and podcast production at my day job, and having something like the TourBox or Razer peripheral that translates a bunch of complicated keyboard shortcuts into individual, tactile hardware buttons is a godsend. … [Read more...] about 7 daily productivity hacks to help you work smarter in 2021