You’d never have seen someone concentrate on beans so much in your life. Whoever cast accountants as bean counters was mistaken. That title should have been reserved for professional baristas. On Wednesday last week, Sam weighed every bean and ground as he showed the Hatch team how to make the perfect Cup-of-Joe.
With the second day of Hatch week dedicated to Balance, Sam showed us how to take home brew to a new level. The presentation wasn’t just about waking the team up with a quick caffeine hit, nor representing balance through the perfectly brewed coffee. It demonstrated the exact behaviour we value in our team – interests outside of work.
Hobbies make life worth living and give us something to improve on outside of work. We don’t believe that work should be the sole focus, nor necessarily the most important part of our existence. That’s why we think carefully about how work ‘works’ for us. This is part of the reason we launched the four-day work week.
The question of balance came up late last year during an impassioned conversation about the optimal time to head to the gym. It’s a Catch 22: go before work, and we’re not fully awake. Go after work, other things can come up, or the place is packed.
We took 90 minutes for lunch and all went to the gym together? We’d be awake, there’d be no one else in the gym, and if the whole team is going then there is no reason to skip leg day.
After Sam’s presentation we spent time designing the ideal day for our team:
8am - 12pm – Morning Grind with limited interruptions to break our focus, including limited meetings.
12pm - 1:30pm – Gym break to workout, grab lunch and re-energise before the rest of the day.
1:30pm - 7:00pm – Working as we currently do, talking and collaborating as usual.
We immediately went in to testing, heading to the Remuera Rackets Club for a game of tennis before the second half of the day. The tennis was awesome – if a little rusty – and we came back refreshed and ready to master the rest of the afternoon.
The results aren’t yet in. Next week we’ll trial the proposed structure for the whole work week (Tuesday - Friday), testing how this fits in with our lives. Whether we keep it, pivot, or move away from this system doesn’t matter so much as the continual drive to make our work lives complement our personal lives.
How would you structure your perfect day?
This blog is part of ‘Hatch Week’, a week where we escape from our day to day to improve as a team, individuals and as a company. Every day had a theme, and every theme a blog.
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