Imagine a workday where you set the rhythm – choosing how, when and where you get things done. This is how it should be. After all, we are living, breathing and ever-changing human beings. We believe work should reflect that.

At Life Size, we embrace flexibility in everything we do. In 2020, we decided to become a fully remote company. Even though we would love to see each other in person more often, we also enjoy the benefits of remote work. The key to this is a strong agile working culture.

How we define agile working

To understand what agile working is, the Agile Organisation offers a helpful definition:

“Agile working is about bringing people, processes, connectivity and technology, time and place together to find the most appropriate and effective way of working to carry out a particular task. It is working within guidelines (of the task) but without boundaries (of how you achieve it).”

We follow the mindset of work supporting life, not life supporting work. A functional agile working culture is a basic prerequisite for this.

Transparency and communication is key for agile working

At Life Size, you can deviate from the typical 9 to 5 workday at any time, allowing everyone to navigate the balance of life and work on their own terms. The idea is this: We don’t control our employees, but we expect them to communicate. We always update each other when we work outside typical hours.

To make this as simple as possible, we have a Slack channel for agile working updates and use Google calendar to block time for absence. This allows for complete transparency when it comes to each other’s working hours and absences.

What helps us to enjoy agile working

Remote work has its perks, but also its downfalls. Long screen times, regular calls and persistent notifications – all of this can become tiring from time to time. Here’s some things we do to embrace the potential of our agile working culture and to make remote working more attractive:

• Creating the right work environment: Everyone at Life Size should have a comfortable work environment at home. We encourage our employees to purchase equipment that makes their workspace effective and comfortable.
• Providing variety: Sometimes working at the same place every day can be boring. For this reason, we encourage our employees to change their location every so often. Each team member has an allowance that enables them to use co-working spaces or work from cafés.
• Creating real focus: During company-wide focus time, we encourage our employees to temporarily mute notifications or even turn off their Wi-fi and work offline.
• Actively allowing time in nature: During regular internal meetings we allow our employees to turn off their cameras to rest their eyes and encourage them to go on a walk while having a call from time to time.

Life Size is a people-first company, for our clients as well as for our team members. We don’t want any of us to be in a situation where they have to build their life around work, rather we want them to have the best work-life-balance possible.

What do you think about our ideas and what are you doing to create a healthy agile working culture?

Feel free to share your thoughts with us via email or LinkedIn.