Is it possible that the most productive solution would be some days in office and some days working from home, getting the benefits of cooperation and concentration on different days?
For example: 1 day of meetings (not necessarily 8 hours in a row, but the idea is that all meetings that are not an emergency and involve a manager, must be scheduled for this day), 1-2 days working together (without interruptions by managers), 2-3 days working from home.
The exact schedule would depend on team experience, for example the experienced employees might prefer “meetings on Monday, collaboration on Tuesday, three continuous days of uninterrupted work from home”, while juniors might benefit from “meetings on Monday, collaboration on Tuesday and Thursday, work from home on Wednesday and Friday” (so if they get stuck, they only lose one day).
I personally have Wednesdays, plus Thursday mornings, as “no meeting days”. I think it works pretty well and I know other faculty who do something similar (sometimes just setting mornings as meeting-free). So this does seem like a generally good idea!
I had a very similar setup for a while and it worked okay. We had one meeting day each week. It was mostly about whiteboarding and building social cohesion. We still communicated quite a lot on other days (mostly through text, rarely VC).
Specialising days like that seems like a good idea at first glance, but I get the feeling I’d burn out on meetings pretty quick if all my week’s meetings were scheduled on one day. Being able to use a meeting as a break from concrete thinking to switch to more abstract thinking for a while is very refreshing.
Is it possible that the most productive solution would be some days in office and some days working from home, getting the benefits of cooperation and concentration on different days?
For example: 1 day of meetings (not necessarily 8 hours in a row, but the idea is that all meetings that are not an emergency and involve a manager, must be scheduled for this day), 1-2 days working together (without interruptions by managers), 2-3 days working from home.
The exact schedule would depend on team experience, for example the experienced employees might prefer “meetings on Monday, collaboration on Tuesday, three continuous days of uninterrupted work from home”, while juniors might benefit from “meetings on Monday, collaboration on Tuesday and Thursday, work from home on Wednesday and Friday” (so if they get stuck, they only lose one day).
I personally have Wednesdays, plus Thursday mornings, as “no meeting days”. I think it works pretty well and I know other faculty who do something similar (sometimes just setting mornings as meeting-free). So this does seem like a generally good idea!
I had a very similar setup for a while and it worked okay. We had one meeting day each week. It was mostly about whiteboarding and building social cohesion. We still communicated quite a lot on other days (mostly through text, rarely VC).
Specialising days like that seems like a good idea at first glance, but I get the feeling I’d burn out on meetings pretty quick if all my week’s meetings were scheduled on one day. Being able to use a meeting as a break from concrete thinking to switch to more abstract thinking for a while is very refreshing.