work

At the startup I work for we used to have a full time HR person. These were in the days when the expectation was that we would have explosive growth and the company would "at least double in size every few months". Unfortunately that is not the way it played out - we are still making good progress but have much more realistic growth plans.

Andrew Cherrie is the pastor of Home Church. In a recent sermon entitled "7 lessons from 7 years at Home Church" he gave the following quote:

Due to the ongoing COVID situation the team had been struggling to stay focussed and motivated. The inability to go out, the lack of change of scenery and the sameness every day has been taking its toll. To try to address this we actively encouraged them to take time off - which, given the limitations on travel, was less appealing than it normally would be.

I recently had a day where I had about 10 different meetings - all on different subjects. I knew that I would struggle to be productive in each of them if I turned up for them unprepared and had to switch subjects each time.

As part of our processes we regularly hold retrospectives. We used to do this all in a room with post-it notes - a fairly traditional approach. We would set up 4 areas: Liked, Longed, Learned and Lacked and proceed to plaster post-it notes over the different sections. Once everyone had finished we would organise each section into themes and then discuss and agree actions.