Relax and Rejuvenate
As we go into the holiday season, I like to look back at all the traditions that allow us to refresh and recharge each year. One of those traditions that we’ve carried forward is shutting down the office for a week each year between Christmas and New Years Day. Initially, it started because that week was generally slower with our government customers. As we continued this tradition, we discovered a whole variety of benefits that made the entire organization more resilient and happier.
A time to recharge
As we’ve become more connected, there are more opportunities to “check-in” on work wherever you go. A quick glance at email or slack can take you out of a break and put you back into the thick of things. Even if you do get fully disconnected, there’s a guarantee you'll be catching up on all of the emails that coworkers spent your vacation generating.
When everyone is taking vacation at the same time, there’s an opportunity to get a true break. Everyone is interconnected and one person's work is bound to generate work for other teams. A cross company vacation can interrupt this process and give everyone a break.
Balancing on-call
As we grew, we still needed to maintain some amount of coverage during the time off. The sales team still makes a push toward the end of the year to hit a final set of quotas and our customer service team still strives to provide high quality support. Through it all we needed to keep the products running smoothly. To manage this while still giving the team a break, we decided how much support was needed and rotated on-call through volunteers based on their availability.
This effort brought the team together while giving everyone some time apart. The structure of these on-call breaks looked different across the departments and teams but the overall goal was the same: Committing to a real work-life balance and going into the new year relaxed and recharged. Year after year, closing down the office was often listed as one of our most valued perks.
Building resilience
One of the surprising side effects of giving everyone a week off was the systems would sometimes break in unexpected ways. For example, our code deployment system would typically be run multiple times a week as we continually pushed out product updates. These deployments restarted most of the systems so we didn’t usually encounter situations where the services were run for a week or more without restarts.
One year when we went on break, some of the systems got progressively slower and triggered alarms that indicated they were not processing data at a normal rate. We realized that our system had come to depend on these periodic restarts. We were able to correct this without impacting the team’s vacation too much and once we got back we found some ways to make the system more resilient so it wouldn’t impact future time off.
People being out also allowed the teams to build up their communication pathways. When on-call responsibility is rotating, the best way to route information and tasks is through common public slack channels. This also allows people to catch up without pulling everyone into a synchronization meeting if something major comes up.
Have a relaxing break!
I am super excited we carried this tradition forward once we were acquired. It’s hard to describe the benefits of taking some shared time off without experiencing it yourself. Even then there are usually some bumps when trying it for the first time as the organization finds the weaknesses that need to be reinforced. Working through these challenges and seeing the bumps as an opportunity to make improvements will make the whole team stronger and happier.
For everyone reading, I hope you enjoy some relaxing and rejuvenating time off for the holidays! I’ll see you all in the new year!
