Anders Thue Pedersen – Founder of Timeblock
TimeBlock was born from the frustration I experienced by running a consultancy for 17 year in which I constantly missed deadlines, saw scope creep and was stressed, overworked and unhappy.
I suffered from these problems for many years, the main differentiator was how many employees or business partners I had at any given time.
When i had none I was mostly stress free and had fun, but whenever I tried to grow the business I experienced a lot of stress and started seeing slipping deadlines, projects that went haywire because of scope creep or incorrect estimations and bad time estimates from those doing the work.
To combat these problems I turned to companies like NetFlix and Valve software, and tried to implement some of their tactics and ideas, such as free vacation, free working hours, salary based on performance, self motivation and more.
I have to admit that it only kinda worked, mostly these ideas failed for me and my employees.
Then i tried the good old stick (failed to work), carrots (failed to work), stick and carrot (failed to work) and was left at the brink of closing my business because i just couldn’t get it to work.
Without knowing it, my epiphany came during a vacation when i realised that there was one thing wrong in my business setup, one thing that most of the above companies are doing without being aware, and especially one thing that most “old business” do not do and something many employees are fiercely trying to avoid like the plague.
The thing I was missing was transparency, not from me I run a pretty transparent company where my employees knows most about what is happening and what is not.
The transparency missing was from my employees to me (and the customers).
The TimeBlock method fixes this by forcing the employees to sit down with a manager every monday morning and talk about what went wrong and what was good about last week and secondly what they are going to be doing this week.
At this meeting they also reflect over failures during the last week and how to avoid these failures in the future.
Secondly they inform the customers after the Monday meeting about what will be done this week, and not just what they are doing but also when, this way the customer has total transparency to when their tasks is done.
The positive side effects from this is that the employees becomes more internally motivated, because they have selected and communicated what they will do during the week, and as science tells us, internally motivated people are more happy, and more happy people are more productive.
