Yesterday I met with a very dynamic team working at making their startup succeed. The partners, Gabriel and Samuel, were full of that enthusiasm young entrepreneurs have when they believe anything is possible.

Websystems started like that, eight years ago.

When your company is still in the nursery stage, the sky is the limit. There is never a conversation about things being technically impossible.  No sentence ever starts with “we can’t do that.” There is no technological debt to live with. Just dreams and hopes and energy.

Which made me think: why does this feeling stop? As the company grows, why do things become less possible?

Ease of change is proportional the resources invested in the project

Small teams, like small companies, have the ability to turn around much faster. Likewise, when we are at the beginning of something – company or project –  it’s much easier to change everything. It seems as time goes, it becomes harder to change our minds. We are blinded by the sunk costs. Sunk costs represent what we have invested already in something. […]

We often think about optimizing our day, our work life, our home life. And by optimizing we thing or improving how we do things.

Here’s something else to think about: how many things to you do every day? How many of those things could you automate?

A good place to start is email. Most of us start the day by sorting and processing the email that came in since we left work the day before. Could you setup rules to automatically sort emails, automatically forward emails to the right people? The amount of time you will invest in setting up the automation will pay for itself in no time.

Here at Websystems, we receive payment confirmations via email and we need to sort those emails in the morning. It doesn’t seem like a time-consuming activity (it takes Sylvain about 20 minutes every morning to sort payments). However, if we count 20 minutes per work day, the total is 80+ hours! That means that Sylvain spends over two weeks a year just sorting emails.

Implementing an automated system to sort […]

I never thought about our workplace in terms of family-friendliness. Still, there are nine of us at Websystems, and there always seems to be a baby or two on the way.

So I started counting. Between the nine of us, we have 19 children! That’s more than 2 per employee. I think that makes Websystems a very family-friendly workplace!

For Websystems, it’s important to hire the right people and to keep them. By making it easy to balance work and family, we are creating an environment that makes us happy.

For more information on happiness at work, check out the Chief Happiness Officer.