Our office on Junkerngasse in Bern's old town is pretty empty at the moment, the whole team is working from home. The corona crisis has only slightly affected the way we work - we'll tell you why.

How do we work at Linkyard?

Even before the crisis, many of our employees worked from home, although not all and always. People were happy to meet on site for creative sessions and workshops, where this made sense. Now this exchange must also take place virtually.

We organize our team of almost 20 people into business units. Each of these teams has a Kanban board, where all tasks/tasks are stored. With our self-service principle, however, these tasks are not assigned top-down, but each employee is responsible for themselves.

In addition to company-wide OKR (Objectives & Key Results), as led by tech giants such as Intel or Google, each business unit also has its own OKRs. Each employee within a business unit should define so-called “meaningful objectives” for themselves, for which it is worthwhile to get up and work in the morning. An example of this would be that you want to improve customer satisfaction. A measurable key result could be to increase the order rate among existing customers by 50%. These key results are deliberately set rather optimistically; you should benefit from not achieving the goals. Because that is exactly how you can learn as an individual, team or organization: Only if you set yourself high goals can you fail at all and continue to grow.

Our tools

Although the right tools are only a means to an end, they are essential for working efficiently from home. Jira Software This is our core, where we manage all our projects and business units and maintain an overview. When it comes to documenting knowledge, sketching architectures, or writing such a blog post, we use Confluence. All communication takes place via Enterprise Chat Slack instead of where we have different rooms for respective topics.

Patrick and Tobias explain: This is how we separate work and leisure

When not only work, but also the university and the university of applied sciences are remote, this requires a great deal of discipline. Patrick and Tobias are both studying business informatics - Patrick in the master's degree and Tobias in the bachelor's program (specializing in business analysis). Patrick works 40% and Tobias 70% at linkyard.

patrick

I like to work in small “focus sprints,” which means I put my phone away for 1-2 hours, mute Slack and concentrate fully on a specific task where I am not distracted by anything else. Short breaks are essential for me, so I make sure that I get up at least once an hour and move briefly. To make it all work out, balancing is paramount for me: I make sure that I exercise at least 2-3 times a week, I like to cook, dedicate myself to my synthesizers or a round of Mario Kart.

On the photo you can see my workplace in the home office, which also likes to become a small home studio in the evening.

tobias

My tactic is very simple: Avoid Distractions. I have a fixed daily routine that gets me in the mood for the home office day. First I take a shower, dress normally (jeans, T-shirt, etc.), look through my messages and then turn off my cell phone's mobile data. If something really important happens, I can still be reached by phone.

My office is also spatially separated from my sleeping and relaxation area. Anyone who can enforce such a separation within their own four walls is also better able to switch off from others.

In order to let my creativity run wild, I screwed two whiteboards to the wall, on which I can quickly record ideas - regardless of whether they are for an existing process or a customer solution.

I use the same notebook for university as for work. I have set up two user accounts for this purpose - one for each context. The game is played on the Miditower in the bedroom:)

To get through the day well, hazelnuts, lots of water and fast music are essential. The latter must always be fast (everything north of 180 BPM) and have good bass - then I am satisfied and can focus.

It's my workplace. Triple monitor setup is a must for me. Slack/Outlook is open on the Surface and you work productively on the other two.

It is clear to us that the perfect work situation is different for every type and every generation. In principle, however, we agree that avoiding distractions and creating balance are the two central points.

We are happy to support you with our Collaboration solutions for session & task management, enterprise chat and video conferences. We also focus on customers in industries with particularly high data protection or security requirements who want their data processed in the EU or Switzerland.