Comments on: Work and Circuses http://paulbogan.com/2008/04/12/work-and-circuses/ The best of everything... just a little bit late. Sat, 11 Oct 2008 06:28:07 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.2 By: Philip Yurchuk http://paulbogan.com/2008/04/12/work-and-circuses/#comment-36 Philip Yurchuk Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:02:47 +0000 http://paulbogan.com/2008/04/12/work-and-circuses/#comment-36 I hadn't heard of those activities, although we have had talent competitions at my work. Completely voluntary, thankfully. It sounds like what they're doing is injecting a lot of interruptions and random task switching (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/03/multitasking_ma.html). There are two companies that have knocked it out of the park in terms of treating employees the way they want to be treated (and reaping incredible rewards for it): Best Buy (corporate office, not stores): http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_50/b4013001.htm Google (you can skip over anything technical): http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html The closer you can get your company to those, the better off everyone will be. I hadn’t heard of those activities, although we have had talent competitions at my work. Completely voluntary, thankfully. It sounds like what they’re doing is injecting a lot of interruptions and random task switching (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/03/multitasking_ma.html).

There are two companies that have knocked it out of the park in terms of treating employees the way they want to be treated (and reaping incredible rewards for it):

Best Buy (corporate office, not stores):
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_50/b4013001.htm

Google (you can skip over anything technical):
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/good-agile-bad-agile_27.html

The closer you can get your company to those, the better off everyone will be.

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