For a little while this morning, as every week, I helped in the class of one of my stepdaughters, at a local school. Last year I did a talk in my daughter’s class. If there is an excursion, I can volunteer to go along and help.

I can drop of kids to school rather than before school care, I can pick up kids from school rather than using after school care, and have time to help with homework and do other things most afternoons.

Other people working for me have the same freedoms.

We have time for all this because I’ve designed my company to enable it. Of course people need to be present and do stuff a certain amount of time every week – but the processes in the company don’t rely on me (or someone else) being there at set times, and that’s the key difference.

It’s one aspect of how one can practically address Upstarta Principle #9: “Focus on people (internal and external), prevent stress.”

That may seem easy, but if you look about various processes in companies that generally require multiple people doing sub-tasks, such as doing payments including payroll, you tend to find interesting dependencies on people and very specific times. Often people don’t realise this any more, as they’ve become used to being in the “right” place at those times.  Changing a process is not easy, but it is possible with proper understanding of how these things work – just deciding to change is not good enough and generally results in a lot of pain (and no change).

See if you can come up with another example of such person/time dependent processes within your organisation, and post a comment here! If you want help with changing, it’s best to contact me directly as there’ll be quite a bit of communication (and real time on your end) required to make such things happen.