Explaining our Beliefs: Why We Work Better When We Work Calmly

The concept of calm was first introduced by the guys from the American software company Basecamp. In 2018, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson published “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work”. The book ended up on the New York Times best-seller list. It also had a huge impact on me. At Sergeant, we were already familiar with some of the approaches described in the book. But it was not until I read the book that we found a name for the way we work.

For the past 18 months, we have been adopting the concept of calm to our own needs. Today, calm is one of our three agency beliefs.

Our agency is our best product

It all starts with seeing our agency itself as a product, or a service for that matter. Like every product, it needs to be constantly reviewed and improved through iteration. We have a lot of ideas and test quite a few of them. If they are any good, we stick with them, if they are bad, we drop them right away. But we never see our agency as something that is fully developed.

We respect everyone’s time and attention

A very important element of calm is to protect the time of your colleagues. By default, we assume every team member is deeply focussed on an important task and try to avoid interrupting them. Sure, there are moments when we need immediate advice or a quick response. But most of the time, a response could wait a few hours. In the meantime, we just start working on the next task. 

We believe in asynchronous communication

A good way to respect your teammate’s time is by using asynchronous communication. At Sergeant, we opted for a combination of Slack and Flow. Especially the task management tools provide most of what you need to run a calm office. You can comment on a task when the time is right and your colleague can read and answer it when her or his time is right. For the most part, we try to work in focus mode, an option available both in Slack and Flow. No notifications, no messages, no distractions. Just us and our work. This is how stuff gets done!

And it allows us to work from literally everywhere. Working from home was an option way before the pandemic. Truth be told: We did not make use of it as often as we could have. But remote working allows every Sergeant to work in the environment best suited for the task at hand, be it in in our new Sergeant House, at home or anywhere else.

What we learned over the years is that asynchronous communication requires for everyone to become a good writer. Your communication should be as precise and specific as possible. It also means you have to think everything through, thoroughly. This is usually harder than talking about something in a meeting. But it prevents miscommunication and lots of back and forth. Plus: you will have everything in writing.

We are in the Infinite Game

When we first learned of Simon Sinek’s “finite” and “infinite games” and the impact they have on business, we saw a lot of similarities to the concept of calm. Finite games have agreed-upon rules and a fixed outcome, a winner, like a hockey game for instance. Everything is about winning against the opponent. 

Infinite games are the opposite. They have no end, no fixed rules and no winner, because they are infinite. Examples of infinite games include business, politics and life itself. You cannot win business, politics or life. The problem is: many are still trying to do just that. To beat the competition and become the number one. But what exactly does it mean to be the number one? Number one in revenue? It certainly isn’t about being the number one in happiness, or even just job satisfaction. In fact, this sort of mentality leads to the very opposite of a calm work environment.

So we decided to drop all that and started playing our own infinite game. We are in it for the long run. Our focus is on making our clients happy, creating great stuff, building teams that trust each other, having fun, following our passion. And having a purpose that gets us motivated and inspired every day.