Thursday, July 16, 2020 — Berlin |Kolibri Games has adopted a new work model – the “4+1 System”. This concept allows employees to freely choose whether to work from home or the office on four days of the week, with mandatory presence only required on a single “Team Day”. The implementation will start in September 2020 and is set to run for an initial trial period of twelve months, with regular check-ins across all teams and stakeholders to evaluate its success.
The company has pledged full financial support to employees by covering the cost of office and work equipment, to ensure that everyone’s home office setup allows for work to be executed at 100 percent productivity.
During weekly Team Days – days during which every member of a team has to be present at the office – office presence is required to retain interpersonal communication and team culture. Activities that require on-site presence, such as extensive brainstorming sessions or “one on one” meetings are reserved for said days. Each team is allowed to pick its respective weekday itself according to the needs and wishes of the team members. The new system will not change the company’s current working hours policy which requires employees to work 8 hours between 7 am and 6 pm – this is to ensure that work tasks do not spill into the recreational time before or after work.
After a successful transition to a fully remote workstyle as part of Kolibri Games’ quarantine measures, that did not lead to a dip in productivity but a significant uplift in employee satisfaction, Kolibri Games is evolving from its heavily on-site driven work style with this new system, in an effort to increase employees’ individual freedom, further enhance productivity and improve work-life balance.
Janosch Sadowski, Kolibri Games Co-CEO and Co-Founder, says:
The measures that we have taken as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and their incredible results have led us to reconsider our stance on remote work and what we want the future of work at Kolibri Games to look like. We are confident that this new system will allow us to achieve even greater things in the future.
Daniel Stammler, Kolibri Games Co-CEO and Co-Founder, adds:
Our 4+1 policy is an expression of trust in our current and future employees. It is very important for us to provide our team members with the best possible work environment – this is why our new policy is no ‘one size fits all’-solution but a flexible system where teams and individual members have a significant degree of freedom to decide how and where they want to work.