Working at the office

VSHNeers are free to choose whether to work remotely or at the office. Most teams typically have some in-person events, like sprint planning, retrospectives, etc., at the office every 1 or 2 weeks. Ultimately, you self-organize with your team and within your roles to decide when and where you work.

Office / Floor Plan

You can find an up-to-date office plan in our Wiki. This plan also shows you which desks are assigned to which VSHNeer and which desks are available as shared desks.

Security Information

  • Our main doors are self-closing. You can only enter them by using your key, so don’t forget to carry the key with you.

  • If you use the goods lift in Neugasse 6 you need to grab the special key to go to the second floor.

  • Visitors have to fill in a visitor form (also for a quick visit and also if you knew them) due to ISO 27001 certification. These forms can be found at the main entrance in Neugasse 10.

Different offices

We’ve three different offices in Neugasse 6 & 10.

  • "VSHN Office" (Neugasse 10, 1st floor): The main entrance is located here, also one meeting room, the kitchen and the coffee room.

  • "VSHNtower" (Neugasse 6, 8th floor): See Meeting Rooms - VSHNtower

Dedicated desks

Everyone who commits to be in the office at least two days per week can claim a fixed desk at the VSHN offices in Zurich. You’re free to change temporarily to any other free desk if it helps you to focus, work together or just for a change of scenery. When doing so, please adhere to the Desk sharing rules.

Desk sharing

In addition to desks dedicated to VSHNeers we’ve spare workplaces in most offices, they usually also consists of one big or 2 smaller screens, a docking station with charging power, electrical outlets, adjustable chair and desk, etc.

Besides the dedicated desks, we don’t schedule who sits at which desk, it’s a first-come, first-served approach. Still we’ve some rules when using spare or foreign desks:

  • Shared desks are labeled. Please only use a shared desk and not anyone else’s fixed desk.

  • Keep the desk clean, especially when you don’t plan to sit there the next day

  • Don’t change the infrastructure. If you do change the infrastructure, please return it to how it should be: both monitors plugged, power and network cable plugged into the dock and the dock Thunderbolt cable ready for the next user.

  • Every VSHNeer has one or more boxes to store personal belongings, take the box(es) with you or store them in a shelf.

Including remote VSHNeers

With everything we do in our daily work we should follow a documentation-first and remote-first approach. This means that we don’t discuss and decide about work related things face-to-face during conversations in the office. Especially when only part of the team, stakeholders or interested people are around. Instead we:

  • Move discussions about work-related topics into our discussion forum.

  • Prepare suggestions in the wiki, as a merge request or as tickets comments and request feedback in the chat, team meetings, stand-ups, etc.

  • When talking and deciding about next steps, solutions, etc. in a ticket, document the decision and next steps in the ticket

  • Prefer written chat conversations over conversations in the office

You should still talk with each other in the office, socialize and have fun. We’ve spontaneous verbal conversations about work, this is only natural, just keep in mind to document decisions and request feedback before you just do something after a conversions.

Meetings

We plan and schedule meetings, workshops, retros, etc. - basically everything that involves discussions - as video calls so everyone can join from anywhere. We always try to prefer digital collaboration tooling over things like flipchart, whiteboard, etc. so that everyone has the same experience and context.

Exceptions

  • All invited people agreed in advance to be at the office, then a meeting can be held in a physical meeting room, using any tools available there.

  • Customer and partner meetings, where we focus on what works best for the other party.