Inside the Box: How Do We Work?

Remote work, hybrid work, the four-day week… All of these are concepts that entered our lives with the pandemic, or settled in even more firmly after it. 2020 can be seen as the beginning of a period in which our ways of working changed along with our ways of living. Yet some seven years before the pandemic, I was thinking hard about how a mobile working culture could be built and how large teams could be managed at minimum cost. I must have thought about it a great deal, because in 2014 the universe arranged the conditions I needed to put those ideas into practice. Even so, I may have phrased my wish to the universe slightly incompletely: while I was expecting to transform an existing organisation, I suddenly found myself on a field where I could apply every one of my ideas from scratch. The exciting part was this: ahead of me lay a brand-new working life and a software company that had to be built with a team of twenty. I was ready for it neither financially nor mentally. But the chance to bring to life ideas you have been turning over for a long time is, I think, a stronger motivation for an entrepreneur than any of the difficulties.

Building a Working System, Not an Office

Let us do some simple arithmetic: twenty professional employees, twenty computers, twenty phones, twenty meal cards, twenty private health insurance policies, an office for at least twenty people and everything that office needs… “How do you get out of that arithmetic?” you might ask. The working model we designed happened to coincide with the economic conditions of the time, and that gave us a very strong start. In 2014 we built a structure with no fixed office: everyone could go to the location closest to their home and work from there, meetings were held online, and basic company needs were met through the boxes we gave our colleagues — “INNTHEBOX”. We believed a well-designed welcome pack could answer a great many needs. Thanks to the agreement we made at the time with Urban Station, known today as Workinton, we gained access to all of their workspaces. That gave us dozens of satellite offices on both sides of Istanbul. Breakfast, unlimited tea and coffee, photocopying, meeting rooms and many other services were included in the deal. Our aim was for everyone to work from the office nearest their home, with all communication running online. When needed we worked at client offices; when needed we covered our requirements with online meetings. Of course, in time everyone started coming to Galata Urban rather than their nearest office, and a lively working environment grew there. Even though we were a single company, we sometimes filled the entire place.

The Tools Inside the Box

We sourced computers, phones and peripherals through leasing from Grenke, a global German company. That way, instead of a large upfront payment for twenty computers and other technology investments, we could spread the cost over 36 months. We could regularly swap devices for newer models, make use of service support, and own the equipment at the end of the lease for the price of one month’s rent.

Later, the colleagues using those devices were able to buy them for a very modest sum. I suspect that possibility also encouraged them to take better care of the equipment. Now to one of our most critical choices: our business cards. At the time, a business card was one of the most valuable pieces of evidence — LinkedIn aside — that someone could show their circle that they had started a new job. Even though there were companies in Turkey doing nothing else, we struggled to find one that could deliver the quality we wanted. We could not even find a printer able to print and cut the half-frame photographs in our card designs properly. In the end we started working with the British company MOO. We uploaded our designs online and, delivered the next day, received high-quality cards — which for a while even included NFC technology — adding professionalism to our professionalism. Once the physical needs were solved, it was time for the software that would let us work together. Being one of Microsoft’s top-tier partners made it easier for us to access the applications we needed. When Teams, which strongly supports collaborative working, came into play later on, our processes accelerated considerably. In fact Microsoft offers a great deal of support that every start-up should know about. Of course there were times when clients pushed back: “Are we not worth visiting? What is this meeting over Teams?” Hard as it is to believe, one very large stationery brand walked away from giving us the work — despite having agreed on everything — simply because we did not have a fixed office. As for collaboration, shared project management and task-based working, Teamwork.com, which we have used from day one, gave us an extremely valuable structure thanks to its simplicity and the fact that it can be used together with clients. It still does.

Culture Before Technology

The Hard Parts of Remote Work

It is true that we used our spare capacity to develop products, to equip ourselves and to gain new skills. But it is only fair to talk about the downsides of that experience as well as the upsides. New graduates in particular found it easy to join the organisation, but developing required working shoulder to shoulder and communicating strongly. The rooms we created in Teams and the connections we kept open all day helped meet that need; they never quite replicated the effect of working side by side in the same space. The work-from-home culture brought other problems too. Families seeing the person working at home as someone “not working” — who could be sent to the bank or the supermarket — caused serious time losses. We saw mothers and fathers looking after their children with one hand while trying to deliver their projects with the other. As economic conditions changed, many colleagues moved city, and even country. Knowing that with some of them we would never again be in the same meeting room was one of the humanly difficult sides of this working model. Even so, we set aside serious resources for research and development. Taking the share Google allocates to R&D within its overall budget as a reference, I can say we used a similar share of our own budget in that area. Let me underline this: I mean the share, not the amount. Those investments always came back to the company as new know-how and as products that grew us. They played an important part in bringing us to the point where we are INNTHEBOX today.

Inside the Box, Outside the Box

“Being inside the box” is not just a play on words for us. A company that touches your life with a box, encouraging you to think outside the box by offering flexible ways of working, represents a genuine point of view and a genuine culture. Mottos like “INNTHEBOX, but think out of the box” and “We’re working everywhere” were born out of that culture. One of the most important advantages of mobile working was being able to go into the field, to work alongside the client, and to meet online at any moment we were needed. We made it a rule to spend a day next to the person who would use a feature before designing it. That approach contributed significantly to the success of every product we built and every project we ran. A screen designed without knowing what the speed at the till, the store manager’s morning routine or a question asked over and over in the contact centre really means may look right on paper; in the field it slows the operation down and makes it less efficient. However much you discuss it in meeting rooms with the people running the business, you cannot fully obtain the knowledge gathered in the field, nor the ability to turn that knowledge into a solution. This is why a mobile working culture offers the ability to reach the point of need quickly — much like an ambulance arriving where you are in an emergency.

How Do We Work Today?

Today, using Teamwork and our mobile working model effectively, we start the week with notes from the field: which customer could not ask which question last week? Which screen slowed whom down? Those notes do not sit in a separate “requests” list; they go straight into our product roadmap. On Fridays each person produces a concrete output and plans the new week. After all these experiences, we have no rigid rule about working remotely or from our R&D offices. Our only rule is that whoever does a piece of work has seen — or at least thought about in detail — who they are doing it for. Because once a developer has stood in a store and watched the till, the code they write is different from the code written by a developer who has never had that experience. In short, mobile working does not simply mean working from wherever you like. It means doing the work where the need and the experience are; finding, together, the most productive point for employees, for customers and for the result.

Just as on a traveller’s journey to discover the unknown, every stop we reach brings new experiences, new needs and new responsibilities. What matters is not losing our curiosity and our way of thinking anew along that journey. That is exactly why our name is INNTHEBOX: INNovation in THE BOX.