As a team, we are highly accountable, like to focus on making meaningful progress on a few things every day, and actually enjoy doing the work instead of worrying about things out of our control. We call this approach “output over input.”

An output focused day is one spent creating results for clients or colleagues instead of one spent jumping in and out of meetings (we have a "Meeting Free Wednesday" policy). Working remotely encourages these types of days because without the usual office politics, the work really does speak for itself.

The advantage of an output focused day is that once it’s over, employees should feel comfortable putting away work and focusing on their actual life. This isn’t to say that we don’t want our employees to care about Shoelace. We are still empathetic, fun, diverse and care deeply about what we do. However, we also want our employees to live their lives away from work and it’s important that our employees have the time and the mental space to do that.

The past few decades and particularly the celebration of the “startup grind” has made this thinking seem old-fashioned but we believe that when employees have time to focus on their lives outside of work, not only are they happier and more productive but they’ll make life easier for their colleagues and managers. If all everyone does is stress about work, every decision a company makes can have an outsized impact on their emotions. When you multiply this across dozens of people, it becomes overwhelming. Soon enough, you have a company that looks inwards, constantly struggling to keep colleagues happy instead of focusing outwards on building the business and delivering results for clients.