Planning the Marathon: Work-Life Balance at HappyFunCorp

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint”

If there’s one thing remote work’s gifted us — aside from a much better public health situation — it’s perspective. Over two years of taking entire industries virtual has helped us see our clients’ and colleagues’ everyday lives fresh: cats, kids, each other’s bookshelves, and the band posters on the wall. In the end, it turns out? We’re all just people.

Making work a space for just people — hobbies, families, cultures, joys, frustrations, and all — has been one of HFC’s fiercest goals: making things together as our whole, human selves. In all our experiments with how — remote-first work, hobby Slack channels to talk plants, hardware, or pets — we quickly discovered there’s no reaching that goal without tackling one of the biggest elephants in 21st-century working life: work-life balance. How do we bring our best to work — and still have our best for our passions, our responsibilities, and the people we love?

Though HFC’s been a remote-friendly company since its founding, the work-life balancing act has only intensified since COVID-19 changed the shape of all our obligations. The tech industry is facing longer hours (or much shorter hours) and increasingly siloed teams with the shift to remote or hybrid work. What our clients need has evolved in ways no one anticipated; in the face of global uncertainty, what we need has evolved, too.

So we’re offering a tour through everything we’ve learned so far, in chorus: How the humans at HappyFunCorp take work-life balance from a goal to a renewable practice — and how that’s changed as we all rethink how our lives fit together.

HFC’s work-life balance fundamentals start at its beginnings: the ways two friends — and their friends — wanted to work together, once they realized they were working together a lot. For co-founder Will Schenk, building things has always been about the big picture, and the big picture when it comes to work is thinking sustainably.

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” he says, leaning back in his home office chair, each word giving the sense of long — and real — consideration. He’s been the founder or a part of Brooklyn-based startups for over fifteen years, and has seen the positives and pitfalls as startup culture’s evolved. “That’s basically it. When you work too much or don’t take care of yourself, you’re borrowing time and energy from the future, and then the interest payments on that get to be overwhelming. You can’t sleep for five hours a night and then sleep ten hours on Saturday and Sunday; your ability to […] do good work, be thoughtful, creatively problem-solve goes down pretty rapidly.”

It’s a swift dissection of the problem in theory: that a team’s well-being and their work thrive together. But it’s not our modern way of handling the work question, and the habits of whole cultures around how work works — and what it means to say no sometimes — don’t change overnight.

Bridging those gaps between principles and execution is key: actively designing systems to make the marathon runnable.

Most of HFC’s supportive systems start with Director of People Lauren Griffin. She came into the tech world from criminal law, where midnight on-calls and major pushes were more common than not. “I worked 90-hour weeks regularly, didn’t have a proper vacation for five years,” she says, and shakes her head. “I know what it’s like to burn at that rate, and I know what it costs you. I don’t want to create that.” Griffin has used her hand in HFC’s project resourcing and staff allocations to build those positive systems, and make sustainable effort the lens through which HFC’s projects are planned, staffed, and resourced. Some of her systems paint with a broader brush: actively building in safeguards against burnout — whether it’s measured in hours or the general intensity of a project. But some are deeply individual: considering each person’s specific comfort with multitasking when it’s time to allocate projects, and pairing people up with the projects, clients, and industries that feed them instead of wearing them out. “It’s a real honest conversation with everyone,” she says. “Checking in on people, being honest, and not setting people up for failure.”

It’s a process that’s informally existed since HFC’s earliest days — HFC’s Managing Director of Product Sales, Robb Chen-Ware, ruefully recalls Schenk “all but forc[ing] me to take a week off” after an aggressive but rewarding project deadline. (“I was a little bit greener,” he admits. “But grateful that I was being looked after in that way while still figuring out what the right balance for me actually was.”) Or as Director of Design Milos Roganovic pithily sums up: “There are people who [can take on] too much, and the fact that that gets called out — ‘whoa, throttle back’ — is something.”

Scaling those informal acts of care up into systems — ones that can hold HFC’s burgeoning team — is where Griffin’s attention has landed.

It’s a strategy that was tested in early 2020, when her eye on productivity patterns noticed a burnout risk emerging: team members working more hours to cope with the collective uncertainty of the at-the-time new COVID landscape. Stuck at home, with social lives shutting down, people simply didn’t know what else to do — and another hour solving work problems was a calming distraction.

She launched a few discreet — and proactive — check-ins to encourage shutting down the computer, and made it clear that well-being came first, especially in a crisis. It’s not the conversation most would expect when HR reaches out. But it’s one that kept HFC’s staff retention remarkably stable, and let team members be open about what they were facing by demonstrating support wasn’t just a perk for easier times. When things got tough, HFC could stick together. “It’s trending back to normal now. People still struggle a bit with it,” she concludes, before tangent-ing into a whole set of staff support factors she’s been considering. There are things HFC can do better; she has plans.

On the other side of HFC’s working pipeline, Managing Director of Client Services Holly Zappa takes the same approach–but for sales. She calls her person-centered focus “personal bandwidth”: pacing and scheduling new clients around each project manager’s capacity.

With each project manager carrying multiple or differently-sized projects, their capacity for new clients is a factor in how — and when — she and Chen-Ware pitch and schedule new work. It’s a way to prevent burnout from the very start — and make sure projects that benefit from a particular expertise or feed a team’s ambitions have a better chance to end up on the right desk. Or to, as Chen-Ware puts it, “give people work experience gifts as often as possible.”

Zappa is also a major force in HFC’s values initiative, wrangling schedules and approvals to get what HFC’s always done informally — or can do better — into stable process improvements. It’s work she cares about. But the professional logic that runs alongside her personal investment in that process is simple: people are happier and less stressed when they’re building something they believe in. Finding those fits and articulating what HFCers believe in is just another part of the alchemy that lets people feel good about their Monday morning.

For most HFCers, the idea of retooling for work-life balance gets less high-level, and much more literal: how we use the software that carries a remote-first workplace. In an era where actively respecting the little boundaries is basic office manners, it’s a fundamentals-first take that works at the smallest and most pervasive level. If our tools can breed bad habits–the midnight Slack message you can’t resist reading–they can also set good ones.

Each team project holds regular stand-ups to handle and contain any non-urgent issues, and asynchronous Slack messages meld with more established ticketing systems like Jira to coordinate efforts in a way that’s built to respect schedules. It’s an invisible, but resilient infrastructure designed to ensure tasks don’t slip into off-hours — or just don’t slip — and make those boundaries that much easier to respect.

But many HFCers, unsurprisingly, dig deeper, melding their tools and systems with what they’ve learned about their own needs–and others’. Senior Product Architect April Lutheran–who started her career in physical architecture– is a big fan of using Slack’s time management features fully. “Do not disturb, setting myself away, not looking at my phone when I’m in certain situations, turning off my watch,” she lists. “I leverage features in Slack all the time. The Remind Me: then it kind of leaves my brain, knowing Slack’s got it.”

Her approach is driven by–and built to accommodate–her own personal work style. “I definitely am not a good 9-to-5er,” Lutheran cheerfully confides. She’s a fan of organizing her own idiosyncratic, carefully-batched schedule; the way she discusses her system hints at a rigor she’s just making look easy. Most importantly, she doesn’t expect anyone, teams or clients, to work the same way she does: “Lots of devs are night owls.”

When asked how she balances between her multiple projects — and a recent foray into bulking up her own design skills — she replies, with the same aplomb: “Sheer honesty. I let people know constantly when I’m going to be available and that they’re not my only client — and I do have a life.”

“Something that’s talked about a lot with the HFC culture is we hire adults, and that’s what I expect from the devs and designers I’m working with: Hey, I get it, you have a life. If you don’t have calls and a deadline? Sure, go to Target on a Tuesday. Just be transparent about when you’re going to be available and when you’re going to have the things you’re committed to done.”

Director of Design Milos Roganovic and designer Nate Jones go a step farther, actively and deliberately building their systems and processes in tandem. Their idea: an ounce of planning and prevention beats a pound of cleaning up their schedules. “We have some agreed-upon standards,” Roganovic says, and enumerates a checklist of not policies but agreements: shared file visibility, building reusable systems, an emphasis on frictionless workflow. The more consensus they’ve built into their systems beforehand, the less likely individual questions or issues are to cause stress.

Chen-Ware and Director of Production Jen DiGiacomo have each been exploring Google Calendar’s new Focus Time feature: Chen-Ware to carve out time for HFC’s newest website refresh, and DiGiacomo to work on her long-planned novel one afternoon a week. Her away message during that seven-month experiment–she retired it in November 2021–was Hemingway-esque in and of itself: Jen has delusions of writing a novel and is very bad at stepping from work. She is happy, if not downright elated, to deal with any issues as early Wednesday as anyone deems fit.

But all these systems reach their peak — and level up — for the 57% of HFCers working not just remote, but across time zones all over the world.

While many companies launched remote work options for local staff — a temporary pandemic measure — HFC’s longstanding remote-friendliness has built a team spread across multiple time zones and four continents. On paper, HappyFunCorp roughly holds a 10:00 am-to-7:00 pm workday, Eastern Standard Time, but the plethora of schedules and time zones give time consideration new importance. For team members based worldwide, there is no work-life balance without time zone equity.

“We have always adjusted with the time zone,” says engineer Suman Debnath — one of HappyFunCorp’s earliest full-time hires, and a seasoned veteran of multiple industries; his last major tech job was in journalism. Based in Delhi, he’s 10.5 hours off Eastern Standard Time, and has worked for both domestic- and international-focused firms in an Indian tech industry that has a long history of shifting to accommodate European and American clients.

“I’ve seen people working for other companies — a lot of Indian companies do have US-based clients — and they often push,” engineer Ravi Asnani clarifies. “There’s no discussion, no choice. They have meetings at 9:00 or 10:00 at night because the US counterparts don’t want to take meetings too early in the morning or don’t understand the complexities of the time zones. We’ve got a team and a culture that understands these things.”

Debnath has built on HFC’s approach to evolve his own balance. “Initially there were not many meetings; I could work more or less Indian hours,” he says. With company growth came meetings, and he adjusted his hours accordingly, but he currently works a flexible, split schedule: half Indian business hours, half American. “Sometimes I’ll spend a few hours in the morning and then a few in the evening, so there can be maximum overlap between the client or PM and me.” On days with lower client interaction, he can split more toward morning, and free up his evenings for everything else.

For Asnani, what makes the difference is simple: consistent reciprocation from his colleagues in other countries. “The times that we push those boundaries a bit, folks at the other side of the world do the same. We meet each other halfway. It’s a little bit of inconvenience for everyone, but not a lot for one side. And stuff like that really helps. And in terms of clients, we’ve been lucky.”

Back in Sales, Zappa agrees. “Very few clients even push us there. I think we consciously look for partners who have a similar appreciation for work-life balance — with the understanding that we also work in an industry where launches happen, deadlines are important, goals need to be met. But I think those two can exist in the same space.”

As is often the case–and just like William Gibson predicted–the street finds its own uses for a good time equity policy. Agencies aren’t exactly renowned as family-friendly workplaces, but some team members are using the flexibility that timezone equity built for something much closer to home: parenting.

California-based Roganovic relocated from New York partway into his tenure with HFC, but he still works East Coast hours — and it’s how he balances his working responsibilities with parenting. “Having kids,” he quips, “for better or worse: I’m around.”

“I went from being an in-office employee to being a part-time in-office employee to being fully remote,” he says. “As part of that fully remote thing, I also changed time zones; my day starts at 7:30 and ends at 3:30, ballpark.” It’s opened up the option to mind the kids on sick days and take point on afternoon childcare, and lets him avoid what he calls “the split shift”: a chopped-up workday, where tasks pick up after dinner and family time. “Personally I like to stick to the confined hours and be like, ‘I’m done for today.’”

Likewise, Chen-Ware’s first son was born shortly after the pandemic began — a double adjustment as his usual in-office work shifted to remote life as a new parent. It’s changed his boundaries around response times and unplanned interruptions, as pediatrician appointments and childcare needs add into his life. “Generally this hasn’t affected how I collaborate with people,” he says. “The team is understanding […], which is great.”

Asnani, who welcomed a baby girl this fall, is upfront about still navigating the adjustment. “You’re actually no longer resting: you’re either working in office work or you’re working at child work. So I think it sort of creates more stress, because you have less real time off as compared to before, but I also feel it’s hopefully a transitional phase where the first couple of years are more difficult.” He adds ruefully — in classic new parent form — “Once they’re in school, things should settle down a bit.”

Designer Nate Jones, dad to three school-aged kids, works his time management both ways: “There’s a really lovely freedom in this work, in that once the kids are in bed, if I haven’t hit all my hours or I have something gnawing at me, I can still do my work.” But he also has school pickup and dropoff blocked off on his work calendar every day.

During the afternoons, he hangs out with his youngest, 5, who draws and paints in his office after preschool. “I cannot imagine working in an office anymore,” he says, with a warmth that radiates through the screen. “I was remote before, so yeah, I’m pretty invested in remote as a lifestyle that is highly productive as well as a really nice balance.”

As more and more HFCers visibly block in time for parenting, the patterns of hobbies and passions are also emerging. DiGiacomo’s novel project has company in time set aside for game nights, gym regimes, guitar school meetings, and poetry classes.

Roganovic rides and works on motorcycles. “I am going through a midlife crisis,” he laughs. “It’s because it’s so engaging; you have to do all of it. The clutch, the braking. I feel like that’s my reset switch; I’ll go out for an hour and I’ll come back a happier person.”

CEO and co-founder Ben Schippers both runs and plays piano, for completely different reasons — and is

keenly aware of how both feed and nourish his work. “I specifically run for headspace,” he says. “It’s just a very quiet time for me […] that’s when I do my best thinking.” But he describes music as a chance to step back into beginner mind. “It’s picking up a hobby that I don’t know anything about to flex into the idea of learning something new, forcing yourself to go back to knowing nothing. I think as you get older it’s harder to do that, because you get paid to do the things you’re good at, and you can stay one-track,” he reflects.

Of course, workdays do have deadlines and demands. There are necessities built into constructing and maintaining software. But while some demands are unavoidable, they’ve proved mostly manageable with a little bit of good process — and what CTO Jon Evans calls “an instinctive sense of priorities.”

There’s a clear chain of command for emergencies like uptime issues, Zappa tells me, and lists at least three ways to the center of the problem: who’s backing up who, and what time, and how. “There is an understanding that we will respond promptly, assuming it’s waking hours, within the first couple of hours.”

That understanding is, ironically, backed up by HFC’s internationalism. “In case a certain project requires people to be available around the clock, we will try to staff those certain projects with a mix of people so that you overlap more working hours in the day,” Asnani says. “There’s someone always around.”

But Zappa adds that she intentionally doesn’t take engagements with 24-hour monitoring at present — and fewer potential clients request it than they did five years ago as they tackle their own balancing acts. “I think now folks realize that if there’s an outage at 5am — outages will happen. Major apps have outages.” Most of HFC’s have been part of larger online disruptions, which need coordination and patience to solve. “The important thing is that you have a company like HFC on retainer to respond to it.”

“Unless something is actively on fire, we’re unlikely to say you have to work through the weekend or ‘no, we really need you to make this call even if you’ve indicated you’re going to be out for a reason,’” Evans concludes. “We trust people to do the right thing and get the job done.”

When it comes down to it, trust is the concept at the center of all the ways HFCers organize –together or individually — for the marathon. At the end, systemic or personal, work-life balance at HappyFunCorp comes down to having each other’s backs.

Chen-Ware’s biggest takeaway from his crunch on the Gatorade project? How to pay it forward. “It taught me to look out for the folks I work with and make sure we have a plan to give people high-quality breaks.”

Evans sees the work-life balance conversation as just another component of respecting expertise — and a decided skills advantage. “It’s rooted in realizing that very good people are worth waiting for, worth scheduling around to some extent, and also encouraging to come back.” In short: trusting them.

Product Architect Karl Hadley, who joined HFC in 2019, goes directly to that question of trust when asked how he balances load. “There’s an incredibly supportive network at the company to tap into when things are going awry. That’s probably something I’d put out there: personally, when I get into those crunch periods, I do feel supported. Jen (DiGiacomo) is actively asking the questions and will do something to help make the situation better, whether that’s more resources, getting a project off your desk ASAP, or just a venting ear.”

Griffin sums up the whole, decentralized, fine-grained approach as: “Listen, life is messy, life is crazy, we want to be here to support you as much as possible, how do we do that without adding to stress?”

“It’s an ad-hoc approach, a bit,” she admits, “which is kind of a nice thing about keeping the policies loose; it’s more human that way.” There’s currently a push to define what works best about that highly individualized approach as the company grows, but the emphasis on relationships — taking care of each other as people, with policy as a backup rather than a limiter — resonates.

It’s an approach that’s fine enough to hold the everyday things — “sometimes just short little messages like ‘sick kid,’” Griffin says — and so far, large enough to encompass crises, caregiving, and grieving.

“Team India got hit so hard,” she adds, uncharacteristically subdued. At one point every single member had either had COVID, was caring for sick family members, or had suffered a loss. What got the team through was finding accommodations that fit: looking at individual projects, arranging coverage, and setting gentle check-ins. It was a challenge that tested the ethic and process that the HFC team built. “Just giving people space and the support to be like ‘Hey, when you’re ready, let us know, we’re here, but take some time.’

It’s in situations like this — the difficult ones, the unpredictable ones — where theory is meeting ever-evolving practice on that question of trust and making the office of whole, human people not just a marketing concept.

As Schenk says, “I think the principle that we hold onto is: ‘How do we treat people with dignity?’ I think dignity is probably — we need to understand what that word means, or what it tries to say. When we think about how we treat people or what we ask them to do, that’s what we’re trying to uphold.

“I think anyone who’s here can find a job wherever: everyone is very skilled and has the ability.

It’s: how do you find a place where people want to spend their time […] and how do you operate with the respect of your peers?”

Griffin, as ever, is ready with the practical end: “We’re called HappyFunCorp. If we were like, militant, that would not really be on-brand.”

Best tips

Will: “Get more sleep. That’s the main thing; you don’t get enough sleep; get more sleep. Also: people undervalue self-care. Not doing self-care makes you unpleasant to be around; that’s the selfish thing. Self-care not only makes all your problems easier, but makes you less of a problem to other people.”

Holly: “Be mindful of the quantity and quality of meetings that you schedule in one day. For example, too many back-to-backs, too many that require you to be more ‘on’ — think about how much energy you have to expend in a day.

“Make fun plans in advance and schedule them in your calendar: breakfast with friends, workout classes, trips to a museum. I find signing up and paying in advance is helpful.”

Nate: “I saw something recently about holidays not being for recharging, but celebrating. As you have time for your hobbies and to be a whole person on a daily basis, it gives you the opportunity to live more humanely and kind of recharge as you’re supposed to.”

April: “I leverage the ‘remind me later’ Slack feature all the time to put my mind at ease that I see something come in, know it needs my attention, but can wait till the morning. That way, I feel like I don’t miss any, but also am not constantly being pulled out of social times to reply right away.”

Robb: “Remember that part of your job — for your company, yourself, and your family — is being healthy. I took this a lot more seriously after my son turned 1 and I was feeling burned out from a crunch of (vaccinated!) travel while working. I think everyone I work with would agree that the change has been for the better, and all decisions I make about how I spend my work and personal time goes back to this — it allows me to give myself permission to make the smaller choices to reinforce my own wellness, which is to the benefit of everyone.

“And take time to express gratitude. My wife and I started doing this when I went back to work after Wes was born. We went from spending 24/7 together to me working during the day, so it was a difficult transition. When I’d get off of work we recapped our days but always ended expressing what we were grateful for. More than once this led to me sending out a Slack message (during appropriate hours!) or taking extra time in a 1:1 to give people positive feedback and gratitude that might not have stuck in my mind if I didn’t take time to reflect on it.”

Lauren: “Set your working hours in your team calendar so that this communicates to your team members to only schedule meetings during your working hours (a good trick for people who hold non-traditional hours or do not work full time!). Figure out what your times of productivity are and try and block those times out to get ‘thought-work’ done. And try not to compromise those blocks when asked to participate in non-urgent meetings.

“Ultimately, though, it’s just treating people like humans and understanding that giving them that support makes them a happier and better person also, and a better team member.”