We feel that Teamwork.com’s new HQ in Cork just might be the best place for developers to work in Ireland because we — Dan and I, the founders are developers ourselves and we’re trying hard to create the perfect environment for developers to do their best work in a company and setting they love. Here are some of the reasons we think developers will love it here.

1. Your happiness matters to us

We’ve learned that beyond a good salary the key for staff to be happy, they need 3 things — Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. We think about all 3 and do the following:

Autonomy

We try hard to minimise bureaucracy by keeping the company hierarchy fairly flat and having small autonomous teams for all products with sub-teams as needed. We don’t want to slow our developers down so work hard to eliminate inefficient processes. Ever heard of the concept of “Minimum Viable Bureaucracy”? It’s all about cutting down on politics and stuffiness and continuous improvement for reaching your goals in the best efficient way, that’s exactly what we want at Teamwork.com.

We are aware that “Good ideas can come from anywhere” — we listen to feedback and suggestions from everywhere — it doesn’t matter if you’re an intern and have just joined us, bring it on! Or showcase your great ideas at one of our Teamwork.com Hackathons. To give you an example, our product lead Conor had a terrific idea of letting users manage their workload and workflows in a better and faster way. His idea won our last Hackathon — and as soon as we recovered from the 24-hour event, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. A short while after, the Teamwork Project Summary was implemented.

Mastery

We want our developers to be the best developers they can be. Working in a strong learning community along talented developers, sharing ideas and using a tech stack that makes the most sense, ensures that skills are kept sharp and relevant. Learning never stops, that’s why we give every new staff member a set of 13 books we believe everybody should read. We strongly encourage an environment of shared learning.

“Showing your work” is a huge thing at Teamwork.com so we do 10-minute show-and-tells every Friday where developers get to present what they did to the entire company (with the caveat that it must already be in production and customers using it). Our internal company blog further gives everyone an overview of what’s happening in each team.

Purpose

We state it clearly in our Teamwork.com values: we stand for more than just profit. Our software is used by millions of people all around the world and really makes an impact in how hundreds of thousands of companies are run. This alone brings us joy — we’d like each and every developer to buy into the mission to make the best software possible used by the maximum amount of companies worldwide — to have an impact. We value every single customer and we give back: we give all our products free for 1 year to startups and sponsor hundreds of free accounts for charities and good causes. 1% of our profits every year go to good causes (not necessarily charities) as chosen by our staff.

2. A culture you’ll love

We strive to build the best software in the world for our customers and employ the best staff — and we don’t want to miss out on the fun while doing it.

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Teamwork staff enjoying catered lunch[/caption]

Teamwork.com working environment

Teamwork.com is an Open Book company. What does that mean? It means that everything is open to everybody by default: We are completely honest, show our numbers and key targets for every team. We share our goals, metrics, plans and even minutes from every meeting that’s held to ensure that everyone is well-informed about what’s going on in the company. We celebrate our #wins and openly admit #fails in our internal chat rooms for sharing the learning and improvement everyday. It’s our commitment to be transparent to both our customers and employees.

We are a high-performance company but so long as you get the work done, we don’t really care when and where you work from. We don’t care if you take a break in the middle of the day, go home early or work 10 hours less in a week…so long as you manage your own time and make up the hours before or after. If it works for you and your team, it works for us. Most importantly, we want our staff to work no more than 37ish hours a week. We don’t want anyone to burn out.

If we hit our targets, everybody in the company wins. Both myself and our co-founder Dan are more than happy to share the wealth of the company with everyone that contributed to create it. No Venture Capitalists dictate our actions, no board meetings slow us down. It’s just the customers and us!

The team

Nothing beats awesome teammates. Teamwork does make the ‘dream work’ (in fact, we named our process manual ‘Dreamworks’). Besides our “Don’t be a Dick” rule (…self-explanatory), we emphasise on a supportive environment for working together on finding solutions to tricky bugs, server issues, conversion projects — the list goes on — plus sharing the knowledge and experiences we get. Everybody’s area of expertise is different, still everyone has something to contribute.

To date, we have 80 staff, 20 working remotely but we still have a small village feel to the company. Come meet the Teamwork.com team here.

A place where you can be yourself

We are all a little quirky a Teamwork.com, and proud of it. We encourage you to be yourself, whatever you are into. You even get a budget for the full wall vinyl art above your multiple monitors — we don’t have investors to impress, go wild!

3. You get to work with the tools and gear you love

We know that writing code is like painting — you can do it in any possible way. That’s one of the reasons why we support each employee’s individuality: every developer at Teamwork.com can choose their preferred operating system and their favourite gear. More importantly, as developers ourselves we are always keen to learn and experiment with new stuff. We’re open about what we’re using and why.

See Peter S. here: Peter has a 34 inch curved display…

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Peter S working with a huge curved monitor[/caption]

… why? Because he said he needed it to do his best work and we listened.

Just like all his developer colleagues, Peter S. has his own office at Teamwork.com. We want our developers to do their very best and try to reduce any distractions to the minimum. It’s like writing a book, one interruption and all the plot twists and characters in your head are gone. Check out why we strongly believe that each developer should have his/her own office.

4. Teamwork Campus One

We’ve just built a mind-blowing new office — Teamwork Campus One — and turned our old office into a free incubator space for SaaS startups. Our new office in Blackpool, Cork is built with love and care; we strongly focused on the details to make each one’s time at work easier and more enjoyable.

Almost every office has a view; every office is 110% so you can easily look outside while staring at your monitor. We provide standing desks and Herman Miller Aeron chairs for everyone. And each employee can customise their offices the way they like. The common spaces are playful, full of colour and highly relaxing. Our staff have the option to change their work environment every day: work from the “Living Room” with the fireplace sizzling or lock yourself in the “Music Room” where you can listen to your favourite tunes as loud as you wish. Take a tour!

5. Great Perks

To come up with new, creative ideas, people need sufficient time to both switch off and experience new things. For the sportspeople amongst us, we support our staff with subsidiaries towards gym memberships, weekly circle trainings or company football. If you’re long enough in the company, we pay for one conference per year where we want our people to learn and come back with new impulses. It’s so important to have a good relationship with colleagues — especially for new joiners — so besides our catered lunches three times a week, we sponsor free coffees and lunches for staff who want to get to know each other better. Once a year, we hold our “Grand Council” to bring everyone in the company together. The list of perks goes on, see for yourself: Teamwork.com Perks.

6. We stand for more than just profits

We know that most developers have a good sense of justice and fairness and want to work for a company who is doing great work, having an impact and making the world a better place. With over 22,000 customers worldwide and through our values, our vision and our actions, we definitely stand for more than just profits.

No Investors! We are 100% self-funded

We are completely self-funded. You can read the backstory but basically we used to do consultancy and made the software that we needed to run our business (Teamwork Projects), and it’s grown from there. The beauty of not having investors is that we can stay nimble and do the right thing by our staff and our customers.

Big Plans

We have a grand vision: “We are building the world’s best software suite to help run any team from small to enterprise level.” Our Long Term Goals are:

• To reach $100m in annual sales.
• To power as many companies world-wide as possible.
• To have careers we are proud of.
• To have a positive impact on the world.
• To have fun while doing this.

Summary

Working with Teamwork.com is definitely challenging as we ask our developers to do the best work of their lives; but on the flip-side we work hard to build the best environment possible for all our staff; ultimately we hope it is fun and rewarding!

Thanks for reading; there is so much more we could tell you but we’d better stop here. Please share this post with your friends/family who might be interested and get in touch with comments if you have any feedback or questions. Cheers!

P.S. We’re Hiring!

We hope you’ll start thinking about joining us and consider Escaping to Cork — just get your your application in via [email protected]. We are also looking for great Designers, Sales and Support people — same culture, same office, same perks. Visit our Teamwork.com job section.