The main resource of any high-tech company is talent. Creating a natural environment that attracts and retains this talent is essential. We’ve picked Hygge (sounds like hyoo·guh), a Danish word for a mood of coziness and wellness as an embodiment of a people-centric approach to creating that fertile talent land. Organizations that strive to implement ideas, described in this workbook, are called Hygge Companies.

Hygge Workbook is a culture blueprint for distributed teams that covers various aspects of the new way of working, from creating and managing atomic work tasks to surviving the mental health marathon. None of this is purely theoretical. We’ve studied successful remote projects and personally experimented with these ideas well before COVID changed the work culture landscape.

Some companies use Hygge Workbook as their Remote Playbook, while others get inspired by these ideas to improve their virtual work management, team engagement and climate. The tags provide navigation for our practices’ database, and Hygge Work Blog captures recent topics that caught our attention.

What Makes Hygge Work Different?

• Hiring from all over the world instead of from a central location.
• Asynchronous work tasks and milestones over set working hours.
• Emphasizing the results over the hours put in.
• Writing down and recording knowledge over verbal explanations.
• Sharing information over creating need-to-know access.
• Every rule, guideline, and policy is open to change by anyone over top-down control.
• Formal work-related communication channels over informal conversations and meetings.

Hygge Team 🧦☕️

When a team starts growing, you need people to keep everyone cozy and well. This is particularly important in the fully-remote work settings. That is why every Hygge Company has a Hygge Team to take care of people, starting from their first contact with the company and supporting every team member on her journey. Hygge Team is tending to a number of internal products, including hiring pipeline, external and internal employer brand, workations, workshops, etc.

Hygge Team is always there to create warm atmosphere and moments of joy at work:

• helping team to learn more about the company’s culture, past, present, and future;
• providing support with professional or personal milestones;
• creating hyggelig atmosphere 🧦
• just being someone to talk to ☕️