Hack Day At Snapshot Media
We’ve been trialling a different sort of motivational technique here at Snapshot Media – hack days.
Once a month all of our staff take part in a hack day, where we work intensively on our own digital related projects. The idea is that we get to do something different from the day to day work we produce and make something fun, exciting or even groundbreaking in the process!
Hack days started at some of the biggest computer companies in the USA in the late nineties and have proved so successful that even some of the most well known companies such as Google, Cadburys and The Guardian hold them regularly. Did you know that the Facebook ‘Like’ button was created on a hack day?
The success of hack days is so well documented that many charities and not-for-profit companies are harnessing their power to improve services. For example, the NHS are holding a hack weekend in Liverpool next month and PayPal are hosting the fourth Charity Hack Weekend at their London HQ at the start of November.
One of our Directors, James Hall, is a huge fan of hack day and believes its use as a tool for business that extends beyond building useful, profitable products: ‘I think the important thing to remember is that our hack days are a break from the norm for our staff and we’re happy for them to work on whatever they’re interested in doing. It’s a great motivator for our team and it means they get to work with colleagues they might not normally work with as well as learn new skills.
Some of our staff have been working on an internal resource system (Tom, Jack and Danny in the above image), some on improving our website, some on producing an HTML5 product that might raise money for charity. It’s fantastic to see so much comes out of just a day’s work – who knows what these guys might produce in the future!’
And we can unveil one finished product from our August hack day. Our Marketing Executive, Alex, researched, designed and created an infographic about SEO so that businesses can understand how this type of digital marketing can improve traffic to their websites.
Please feel free to share it and let us know what you think!