Six Feet Up will hold their second FedEx Day on January 12-13th, to encourage intrinsic motivation in their team, boosting morale, creativity and productivity.
This event is based on a concept described in the book Drive, by Daniel Pink. A FedEx Day allows team members to work on a project of their choice, with the requirement that they have to deliver within a 24 hour period of time. People can choose who to work with, and how to work on their project as long as it benefits the company.
Achievements made during Six Feet Up's first FedEx Day held in the Fall of 2010 demonstrated the power of this idea. In a mere 24 hours, the Six Feet Up team improved a blogging product now in use on their corporate website, implemented a continuous integration process for the software development team, and added a failover mechanism for some of the company's critical internal tools. A prototype was developed for managing releases of the open source knowledge management product KARL. "Push button" releases were made possible so that deployments of even for the most complicated setup can happen in a matter of minutes. Housekeeping was also on the agenda as one team removed many years of clutter from a storage area and another team rewired several portions of Six Feet Up's offsite colocation facility. Another group put together a new deck of corporate marketing slides for presenting the company and developed a diagram of "Fex6", the company's project management system.
"The FedEx Day definitely boosted our team's sense of accomplishment and provided opportunities for people who would not otherwise get to work together to do so", declared Stephanie Fuchs, Six Feet Up's HR Director. "We all look forward to the next event."
The second FedEx Day will introduce a few improvements based on feedback gathered from other companies having deployed the concept. First, Six Feet Up will open up the event to various outside parties. Human Resources Consulting and Outsourcing firm Aon Hewitt will send observers investigating the FedEx Day concept for one of their internal projects, and Six Feet Up will include some of their external consultants in the event. Second, the company will ensure coaching staff is present to help people get started and wrap their projects up. Finally, Six Feet Up will ask the team to rate the various projects at the end of the event in the form of a contest.
Many renowned companies have embraced the FedEx Day concept, and some for many years, such as Google, 3M, Yahoo! and Atlassian. Six Feet Up joined the list of forward-thinking companies with regards to employee motivation in 2010 and has committed on hosting a FedEx Day quarterly.