Any which way you look at it, Bhavin Turakhia, founder and CEO of Directi, a $350-million (valued by Deloitte), domain registrar and web products company, has got productivity pat down. He's admittedly “fanatical” about it—constantly keeping score, and making sure “today’s excellence is tomorrow’s satisfactory” is Turakhia’s model for lightning-fast growth. His ideas aren’t empty management speak though. They have evolved from carefully designed experiments in Directi’s five offices across the globe. 

At Directi, not just me, everybody is kind of fanatical about productivity. Maybe I championed it but there has been a very successful trickle-down effect. We like stretching ourselves to the maximum, and  as an organisation, we are constantly thinking about the various deployment, technology, hardware and software solutions that can help us become more effective. It’s an obsession really, and an issue around which a lot of experimentation happens here. 

For example, every single individual in our offices has multiple monitors linked to their PCs or Macs. I began the multiple monitor experiment some five years back. After reading a tonne of material on the subject, I found that multiple monitors significantly enhance productivity. It goes like this—if one uses two monitors, productivity goes up by 37 per cent. Add a third monitor to it, and productivity spikes up by an additional 20 per cent. Personally, I use six monitors. Three of them—the ones placed on the bottom layer—are the ones I work on. I believe business is a sport. It’s a game, and you don’t know how you’re doing if you don’t keep score. So, the three monitors placed on top are used to display reports or dashboards that track various metrics—revenue, hits and downloads. With these monitors, I can track the overall health of our different businesses, verticals and clusters. You have to be hyper about keeping score. 

Most other people have on an average two to three monitors. But we didn’t stop at just getting more monitors. We spent a lot of time in researching the exact kind of monitor arm we wanted—we shortlisted three and finally chose one which would enable monitors to be rotated, revolved or swivelled.  Our monitor arms can pretty much move in any three dimensional way somebody needs them to. So, when developers are coding, the length of the document is actually more relevant than the breadth. If you’re writing the code, and can swivel the horizontal monitor to make it a vertical one, you have far more screen space. On the other hand, designers need horizontal screen space. The monitor arms and structure allow both those kinds of layout, and lead to greater productivity.   

 Most offices are built as a one-size fits all, and that’s problematic. 

Office design is the new productivity initiative we’re working on now. Most offices are built as a one-size fits all, and that’s problematic. Why should all floors look identical, and have the same size cubicles and cabins?  I have been working with two of my designers for the past three months to custom-create work environments for different work types. For example, a customer support staffer’s job is different from a software coder's. Logically, then, office design and furniture should not be the same for these two people because their needs are different. We’ve been working on an experimental plan where we are creating a floor space that allows for different work areas. We have begun with the software and design teams. In software, a product’s development life goes through different stages. In the beginning, programmers or coders need to work as lone rangers in total peace and quiet. Later, work reaches a war room mode where team members need to sit together, and thrash out, or brainstorm, how to deploy the product. For these teams, we’re creating a workspace with several two-people pods that are sound-proof and encapsulated away from the rest of the office; there are also war-room zones big enough for eight to 10 people. We are determined to move away from the cookie-cutter approach. 

We began this experiment with the software and design teams but we’ll eventually take these ideas to each department, and devise workspaces for them. We started by filming on camera each team for a full 24 hours to understand their work flow, and to make sure that the new designs are specific to their requirements.