A source of motivation

Most of the 57 employees at Telnyx are engineers, and everyone’s days are long —12-hour workdays are not uncommon— and involve a lot of focused, individual work.

Telnyx competes for talent against the big-name tech companies. They can’t outspend these recruiting rivals, so they use other means.
“How do you intrinsically motivate people?” asks Casem. “Meaningful work. Setting up people to succeed. Creating a great environment where people spend the majority of their weekday waking hours. The work environment has a direct influence on what people produce.”
He says start-up companies often buy bare bones furniture “to impress their investors that they’re doing things economically. I think that’s penny wise and pound foolish. If you amortize the cost over five years, you make all your money back and more, when you take into account the total cost of your most expensive resource, your people.”

Casem isn’t blue-skying. He learned early on to measure how the workplace can help his business. “We’ve always been crazy about metrics as a company,” he says, so when Telnyx installed a pair of workstations with height-adjustable tables and ergonomic chairs a few years ago, they conducted an internal study to determine if the team benefited from the new furniture.
“We saw empirical evidence that an improved work environment made a huge difference in productivity.”

“‘How do you intrinsically motivate people?’ Meaningful work. Setting up people to succeed. Creating a great environment where people spend the majority of their weekday waking hours. The work environment has a direct influence on what people produce.”

David Casem – Telnyx CEO

Tech specs

When it was time for a new workplace, Telnyx further embraced space as a tool to help their business.

Telnyx’s Chicago headquarters is a welcoming loft space with wood beams and floors, brick walls and plenty of daylight from tall windows. To complement their open plan workstations, seven enclosed, glass-front rooms (“hubs”) are available for collaboration, private conversations, as well as the the occasional nap.

Each employee’s workstation features an Airtouch height adjustable table, with low Answer panels for routing power and defining individual spaces. A SOTO mobile caddy for personal work items, a travel bag or purse, nests under the desk.

The height-adjustable desks allow users to change posture throughout the day and encourages movement – important to their physical wellbeing. “The Airtouch tables are modular, moveable, have lots of workspace and plenty of room for two monitors. They’re sturdy, and give you all that range from standing up to sitting down,” says Ian Reither, COO. “Over the course of the day, you see heads popping up and down. People use the height adjustability a lot.”

Telnyx

Telnyx employees have height-adjustable desks which allow them to change posture throughout the day and encourage movement – important to their physical wellbeing.

Ming Huynh is one of them. A computer engineer, Huynh uses height adjustability as a kind of collaboration tool. “I change the height of my desk pretty frequently. I also go to stand-up height when I collaborate with other people, because I can get more people around my desk when we’re standing.”