Let’s see what the (excerpt from the) Duden tells us:

“Discipline” Meanings

• 1 a) adherence to certain regulations, prescribed rules of behavior, etc.; conforming to the order of a group or community
• 1 b) the control of one’s own will, emotions, and inclinations in order to achieve something
• 2 ) Branch of science; subfield, subdivision of a science
  …

Okay, that sounds a bit old-fashioned and “strict” – certainly not in line with today’s management ideas of individual development and mindfulness.
On the other hand, for us, discipline as a value is not an empty term, not a shell that superficially conveys arbitrary “management ideas”.
Just like our other values, discipline is a term for compressed experiences, a part of our very vibrant everyday life, so to speak. Therefore, our values each carry more than one form of truth or personal perspective; they all have individual and contextual manifestations. Too theoretical? Okay, let’s understand our value “discipline,” for example, in the following way:

We all know this: we are engrossed in our current task, and we are constantly interrupted by calls, emails, or one of the various communication channels.
However, our remote structure, with all its independence, can only be successful from a business perspective if our customers can reach their respective contact persons.
For our core topic of project management, the team has formulated an important sentence that also includes the necessary boundaries: “We are always reachable (during working hours) but not always available.”.

For our customers, it is not important to know where we are or what we are currently doing – what matters is that we help them with their concerns. “Discipline” here means ensuring availability in a self-determined and self-organized manner – always with disciplined, transparent boundaries during focus times or, for example, when we finish work for the day.

A decentralized team can only be successful with individual self-responsibility and (a lot of) communication. Discipline here stands for the “order” in our everyday lives, which is also important for our close collaboration, for example, in the “tandems” used in project management.
This is, so to speak, our articulated, disciplined counter-concept to “micromanagement” – often meant and misunderstood as “help” in traditional collaboration structures – whereas the real motivation behind it is often control, making employees feel helpless and uncertain.

A real challenge remains the “disciplined end of the workday,” which for some employees is almost the flip side of remote or independent work: recognizing when to stop. It has long been scientifically proven that we need our breaks as a basis for our work!
In our “helper everyday” in customer projects, it is not always easy to draw a line. We have already experienced burnout in the team – this can have various causes, and we want to exclude overwork!

“Discipline” is important for us as a decentralized team from many perspectives:

• We organize our workday in a healthy measure for us; we are reachable during working hours, but there is no permanent availability
• We continuously develop in our self-responsible work and with a lot of internal communication, rejecting micromanagement and replacing it, for example, with shared routines
• We practice mindfulness, including recognizing when the workday ends

In our sense, discipline helps us achieve more self-organization and self-responsibility. Together with an open, strong culture of communication, they form the backbone of our virtual teams.