Startup Office Hours?

The enforced office hours would keep the team close to each other and on the same page. The flex time would allow employees to work wherever and whenever they deem most efficient for themselves. Set goals on Wednesday, recap on Monday.

Results (not office/face time) should always be the final metric in judging employee performance.

1. Working all the time is not sustainable. 2. There's always more work, and getting it done sooner isn't as helpful as you think.

Nowadays, I'm a proponent of basically exactly what the linked post says.

Standard office hours are from noon to two, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. All meetings should be scheduled during those times. Other than that, people can work where and when they'd like.

This system has a lot of flexibility, encourages people to be in the office a few days a week, but doesn't force them to commute at the same time as the rest of the world.

Why was the no-work-from-home policy ever created? Did employees just stay home and lie about their work?

I take the 37Signals-type approach on anything like this, don't create rules or policies until they solve a real problem (not just a hypothetical problem).

1/ Don't add process until it's necessary. Why have office hours, a vacation policy, or any rule that requires employees to expend mental capital on superfluous issues?

2/ If you're to the point when that process is necessary, you probably hired the wrong people (especially in a startup).

What I said above is untrue for some 1-person startups that are effectively abandoned, and for startups where people stay in their day jobs and therefore really aren't able to contribute enough to get the thing off the ground. But when you have 2 to 4 people working full-time on a startup, there are still a lot of things that can kill it (bad product, poor team dynamics, bad investor relations, just plain bad luck) but a lack of aggregate effort is very, very low on the list.

What seems to be far more common are hours- or sacrifice-related squabbles, and these can utterly break a company. Let's say two founders are working 80 hours per week and one is working 50, but they're all about equally valuable and productive. What happens if, when it's time to split equity, the third founder gets a smaller share? Possible fight. Or worse yet, what if he ends up with lower status within the company and is treated more like an employee, because he didn't "pull enough weight"? This is where fatal fractures happen. Nothing goes wrong because there wasn't enough effort, and nobody put in such a low level of effort as to cause problems, but the perception of unequal sacrifice and dedication has spawned a very nasty conflict that is destined, at some point in the future, to create a fight that could damage (or ruin) the company.

People tend to think of rules surrounding office hours and vacation allotments as exploitative in nature. They can be, but they're also there, in an odd way, to protect people against certain kinds of social dysfunction. Working from home, for example, is great when you have a good working culture, because people can work more productively and are happier. If the environment's dysfunctional, to have people working from home is going to make it a lot worse, because of the distrust that it will breed. In a dysfunctional work environment, it becomes important (until you've made your exit) to be cautious and show up at "normal" times, because the perception of working hard becomes more important than actually working hard.