Ask HN: Would an office with no mandatory work hours function? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would an office with no mandatory work hours function?

2 pointsMarcellusDrum3 comments

Long story short, I started out as a freelancer making small websites, and now I'm managing a small team of 4 other people (Designer, Social Media Manager/Marketer, Backend Developer, Front End Developer).

The social media manager joined recently, and we all have been working from home till now. I'm in the process of opening an office, and I'm thinking of implementing the following rules:

1) No work hours. You can work whenever you want, for any period of time you want.

2) You can work from wherever you want. You can go full remote, come to the office daily, or anything in between.

3) You have to come to the office every Monday for an hour or 2 for a meeting. You choose to leave or stay after that.

What's important is that you meet deadlines. Everyone has a specified set of tasks, so it would be very clear when someone is lagging behind.

The previous employee inside me is very excited about this system, but the manager in me feels that this is a naive approach. I fear that trying it out might make us miss some deadlines or produce low quality products, which would be a hit to our reputation.

Anyone has experience with working with such a system?

I think that giving people autonomy works and can be great. It is challenging when one person's job requires the attendance of a 2nd person. At some point, one person(s) gets to set the schedule for other people and being able to resolve those clashes is important.

Treat it like a typical system. Put it in the contract that there's a specific number of days off, specific hours, etc. Have people request and log days off - this is extra useful for vacation periods where you might not want 100% of people off.

But there's no penalty for violating this. It gets rid of the main problem of unlimited PTO: People tend to overwork because it sounds like no PTO. People tend to work 60 hours because it's not in the contract to work 40. You're giving them a specific expectation for time off and work hours.

Some trust is required when it's in the contract, but it works both ways with a system like this.

Also one of the problems with working anywhere you want is that public holidays may not be synced. The team I'm on have different celebrations - Christmas+New Year holidays, Chinese New Year, Diwali, Eid (there's two, of differing importance based on country). So you might want to decide which ones people are expected to take 1-4 weeks off.

"Everyone has a specified set of tasks, so it would be very clear when someone is lagging behind."

You have to be careful of this, though. Some tasks are deceptively tough, and often poor management ends up squeezing people into unrealistic deadlines. I've seen situations where everything goes as planned but creep from deadlines. Then management gets uncomfortable at the lack of visibility and adopt "scrum", which can be more micromanaging than just asking everyone to come into the office and standing over their shoulders. We'd get twice as much work done from home than the office, and spend home time covering up for tech debt in the office. But the office incentivizes people to do hacks to have something they can show the PM.

Set up a system for monitoring how much is being done.

> Anyone has experience with working with such a system?

Yes, I have been using this system for over a decade and it's extremely capital efficient.

> but the manager in me feels that this is a naive approach

What risks do you see that make you concerned?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com