Why employees shouldn't have hours
linkedin.com
linkedin.com
More importantly - be intelligent about your policies. Consider what the work is, and how people work best. Give them the power and the responsibility to get things done. Allow them to take control, and make sure they are well informed about what you're trying to accomplish, and what the various external forces might be.
But don't tell me not to set hours for my employees. I've consulted with them, we've worked together, and for our context, with our customers, with our work, and in our marketplace, we, together, have concluded that regular hours in the office are the best way to work as a team and get the job done.
Your context will be different - be intelligent about your choices.
We can do better than this!
OT: wouldn't it be great if software like HN made it trivially easy to indicate WHO was being talked about? OP is apparently confusing - perhaps colour coding, or some other visual cue rather than "the post two posts above the reply to the previous post" or the mangled cut'n'paste of someone's barely readable grey handle that we have now.
Your point is valid, but it's usually easily deduced, or the person who wrote the ambiguous comment should simply have been clearer.
The article is written by someone who is not yet 30 and started his company, a small web design company, 14 years ago. He has likely worked with young, small teams and has no other experience.
The article itself comes off as naive and doesn't even say who the advice is intended for. It's reminiscent of a bad assignment for an undergraduate management course.
Regardless, he's aruging for something that's going against the grain, so he doesn't need to actually give a balanced approach. We already know the advantages and hopefully the disadvantages or working set hours, so we don't need to hear it, we just need a strong argument for his point of view. You don't generally route for the other side in a debate, so the complaints are misplaced.
Also it's not surprising as an employer you feel set hours are the right approach for you. I'm not making a judgment on you, but it's very common for employers to make leaving at 5 O'clock very awkward and they never seem to have a problem asking employees to do work out of hours, while generally being very quiet about policy to get that time back.
Over the short term, abusing your employees in such a way comes with no disadvantages, so the employers love it. Long term, the same employees will probably become disheartened, but we live in a society where we'd rather replace those employees and charge on ahead. If you do any of these things, you're the type of employer the article is arguing against, if not, then your morale is probably fine which is the real undertone of such articles.
We are explicit about out-of-hours work, because sometimes we have engineers in the field working in very different time zones. In those cases the staff decide among themselves who will be providing support, and the company policies about recompense are clear. The compensation policies were agreed by all affected staff, and they seem genuinely content.
We take this seriously, not least because it would be possible to abuse our position.
Removing abusing your employees, pay them resonably well, and give them something to do, and you've probably removed 90% of the reasons people move company, especially considering most employees know it probably won't be the case if they move elsewhere.
Truly well done if that's the case, it's a shame that such a thing seems to be the exception from my experience. :)
Here's an interesting thing: from my experience (and I've worked for many companies over 25+ years) this is not a rare exception.
However, such a culture absolutely requires mature, responsible, reliable and honest employees. Maintaining such a culture requires everyone's active effort, not just that of the boss. Companies select for that, those qualities often carries more weight than skill or experience.
Time and time I've seen people bitching about their work environment in a way which immediately sets of alarms about that person. I wouldn't hire them, and I'm guessing neither would ColinWright.
Don't take this personally, I don't know you or your experience, but I think many people who complain about good employers being rare should take a look in the mirror.
You're from a different generation from me and you have much more experience, so hopefully you're right. On the other hand, I think it's possible that things have changed and the people out there who'll attempt to exploit youth could be more common.
Personally I've been offered jobs by people I know who'll treat me right, that's an option I didn't have when I was 20, but it's a different story now I'm _almost_ 30. It's probably a bit of both either way though. :)
The 40-hour week isn't "a fossil" from the era of production lines; it exists because workers fought for it.
Many of these rights were also secured because the awful production line jobs were sent overseas (cf Bangladesh). Unions were a powerful force for good - but they also created huge problems in some countries once those rights had been one and they failed to modernise. Modern trade unions are again a powerful force for good, but those are the ones that aren't going on strike all the time and hardly anyone has a problem with them.
(From a very UK perspective)
> Maybe the answer is to get rid of corporations?
Hyperbole aside, there is no silver bullet to the situation as it stands. And I'm not informed enough to make any claims as to what could fix it. I just find it horribly hilarious when unions are made out to be so evil and corporations are made out to be the good in any fight. Unions at least have the interest (to a degree) of their members to protect, corporations just care about profit.
Were earned. Were secured. Continuing to harp on the past is not a convincing argument for current relevance.
But I guess if you willfully deal with the government as an employer, that's your own fault, right?
Some things have already been disrupted. The 40hr working week being a great example.
I'm really beginning to wonder if our industry's fascination with young, gullible and naive staff is actually healthy any more.
There's two reasons hours are useful, internal and external teamwork. Nobody works alone, if you have somebody in 7-3 and somebody 11-7, there's a significant period without overlap. This can be even more problematic if your team doesn't have regular hours at all so that you can't even plan for this.
For external parties, your clients, customers, etc., you want to be responsive to their needs. Most companies work 9-5, though timeszones can make this tricky.
It tends to be caused by people being responsible for both support and new development, and the latter gets squeezed out by the needs of the former; or domain knowledge being concentrated in a few employees, who feel they are swamped helping others instead of doing the work they should be doing.
Being too busy is a problem in itself, people who are busy are less efficient in the long run because they are focused on short-term goals. It's why you see people fighting with terrible build systems, they don't have the time to fix them even though they are wasting time every day due to them.
There's no right or wrong answer with things like hours, we operate in the big grey area in the middle. It's about finding the best compromise where the happiness of the group is maximized without negatively impacting the business.
Yes, but that is not inherent to having other people in the office, it is a symptom of a bad office. Intellect workers require a quiet space where they can work without distraction and interruption. In most offices, the only way to get that is to be there when nobody else is there. In an office where management isn't clueless, people could get that all the time.
And then he slips this: After all, during a big project it’s important your employees don’t feel inclined to exit as soon as the clock strikes 5 p.m. Very telling; and also note that time crunching is most often caused by bad planification than by lack of productivity.
As for the points explained, I strongly disagree with the first, the second and especially the fourth (not only it doesn't promote teamwork, since not every one is in the office at a given time: also, it can quickly devolve into a race to the bottom where everyone tries to do the highest amount of hours, which is the real productivity killer via burnout). I find the third point dubious, although it's worth discussing.
The larger the team, the greater the need for interaction between the members. And that doesn't mean an email response 2 hours after the initial one was sent because you just woke up.
In some very real ways, 9-5 is archaic. But it serves a purpose today - it puts everyone in the office at the same time during hours where there's someone to take care of children.
It's more about consistency and reliability than history.
In my experience, having a technical manager means you're much more likely to get flexiable hours or remote working, where the manager knows they can check on your productivity by looking at commit history and project managment tools. Same deal might happen with non-technical managers after you have built a relationship of trust.
Exceptions exist of course, but most everyone else doesn't have a clue what they're doing, so they make sure you show up, tell you what to do, squeeze you on impossible deadlines, and basically make your life miserable. It's just the status quo where you have middle management trained to be managers without any real knowledge in their field they are managing.
That's not to say there aren't any advantages to the 9-5, just my personal opinion based on anecdotal experiences. :p
How often does this happen where you're not working with a single other person? Another developer, QA, designers, product managers...
I can see if you're working on your own startup, but if you're on a team of people it's very unhelpful to have any one person just go off on their own for days a time.
Otherwise you're talking about wasted time due to the staggering of schedules.
But those situations are pretty rare in most companies.
With all this tech, it's pretty simple for me to do something and leave it for someone else to pickup while I sleep, as long as we both go to the effort to do our parts properly in the first place.
Even in an office, working on a startup, I would often find myself working on my code, while other people are working on theirs with the expectation I'll do mine correct.
It just seems to work from my experience, though I'd still much rather prefer to live close to work to pop in and attend meetings without it being a plane flight away.
Can one gauge productivity by tasks completed without a good estimate of the effort required for a given task?
My employees don't understand that if i wasn't for their lazy asses we'd be the next instagram, or reddit or whatever. the only thing standing between me and striking a huge payday is my employees desire to not constantly be working.
After having been abused by employers who didn't understand why an employee wouldn't want to work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, for months on end (I'm not exagerating here) I have a slight skepticism of people looking to abolish a finite work week.
"Sorry bud, the loading dock staff get in at 5 to finish early. Can you come to pick up the packages tomorrow, a bit earlier this time?"
"An ISP technician will come around to your house to fix the problem between 1am and 4am. He's a bit of a night owl"
Of course, all the people in the comments that are for the abolition of set hours would likely change their tune if the employees decide to shorten their weeks. "That project can't be done by then".
1. The reason employees bolt for the door is because they have things to do. Believe it or not employees have lives outside of work. I can't think of any project that would be "big" enough to miss a daughter's soccer game or son's concert. And if that means I need to leave the office at a certain time to do so, then so be it.
2. By offering flexible hours, employers seem to be able to demand employees work long upon demand. No thank you.
3. Working long hours to crunch for a big project is shown time and time again to not be effective. Why not fight the cause instead of accommodating it with flex time?
All that said, I'm convinced the best, long-term answer is to not be an employee. Instead, freelancing will continue to become more and more common.
The first week, 60 hours works. The second, it's still more productive than 40 hours, but not as much, after that, it isn't, then actively dips below a constant stream of 40 hour weeks.
So depending on how short your spikes are, it can be fine.
You like to work in the middle of busy café? No problem. You like to work from home? No problem. You like to work from 9 to 5? No problem. You like a variation of the above depending on your mood? No problem.
The only thing we ask is to keep the communication open, ie, don't fall into an autistic "I never show up" way of work.
Which leads me to the following.
When there are meetings, when we're at a customer or when there is any kind of external constraint we have absolutely no tolerance for lateness or approximation.
On the plus side, these people are going to be the same whether they're in your office or not, thus I've never actually believed keeping them in the office will serve any real benefit, you need employees you can trust, either way.
If the point is that modern work is so special and creative that it is more of an artistic creation, and thus requires "passion" (translated as work 60 hours a week), than no, that is a ridiculous assertion and a work practice that should be illegal.
But these problems could be significant, and a discussion of them could have made the article much more useful and interesting.
For example: people do compare their performance against that of their colleagues. People do steal credit for work done by other people. How do managers deal with this? There's the potential for significant ill-will if Ann is picking up Bob's slack, but not getting the recognition for it. And if Bob is getting recognition for the work that Ann is doing it's worse. And if Ann's work is suffering, and she's told people and been ignored, and she's losing out, then it's even worse.
Management advice often feels superficial. It'd be great if people writing this advice started making more use of good quality research. I guess it'd be good if more good quality research was available too.
This is our fault, as we've basically let this happen. I've personally told developers on my teams to go home on time and I get excuses like "well I'll just end up watching TV or wasting time."
To this my response has always been "save that energy for when the project really needs it, because it will. When things are calmer, go have a life."
Unfortunately, I think most business leaders are ignorant about the urgency of work, or they take the attitude of "push until they push back". This leads to the burnout, apathy, and overall lack of commitment over time from their employees.
The problem I don't have any grip on is people working from home. Because we're pretty flexible and developers enjoy their work, I often see them working in the evenings or in the weekend, when there is really no need for it. Also, people who work from home all day invariable tend to make longer hours.
This worries me a bit, but I'm not sure how to address that.
As for the late night work at home, I would recommend you do one-on-ones (or have their managers do one-on-ones) with the late night workers to make sure they aren't being overwhelmed without saying anything. Showing that you're proactive about it helps build that trust.
Another thing I've noticed is that when you have a strong in-office culture (which it sounds like you have), sometimes it's difficult to stay on top of individual tasks while you're in the office. There are always side conversations, ad-hoc discussions, or even a higher frequency of in-person meetings during the day. These things are important to maintain culture, but often eat into a person's time so much that they have to get caught up at night. Sometimes the late night work is simply catching up on emails from the day or it's finishing up a minor coding task.
But in worst case scenarios, people can't get anything done in the office so they resort to early morning work (before anyone shows up) or they always work late regularly. Keeping a pulse on that and handling it before it becomes a cultural problem is very important.
This article's points are great in theory, but in a business world it creates a barrier.
However, is such a policy implementable at a large corporation like Google or Microsoft? It is certainly within reach of startups that have a dozen or even a couple of hundred employees.