
Startup Office Hours? - betashop
http://betashop.com/post/4611273735/startup-office-hours
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Construct
I think the best schedule would be a mix of enforced office hours (Monday
through Wednesday, for example) combined with letting employees work from home
(or coffee shops, etc.) for the rest of the week if they so choose.

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.

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StavrosK
My view shifted from "work as hard as possible, as much as possible" to a much
more relaxed approach when I realised two things:

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.

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betashop
My personal schedule is like this these days.

Weekdays: Wake up. Quick run. 4 to 5 hours of WFH (work from home). Office
from 11 to 6. Gym. Dinner. Unwind. 1-2 hours catch up on work. Read something
non work related for 30 minutes in bed. Sleep. Rinse Repeat.

Weekends: 4 hours of work catchup each day on Saturday and Sunday.

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random42
That is around 75 hrs/week. Please tell me you work for yourself.

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betashop
Well, we all work for someone. I work for our investors. But yes, I'm the
founder of my company, so I work for myself and because I love what I do.
Realistically I'd say I do about 80 hours per week. But when you love what you
do it's not work.

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random42
Thanks. I hope you dont take my query the wrong way, I was just concerned that
how well your efforts are tied with (potential) rewards. Good to know they are
tied well enough.

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zacharycohn
One system I'd like to try is basically this:

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.

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k33l0r
_I learned that she had a 2 hour commute to work every day, which was killing
her … because the company had a formal no-work-from-home policy. Needless to
say I created a new policy and she was granted work-from-home Wednesdays._

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).

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betashop
Some cultures are more strict about office hours than others. In German
culture it is normal to expect someone to be there on time and leave on time,
and to never stray from the norm. I had to shake that up a bit.

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coreymaass
A couple years when I moved back to freelancing, and working on my web apps, I
instituted a pretty strict rule of ending at a normal time, and no working on
weekends. It works most of the time :-) but has definitely kept me sane, and
made the people around me calmer. It also forces me to take time to think,
which I wasn't doing when I was just working all the time.

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justinmitchell
Two thoughts here,

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).

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rhizome
I don't agree so much with point 2, but I do think that it's smart to figure
out what people actually need to be in the office for and plan around that,
rather than assuming some kind of window. Maybe the lunch meeting at one
startup is the 4pm at another.

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zem
my personal philosophy is try to come in at least three to four days a week
(say between 12-5), because it helps keep the team connected. other than that,
work when you want, where you want, as long as the work gets done.

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betashop
Curious to hear others' thoughts on this.

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michaelochurch
My thoughts, based on a few startups I've observed among my friends: once a
startup gets to 2-3 full-time founders, the probability that it will fail
because people aren't working hard enough goes near zero. The company might
fail for other reasons, but once you have 2 or 3 dedicated, full-time
founders, "lack of effort" is not even on the list of the top 20 things that
can kill it. Occasionally, an individual person might drop below acceptable
effort levels-- that person usually leaves for a more stable job in a month or
two. It just doesn't make sense to work for a startup if you're going to put
in a half-hearted effort, so the less committed people usually leave before
they become a problem.

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.

