So to paraphrase, you are asking HN: "How can I detect which workers are easiest to exploit?" I don't know your exact situation, but extrapolating from experie

So to paraphrase, you are asking HN: "How can I detect which workers are easiest to exploit?" I don't know your exact situation, but extrapolating from experiences at early stage startups I worked at: 1) Hire more people. Instead of asking people to give 110%, hire 1.10⨉ the number of people. 2) Give employees the same stock (in the same class as the founders) not some second class options. 3) Get organized. A lot of crunch time occurs because tasks are not well defined, dependencies not identified etc... And write things down, that way you can read a document instead of bothering someone on vacation to ask a question.