9 ms·

At Mobile Jazz (7 years old now) and Bugfender (4-5 years old now) we always had the rule, that people could choose to work as much as they want and when they w

• xfitm3 8y ago
  Your handbook says you track work daily in Asana and have two stand ups. Along with an expectation to immediately respond to pings and vacation pre-approval is required. How does that fit into “work when you want”?
  • znq 8y ago
    With freedom, comes responsibility. There needs to be some communication and information/knowledge exchange, otherwise it's difficult to coordinate and synchronize in a team of 20 people. Therefore updating other people via Slack/Asana is the minimum anyone should do in my opinion. The two weekly stand-ups, one is actually work related (the team meeting) and people are encouraged to be there and not go surfing just during that specific hour and the other one is the MJ Weekly, where we just exchange personal and professional learnings for about 1 hour, which is a great way to get to know other people being a remote company. That said, making those things "required" is not that bad compared to requiring people sitting 8 hours in an office. Again, my personal opinion.
  • wgerard 8y ago
    I don't work there, but it seems pretty clear to me. Morning slack message (which isn't the same thing as a standup): "Hey, I'm going to do X,Y,Z today but I'm also going to run a few errands after lunch so I'll be MIA from 12-2 CET but available after until 6 CET". "Work when you want" doesn't have to mean "I have no idea when you'll be available today".
    • verelo 8y ago
      > "Work when you want" doesn't have to mean "I have no idea when you'll be available today". People confuse the two all the time! Flexibility and reliability have to go hand in hand, if you cannot be reliable when left unsupervised, you need to expect I cannot leave you unsupervised. On the plus side, when people are given this explanation they often self manage into a good routine.
      • 1337biz 8y ago
        But this is the problem. The current mindset is - as long as you are here, I trust you to do something productive. The work-when-you-want is easily leading to a - show me the evidence on why I should trust you to have done something productive today. It forces someone to just push for quick wins and avoid anything that is not leading to directly accountible results.
        • wgerard 8y ago
          You should really know what you're doing all day. If you can't even summarize what you were doing all day, that sounds like a bad thing. The evidence is your story about what you actually did. Here's a perfectly great update that didn't result in a quick win: "I spent all day debugging that null pointer issue like we discussed. I thought maybe it was because the API was sending nulls across, but I looked at the logs and couldn't find any instance of that happening. I thought maybe it was a type coercion issue too, but I wrote a few tests to rule that out and it turned out not to be the case. Then I remembered reading about a memory corruption issue that sometimes happens in our runtime version, so I spent the rest of the day reading about the situations where that occurs and figuring out if it applies to us, but didn't get enough time to finish that up completely."
• wodenokoto 8y ago
  How do employees know when good is good enough? When things get stressful and overwhelming at work, I look to my contractual hours per week and remind myself not to overdo it.
  • ryandvm 8y ago
    This is actually the downside of these "you decide" plans and why I absolutely hate "unlimited PTO" policies. Whenever it's up to me I end up taking less vacation than if I just had an allotted amount. People shortchange themselves because they don't want to inconvenience their team. And as an added insult, the company gets out of paying you for unused vacation when you finally burn out.
    • karlokeeffe 8y ago
      When I worked a Geckoboard they had a great system where you had unlimited paid time off, but you had to take at least 25 days off each year. This, combined with colleagues visibly taking advantage of the time off available, helped ensure a healthy approach to unlimited time off.
      • VectorLock 8y ago
        >When I worked a Geckoboard they had a great system where you had unlimited paid time off, but you had to take at least 25 days off each year. Thats doing it right. Or pay people for the vacation time they don't use.
        • nick_g 8y ago
          I would expect that paying people for unused vacation would incentivize employees overworking themselves leading to reduced quality of output. In a sense, I expect that it would magnify the existing issues with unlimited PTO. It seems like this would be neither good for employee or employer.
          • 8y ago
• js2 8y ago
  > Remember, work has to be fun. We value employees who live rich and rounded lives. We run a flexible workplace, and we have ever since we were a blacksmith shop that shut down whenever the waves were six feet, hot and glassy. Our policy has always allowed employees to work flexible hours, as long as the work gets done with no negative impacts on others. A serious surfer doesn't plan to go surfing next Tuesday at two o'clock. You go surfing when there are waves and the tide and wind are right. From Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard.
• jypepin 8y ago
  Yes this sounds good. Have you noticed a risk of people over-working because of the lack of hours? Or feeling bad about taking vacations? (Something I've felt while having unlimited vacations). As you are saying that, as the business owner/manager you do the same, I think it shows a great example and helps people feel they actually can do this. The opposite might also be very true, where if the manager is working harder than what is expected/accepted, people will follow and do the same too. Do you think that is true?
  • znq 8y ago
    The problems we see is when people are overloaded because of bad planning on our side or customers asking for too tight deadlines and we wanting to be nice and help them achieve it (again our fault). Then people actually tend to feel pressured doing more for the company's sake. Which is sometimes ok in my opinion and also appreciated when there's an emergency, but we try for it not to become the rule. Regarding owners/managers working less, I see it the same as you: leading by example. And generally I don't see a problem with that, as everyone is mostly working very responsibly (in our case). However, what we've noticed over the years is that it still needs some people with a global company vision and also visionary mindset to push the company to new frontiers and help people to look beyond what they're currently working on and to think outside the box.
  • Bartweiss 8y ago
    > The opposite might also be very true, where if the manager is working harder than what is expected/accepted, people will follow and do the same too. I think this is a serious risk for unlimited PTO. It's easy to miss, because well-meaning managers are least likely to notice the problem. Sure they were busy and came in all year, but they genuinely wanted their reports to take more time off! In that sense, it almost has to be a responsibility at the management level; visibly booking time off and disconnecting is part of making a PTO policy usable for everyone else. Fortunately, it's the sort of responsibility that also helps keep management and founders from burning out or already being exhausted when crunches do hit.
• deleted 8y ago
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• tokyodude 8y ago
  I would hate that environment. I don't want to have to guess if I'm doing enough. I don't want to guess if I'm working 20 days more a year than another employee or 10 days less. I just want a negotiated amount of time off. If it's 10 days a year or 50 days a year at least know I can take them off 100% guilt free. If it's "take as much as you want" there will always be those who abuse the policy and those who under utilize.
  • rabidrat 8y ago
    What if 'enough' is not time-based? What if you just have to make sure that new versions are deployed and the service stays up and isn't being hacked? If you can do that with 2 days/week, more power to you. Or maybe you put 6 days/week in at the outset, as an investment so that in a few months you'll be able to work a lot less?
    • vkou 8y ago
      > Or maybe you put 6 days/week in at the outset, as an investment so that in a few months you'll be able to work a lot less? There are two outcomes in that situation. 1. Great, so you've gotten Service Foo stable! It now needs minimal dev attention. Since there's no shortage of work that needs to be done, and you've got 3 days/week free, it sounds like you're free to work on Service Bar, in addition to Service Foo. 2. Great, so you've gotten Service Foo stable. Now that it needs half the development attention that it used to, we no longer need a full-time person on it. Since we don't have any more work, we're laying you off (Or, in a fairy tale, where, for whatever reason, your manager values your contributions for what they were, laying one of your co-workers off.) Personally, I prefer outcome #1. I'm paid to be at work, and do things, and if I get my work done faster then estimated, I'll get more work. And that's fine. The alternative is much worse.
      • rabidrat 8y ago
        I think there's a happy medium. I have a personal target of 4 days/week (or equivalent), and so I don't mind optimizing existing work, and then taking on additional work, as long as it averages out to this healthy balance. I have found that the best motivator for me is a manager who is able to say "you've done great work, you can relax for a bit, take some time off". I'll work hard for them, knowing they have my back and I don't have to fight and scrape for well-deserved rest. If they won't say that, and will just let me work as much as I can, then I start making clear boundaries around my work; and overall I am less motivated to make things better.
• dv_dt 8y ago
  I think without systematic backstops to keep it below a certain number of hours there's a big risk to slide into more and more hours. Esp if you hire on someone who might visibly work a lot and get visibily rewarded for it - it puts a subtle pull on the group as a whole.
• darepublic 8y ago
  Yeah but this policy is not that helpful if high quality output is demanded at a fast rate. The same situation that forces someone to work overtime in a 5 day week is still present.
• wutbrodo 8y ago
  I have never had a job that doesn't work like this (or rather, that I didn't treat like this) and frankly, it's a huge red flag for me to see an engineering job that doesn't. Given that engineering can require long periods of focused work, it's beyond me that a company would step in and decide the manner in which you get it done. Tangentially and less convincingly, I don't see a reason why if I'm twice as talented as someone else and want to work half as much, that shouldn't be okay, and we should be similarly compensated for having similar productivity. It's to the point where it reminds me of jobs that force you to dress up in a certain way: I can't imagine your workplace respects you if they're enforcing how you get your work done or what you're wearing. I should be clear that there are situations in both cases where it can actually make sense: anyone working customers doesn't get to decide that customers are irrational for judging attire, so dress codes are reasonable in that case. Similarly, if your work heavily involves constant communication, then enforcing work hours can make sense too. But there are a TON of jobs that enforce rules like work hours and dress code for no reason other than lack of trust and respect for their employees, and I just hope I continue to avoid ever being in a position like that.
• snambi 8y ago
  This is nonsense. People work for money, so clearly call out what is the expectation.
• nilkn 8y ago
  This is very interesting, but I'm curious how it scales to higher levels of management. Of course, if the whole company is only 20-30 people, those higher levels don't exist. In a large company, a single low- or mid-level manager may have more direct and indirect reports than an entire small 20 person company, and a high-level executive may have hundreds or thousands of indirect reports. At this level, it seems to me like it may be possible to maintain this "work when you want as long as the work gets done" style of scheduling for developers at the bottom, but it feels like it would work less and less for managers and executives who will spend more and more of their time in scheduled meetings.
  • dvdkon 8y ago
    Of course, people whose workload consists of talking to or otherwise dealing with other people can't have flexible schedules like this. A cashier can't walk off, because there's a line of customers waiting to be served. However, it can still in my opinion work for a large amount of people. Anyone whose job has parts that can be done alone (programming, compiling reports, writing articles...) can benefit from a more relaxed schedule.
• mattharney 8y ago
  Hey zqn, this is an awesome deck and post. In fact, I wrote this up on my blog as a case study in using content to attract talent: https://mattharney.com/2019/02/22/talent-magnet-in-action/ https://mattharney.com/2019/02/22/talent-magnet-in-action/