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Great post, with some very interesting ideas. My experience has been that although it sounds great to be "super" flexible, it's really hard to run a company tha
by danielpal 13y ago
Great post, with some very interesting ideas. My experience has been that although it sounds great to be "super" flexible, it's really hard to run a company that way. As you add more people to the team, people will mimick the worst behaviors to restore fairness - "if jon always leaves at 5, then it's not fair if I stay late" and suddenly people start slacking. Strengthening the rules later is also really hard, but at some point you realize you have to.
That doesn't mean you push people 60 hours or weekends, but you enforce minimums like 9-5 and you make sure everyone feel's everyone is equally contributing and that everyone is trying hard.
- ivankirigin 13y agoIt seems really plausible that the flexibility would lead to resentment. But isn't that reaction negative? What does it take to convince employees, not just management, to look at output?
- danielpal 13y agoI am not sure if it's possible to get your employee's to learn to spot the output of everyone else. You will be able to, as you'll probably spend significant time interacting with everyone, but your employees won't. Each will be focused on their own project and won't have enough visibility across the company to notice output. However all of them will notice if someone arrives late and you don't do anything about it. We had one specific case were someone constantly arrived 2-3 hours late. People very "subtly" started complaining (and I mean very subtly). No one ever mentioned or talked about what the person was working on or if he was producing great code (his code was very good btw). Neither did they asked why he was arriving late - they only assumed it was not OK and felt it was unfair.