Curious Office

Whew. By now most of the blog sphere will have been aware of this post by 37Signals which details how the firm is experimenting with a 4 day work week. The logic being that employee satisfaction is higher and people come back more refreshed after a nice long 3 day weekend.

Nearly simultaneously was a email thread going around on the organize@seattletechstartups.com mailing list on the very same subject. The discussion got heated. Some said that if you want a nice, relaxing work experience then you aren’t cut out for a start-up. Others maintained that this position is arrogant, unrealistic and dated. I haven’t seen a good email flame war in a while but I could easily understand both positions.

At Imagekind, my first developer was a very hard worker. She showed up promptly at 9am when most other devs preferred to get started around 10am. She worked all throughout the day and never left for lunch. She would also begin packing up around 5:30 pretty consistently. I knew that when she was in the office she got more done than anyone else and there was no question about it. From the very beginning, I had discussed that she could work from home every Thursday. Like all great devs, she had other employment options. Allowing her to work from home one day per week was a creative perk that we could offer as a fledgling start-up. There was a huge amount of mutual respect, admiration and trust between us and I never felt that she wasn’t giving 100% while she was home on Thursday. Her instant messenger would light up promptly at 9am each day.

There are different expectations for employees than there are for co-founders. I don’t expect employees to work the same amount of hours that I do. Frankly, I’m on email pretty much all the time and I work most weekends. But, employees are different. What I do expect is that employees are incredibly talented at what they do. And I expect that they are not disruptive in the office. They need to work well with others and I’ve made the mistake of hiring incredibly smart people would were also incredibly abrasive. It never works. I don’t really care if someone wants to work from 11am-7pm. Or 9am-5:30pm. It just doesn’t matter. Where it falls apart is when the situation is abused. In my experience though, it is possible to communicate up front that this freedom and flexibility is offered because you generally care about the well being and happiness of the people who come to work every day. I want them to be happy that they came to help us realize our dreams. I want them to feel appreciated. And I tell them that I appreciate them every day. I’ve found then when you structure your work environment around a sincere desire to make an employee truly happy about working with you then they will give so much more back to the organization. When it all comes together, there is no discussion about the work week because each is trying hard to make the other happy.

If someone went above and beyond to help us hit a milestone I’d ask them to work from home after lunch.
If someone wasn’t feeling well and I could see it I’d ask them if they wanted to leave a little early.
If someone was having a difficult personal struggle I’d tell them to work from home and just leave instant messenger on.
If someone was having a hard time solving a problem I’d take them to lunch.

All of these things probably seem obvious. But, in the end, we all felt that we worked hard enough each day and there wasn’t a need to ask someone to work harder.

Having said all of this, I admit that I made mistakes. The biggest mistake I made was that I subconsciously provided this kind of attention primarily to developers and I don’t believe that I extended the same level of courtesy to all the employees right down to the temporary folk who helped us on non-technical issues. It’s easy to show favoritism and not be aware of it. In retrospect, I would have treated everyone the same but I didn’t realize at the time how much preference devs were getting compared to others. It turned out others noticed before I did.