How do you stop your team working on the weekends? 😊
I asked this on Twitter today, but will pose the same question here on IH for advice:
Founders who have a growing team - how do you prevent your team members from working on weekends and outside their normal designated working hours?
Some background: We used to enforce a strict "no working on weekends" policy with our remote team. In fact, anyone caught working on the weekends would have to donate to their least favourite cause! 😄 (e.g. if you didn't get on with cats, you would have to donate to a feline shelter etc.)
However, over time, we discovered that some team members actually preferred working on weekends, which is fine. I myself always take Wednesdays off to spend as a "date day" with my wife, as she doesn't work on Wednesdays, but she does home tutor a few students on Sundays, so I tend to work on Sundays as well while she is busy.
So we relaxed this hard and fast rule and allowed people to pick their own working schedule.
The problem is, other team members who don't normally work weekends would notice me checking in code, updating documentation, answering support tickets and leaving notes on Slack etc. on a Sunday, and they started feeling obligated to keep up with the founders (my co-founder also often works on weekends as a preference).
As much as we stress that this is not expected of them during our team meetings, I think that there is this unvoiced intent from them that they feel the need to keep pace.
While I totally appreciate their dedication, I don't want it to lead to a situation where they burn out or start to feel resentful about it.
How do others deal with this?
Ah, the classic case of FOMOW.
It's hard to deal with this if your team have a sense of psychological ownership that forces them to raise to the occasion every time.
It's hard to deal with this if your team feel constantly left out and that's forcing them to do this to try to fit in.
But which one is it? Identifying the underlying cause might be the most important next step here. A classic case of competitive workaholics? Give them mandatory off days within the week to compensate. A more difficult case of teammates feeling out of the loop? You might want to reconsider the culture.
I think you should let people work whenever they are most productive. Often weekends can be a good time to catch up on things that were set aside during the week. Flexibility within reasonable constraints is the key IMO.
Why stop them working weekends?
Mainly to prevent burnout, and also to prevent any building resentment that they may feel about having to keep up with the founders. I appreciate their dedication and commitment to my startup, but I think downtime is a necessity.
I am happy to manage my own quirky work schedule and keep an eye on my burnout early warning signs, but I can't do it for everyone.
I short, I want them to feel that they can have proper time off and they don't have to work when I decide I want to.
Do you think burnout happens by working on weekends?
From what I have seen folks burnout when they have bad managers/projects.
Of course I don't mean having them work 2 days extra, but using their time however they like.
Also async tools instead of email might help.
I've had at least 4 episodes of burnout - 2 quite bad, and that was all while working for myself - no bosses or bad projects. All caused by working day in day out without taking any sort of breaks or engaging in my other passions to free up my mind from just problem solving in my startup all the time.
I understand the drivers will be different for business owners vs employees, so I wanted to mandate that time off is time NOT to squeeze in more work.
We do have a couple of employees who have stated that they want to work weekends. One of our programmers always takes Friday off, but works on a Sunday instead, and it fits in with his other obligations, so that is fine.
I just want to ensure that time off is actually spent doing stuff outside of work, which is what I do when I have my mandated days off - going as far as turning my notifications off or setting DND on my phone.
As much as possible, we try not to use email, but a lot of our systems are tied in to Slack, so whenever something like a code check in/deployment or server upgrade or changes to our knowledgebase happens, it triggers notifications in Slack and other comms tools we have, which seems to prompt the team to feel they have to chime in at that time. Whereas I'd like it more to be "Got a notification at 9pm on your Saturday? Don't sweat it, wait until Monday morning and respond".