Do you ever stop to think about how your startup’s employee-friendly policies are affecting your team?
I don’t mean the Ping-Pong table or the free gym membership. I’m talking about the things that have a more fundamental impact on your employees’ lives, such as vacation time and working hours. While your perceived “generosity” may work in terms of getting new hires in the door, certain trendy tactics used to increase productivity may actually be working against you.
Here are a few policies I’ve considered and happily discarded for my business:
Unlimited Vacation Time
Ever watch people go out to lunch with their boss? It’s fascinating to see how they wait for unspoken instructions. Does the boss order alcohol? Does she order an appetizer?
People determine their actions by how the most dominant person at the table sets the pace. When people aren’t given clear standards and expectations, they don’t know how to behave.
If you tell your team that they have “unlimited” vacation time or that there’s “no vacation policy,” you’re not setting the pace at all. You’re telling them to be scared for their job every time they ask for time off.
I know you think that your team is different. They understand that you genuinely want them to relax and disconnect for a while. However, your “open” policy doesn’t actually convey that sentiment.
Having an open vacation policy isn’t generous to your employees — it’s confusing and unfair.
The employee/employer relationship is not an equal balance of power. If there’s any uncertainty that an action they take might not make you happy, your employees will err on the side of not doing it.
An unlimited vacation policy puts the onus on them to read your mind to determine an “acceptable” or “normal” amount of time to take off. At most companies with this policy, people don’t go on vacation at all.
At my company, employees get four weeks of paid vacation upon joining the team. The first year we implemented this policy, people struggled to take all their time off since they couldn’t roll their time over to the next year.
In November, a few people found themselves with weeks remaining, so a number of employees took a lot of time off at the very end of the year.
It wasn’t ideal, but we learned to help people plan ahead better. I wanted to make sure vacation time was a reality in our company, not an empty promise. To do that, we had to send a message loud and clear: It’s crucial to the company that people actually take time off.
No Set Hours
Companies love to say they “focus on outcomes, not hours.” Why track something as old-fashioned as time when you can be all about results.
But by not having set working hours, you’re telling your employees you expect them to be available 24/7. If you don’t know people’s schedules, how can you have any idea when you’ll receive a response from them? The unspoken truth is that you expect an immediate turnaround — all day, every day.
“Sometimes we just all need to work overtime to just get it done.”
Having no set working hours can easily morph into a “just get it done” culture — no matter how long a project takes or how unreasonable the deadline is.
Occasionally, your team may need to work overtime to get a project completed, but how often do you find yourself in “emergency” mode? Do you always seem to find a reason why this needs to be finished now?
It’s a habit we get it into, and it makes our work sloppy and burns us out. Asking your team to put in extra hours can be avoided by simply building more time into your deadlines. No, it isn’t easy; you really have to fight for reasonable timelines in a culture of “do it now,” but it’s worth it.
I don’t run a service business, so our external requests often come in the form of people wanting to interview me for their podcast or blog. No one ever seems to schedule in advance. They want to know when I’m available this week.
My response? No thanks! You can publish this later. I can be in the next issue. There’s no reason for this to be an emergency, and I’m not going to let you pull me into the land of endlessly frantic work.
You should protect yourself from unreasonable deadlines, and you should protect your team from them as well.
Protect Your Company From Overwork
Although set work schedules and vacation time may be “uncool” in the startup world, they protect the integrity of your organization and ensure that you are an employer, rather than a drill sergeant.
Since 24/7 work availability has become the norm, most people don’t think twice about contacting someone with a pressing problem while that person is supposedly on vacation or sending an email at 9 p.m., hoping for a quick response.
As the leader of your organization, it is your responsibility to shut down these behaviors before they become bad habits. If you’re working on the weekend, stop. If you just can’t help yourself, work in stealth mode — that means no emailing your team. (Use Boomerang’s “send later” feature to send out those emails on Monday morning instead of interrupting your team’s weekend.)
The same goes for working in the evenings and responding to work-related emails from your employees. If an employee asks you a question in the evening, your only response should be to tell him to go home.
Whatever it is, it can wait.