Assume that, for the people on your team, work is a #4 or #5 priority. And there's nothing wrong with this, as long as they're giving you a solid 80-90% effort during working hours.
If you ask them to put work ahead of family or faith or rest, or if you somehow expect more than 100% effort from them, you're going to drive away the ones who have other options. And the reason they have other options is because they're the best ones.
I’d like to add to this. Not only should you not ask your team members to put work above their own personal well-being, you should actively be challenging people who are doing that unasked. Every company will have an occasional time when extra effort makes sense, but if you’ve got people who are consistently working 10 hour days, or doing work at weekends or on holiday, it’s your job to deal with that. Find out why they’re having to put in that extra effort, then fix it.
Often this will be a case of one person having all the knowledge of a specific thing and needing to pick up any bugs around it, sometimes it’ll be that they’ve been given a task they’re not equipped to do. Occasionally they’re just not very good. Those are the cases that are reasonably easy to deal with.
The worst cases are the true believers - people who are so bought into the company, or the work they’re doing, that they just want to be working every hour of the day. The temptation will be to shrug your shoulders and count yourself lucky that someone is willingly doing a bunch of extra work for free. Don’t let them do that, because otherwise they’re going to burn out at some point, at which point you’re stuck with a bitter wreck of a person dragging the rest of the team down, and also suddenly lost a massive chunk of productivity that was carrying projects.
This sort of thing is especially common in early stage startups, and I’ve on occasion had to go round the office kicking people out. On one occasion I had someone go on holiday but continue popping up and doing things, eventually I had IT disable all their accounts for work systems until they got back.
The other thing around this I’d suggest is not to let a culture of rewarding heroics to build up. You should see every case of someone having to work a 100 hour week as a failure, even if it meant the project got shipped on time, or whatever fire was burning got put out. Post-mortem it, and then fix the root cause.
I always say people have five productive hours per day. I ask they give me four of those on working days.
This applies to creative work: development, document writing, content production and similar. Meetings, sales, email and other types of interactions are less taxing.
I don't mean to downplay the effort of interaction-type tasks. It's the result of observing people around me. I know many people who are happily productive on sales for 12h workdays. I know no developer who's proud of code written on the 12th hour.
Don't assume that these sales people are so happy to work overtime. They probably rely on commission and/or need to hit that sales target. Sales teams are known for super-competitive, target-driven, and high-pressure culture. We software engineers have it easy in comparison.
This is a personality characteristic. For me, meetings and sales are definitely a production that tax me enough. I want to quota how often I do them. (Sales, preferably never.) Some people get positively powered up by sales or meetings though.
I’ve even had medications turn meetings and such social interactions around for me. So I know it’s not a universal truth one or the other way.
The truth is that the "best ones" are often obsessed with their work and endure painful tradeoffs in their lives, for example their family lives, because of it.
People who do great work tend to think about their work all the time. No one thinks about their fourth priority all the time.
If you ask them to put work ahead of family or faith or rest, or if you somehow expect more than 100% effort from them, you're going to drive away the ones who have other options. And the reason they have other options is because they're the best ones.