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.
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.