Never Honor Hours Worked
Kill this well-meaning praise that can cause real harm
Welcome to the latest entry in The Captain’s Log. You’re in good company with thousands of fellow entrepreneurs and innovators who have subscribed!
I’m your host, Bob, and my mission here is to share personal, behind-the-scenes stories of ups and downs from my career leading tech startups and corporate innovation.
I write to make you think, smile, and discover a shortcut to success or a trap to avoid.
Here we go…
There were a million ways to die in the Old West—and there are a million ways you can screw up as a leader. I’ve checked the box on several. But I’ve learned, survived, and advanced.
We often don’t know that something we said did damage until it’s too late. If only someone had warned us…Well, that’s pretty much the purpose of my writing here—and I’ve got a good one for you today.
It’s time to talk about praising hours worked…
A Career By the Hour
If you’ve ever worked in an advertising agency, consulting firm, or legal practice, you know that billable hours are a big deal. This is how most clients pay for services: They buy a certain number of hours of your time in return for the creative, strategy, code, or other output they require to keep their business humming.
Billable hours are the lifeblood of these companies, and while your rates may vary, the name of the game as an owner of these service businesses is to maximize how many of your employees’ working hours are paid for by clients.
I first learned about this business in 2004, when I left my client-side marketing job at a big company to join my friends as a partner at a digital advertising agency. Within days, I was my employees’ timesheets, estimating how many hours would be required on new client projects, and projecting how many people we might need to hire if we landed a promising new business opportunity.
Like most companies in these kinds of businesses, we set a goal for employees to “bill” a certain number of hours to client projects per week. In our case, we expected most people across functions to bill 32 hours per week. That left 8 hours for “non-billable” activities, like company all-hands, team planning meetings, and other odds and ends—like the time it takes to fill out timesheets. Managers would be expected to bill less time, say, 20 hours, as they were more often coaching teams and working on other company-wide projects.
Of course, the numbers would vary by person, department, and time of the year. We’d look at employee timesheets to identify ways to redeploy people. If a big new business pitch was coming up, we’d see who was below goal and have them chip in on it. Individually, we might see an employee chronically under the goal, and the manager would use the next one-on-one to figure out what was happening.
If you’ve ever worked in these kinds of businesses, you know that sometimes the business requires that you blow way past that 32-hour goal. You’re always at the mercy of clients, and clients aren’t always great at giving you a heads-up on their needs so that you can plan. Plus, problems happen—weirdly often on Friday evenings—and if you don’t work through the weekend to meet their needs, you might not have them as a client come Monday.
Recognizing the Wrong Thing
Our agency had all-hands meetings every Monday morning. It was a great way to share important information and get people prioritized and pumped for the week ahead. A recurring agenda slot on these Mondays went to company leaders, who praised specific individuals and teams for outstanding work the previous week.
In one of my first such opportunities, I prepared to heap praise on a team that worked all weekend to prepare for a big client project that came in suddenly. Our client “found” some money and needed to spend it with us before it went away with their new fiscal budget. And that team billed as much as they could in a three-day grind.
I grabbed the mic and started my little speech. All I recall is that I said something like, “They put in long hours over the weekend…” And I looked over and saw my fellow executive friends shaking their heads in disappointment. I was flustered for a second…then wrapped up and handed the mic off, wondering what I did wrong.
My exec team pulled me aside into a huddle room afterward and enlightened me. They said:
“We never use the number of hours worked as a point of praise. It sends the message that people need to work more hours to be successful here, and that’s not what we want. Too many hours burns people out, kills our culture, and hurts our business in multiple ways.”
They went on to give me examples that would have been much better. For example, spotlighting the team’s brilliant design idea, how they worked more efficiently, and even the creative accounting our Finance folks did to allow this fiscal folly to make its way safely through our client’s guidelines.
I felt dumb, but also smarter. In the weeks, months, and years ahead, I realized some other key points about the issue of praising hours worked:
People are incredibly perceptive—especially unconsciously—to anything a leader says when giving praise.
There are self-imposed pressures at work, often from what they experienced at their previous, less-enlighted employers. People think long hours demonstrate commitment, loyalty, toughness, and strength. And there’s always a fear that face time is important.
Smarter, more efficient creative work is always of higher quality. Hours are just numbers.
Limiting billable hour expectations and praise helped us attract and retain women, who tend to have higher hourly expectations at home with family responsibilities.
We saw some agencies squeeze their employees, trying to get higher profit by accepting regular 50-60 hour billable weeks. And we successfully recruited those employees to join us.
Sometimes, you have to force people to use their vacation days!
We also got better at talking about this rule against hourly praise. If someone said this at an all-hands meeting, we’d often interrupt and correct them (nicely) in front of the whole company.
Everyone got the message, and it was one of the million ways we built a high-growth, high-profit agency that was also named a national Best Place to Work winner six years in a row.
It’s About Health, Too
This lesson wormed its way out of my brain and onto this page today because I’ve been reminded recently that a negative work environment can harm the health of the people who work with us.
The book Dying for a Paycheck is still spinning in my mind. The author lays out mind-boggling data on the billions of dollars lost due to avoidable workplace stress, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of excess deaths from work in the U.S. alone. It’s not happy reading, but as leaders, we are responsible in part for the health and happiness of those who work for us, so we need to understand the reality of negative impacts that can come from our decisions and those of our employers. The book also suggests several changes we can make at work that can be implemented at no cost, yet significantly boost both employee wellness and company profits.
And in his Substack this week, my friend, Jonathan Richman reminds us that we should stop thinking that sacrificing our health will help us succeed in business. That’s a strategy destined to fail in work—and life.
I was reminded of one of the client service managers who worked for me at my agency. She was an incredible force for our team. Clients loved her, she inspired the creatives, and she always delivered on time and under budget.
Unfortunately, she was also addicted to work. And I saw how it negatively impacted her health. Month after month, she would take on two to three times more projects than her peers—far more than we expected. About once per quarter, she hit the wall and ended up sick at home for multiple days. A more chronic health condition set in eventually, which I’m convinced came in part from this self-imposed strain and stress.
I had many tough conversations with her about dialing things back, and eventually, she got to a better place in both health and work. She left the industry a few years after we no longer worked together. Sometimes, the best people in a job must leave it because they cannot stop themselves from excess.
Unfortunately, we often do and say things that remove humanity from our work. We use words like “FTE” and “Headcount”—usually to make it feel less painful to ourselves when we are kicking those “human resources” to the curb in a RIF.
But the more we hold onto our humanity and retain empathy for the comrades we work with, the higher our chances of building lasting businesses together and enjoying every hour we invest in them.
How we might work together…
My team and I lead Hearty, a boutique recruiting service that helps tech-forward companies hire proven talent. Our senior team of operators sources and screens, saving you time and money. When you need help, let’s chat.
Looking for Influencer Marketing and Content Creation? The team from our previous company is back by popular demand with A2 Influence. We’re ramping up now and would love to share more.
Feel free to schedule time together during my Open Hours for questions, feedback, networking, or any other topic!
BONUS: Cool Content of the Week
A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…
The Crisis of Venture Capital
I can’t say I’m a frequent reader of American Affairs. It’s not something out of the media capital of NYC or the startup ecosystem around SF. Maybe that’s why this piece can present such a strong case for what’s wrong with the Startup+VC world today.
Originally published in Spring 2021 at the peak of the last round of tech hype, it predicted the reset we’re living through now. I wish I read this back then, but it’s not too late to learn.
Love the post. We had this issue in the golf superintendent business. Working 60 - 80 weeks was lauded like a badge of honor by many courses. Never made sense to me