this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
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Every year, we do an employee survey to see how management is doing; like a report card for management. In the last 3 years, mine has come back with the highest company scores for employee engagement, job satisfaction, and project completion rate. I was asked to give a presentation to the other officers and managers about things I do to get those scores.
The presentation was basically one slide that I expanded to 10. It came down to creating the expectation, for the folks who report to me, that a work week is 37.5 hours (our full-time week) and no more. I make it clear that if my team is working overtime, I've failed. If that happens, together we look at their project commitments and reduce the workload, or get training, or whatever is needed.
Working folks to the point of burnout is NEVER a valid solution. Respecting personal time pays dividends to everyone. It's amazing how treating people like adults makes them happier and more productive. It's such a low bar and yet seems so foreign to people.
After my presentation, multiple execs argued thar I'd get more done if I pushed my team harder. Our company President pulled up all of our project completion rates, and asked them to explain the discrepancy. The three who complained the most about my approach were in the bottom five.
Data continually shows people are happy when they have a solid, predictable, work life balance. Happy people are more productive and are willing to do more in the long run. And they stick around, so you don't have to keep looking for new employees. Everyone wins. Yet, there is such a resistance to it by certain people, and I don't understand why.
Tldr: Expecting your people to give up their personal life for work, it's a clear sign that you are a terrible leader.
Bingo!
This was my attitude too. If anyone has to work late or weekends, it was a failure in resource allocation, which is a management function.
The only exception was if people had to get on late night calls with people in other timezones, in which case they were expected to take the equivalent time off at their own convenience.
Another easy win is bullshit agile daily standups. I made them twice a week, and no longer than 15 minutes and only to cover potential blockers, not status reports. That alone made everyone happier. In one case, the team finished a project that had been languishing for three years in three months and shipped it out.
It's really about respecting people's time.
My last boss totally fucked up my daily stand-ups. I suggested them because, when I started, I found most work wasn't consistently tracked or even discussed. My boss's management style was panicking about everything and panic working while raging that no one else was also panicking about everything (spoiler: I also learned department turnover was high, can't imagine why), so I was trying to help implement any organization whatsoever. She quickly turned my 10 minute stand-ups into 1-1.5 hour slogs where each team member had to give an update on each of their projects, despite having earlier logged it all into the project tracker I created.
By far the worst micromanager and least competent person I ever worked for.
My coworkers and I were having issues getting any information from another team to do our job. Since we had a set deadline to finish the work, I set up a Monday/Wednesday meeting schedule to extract the information we needed from that team. My boss and the other team's boss turned it into a two hour update-fest with us and the other team updating our respective bosses, with both teams in the meeting. So fucking pointless, and so far away from what that meeting was supposed to be, it is truly astonishing we were able to get anything done.
Oh and the other team stopped providing the information we needed to finish when our bosses converted our meeting to update-fest.