From the Entrepreneur’s Corner (22): Healthy Work Environments — A (Tech) Startup Perspective
Working in a toxic environment is highly distressing and makes you feel powerless. Toxicity may come from many sources, like from the top (heads,) investors, the ground floor (including those always stopping by your desk for a silly joke,) inappropriate open spaces/cubicles, noisy environment, poor light, ego wars, the pressure of deadlines, lack of strategy, sloppy management, many hours spent in traffic… put on the list whatever bothers you to the core.
Agile and its framework Scrum, Lean, Kanban… + Zoom, Monday, Slack, whatever… + meeting after meeting, day after day… product development has priority, some say. You take a break, thinking to recharge your batteries and focus on making the next project a slam dunk. It’s not working either, toxicity is still there. You start questioning your value and sanity. But you’re ok, rest assured.
The founders should be constantly improving the business (not only the product,) so that your team creates a product in an environment that does not suck! (David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founder of Basecamp, has some great insights on this — there’s a recent podcast on Product Hunt.)
Founders should keep control of their company (if they can do it)… I love VC, but there’s a toxic culture in their ecosystem as well (“We have to dominate,” “We’re killing it,” or ”We’re crushing it” kind of thing.) I don’t really like that, and there’s so much language and framing dictating your action when they jump in. Fortunately, bootstrapping can coexist with other sources of financing.
Viewing the world from 0 to 1 (Peter Thiel’s) is depressing. Do you want to live in a society where some huge monopolistic tech companies dominate? … sort of rhetoric, as it’s already here, highly toxic, and for sure you’re browsing on a daily basis. Personally, I don’t need Facebook and the like, I don’t want Zuckerberg’s spying tools and his global “highness,” which contributed even to fights, strikes, famine and destruction, in my life. Small is also great and healthy. I don’t feel bad for not living the unicorn dream. Morality and ethics are still core principles for me. And I enjoy being at home at reasonable hours and enough.
Working 80+ hrs per week is not worth it. I would rather have failed or succeeded modestly, and instead having built relationships face2face…
“All hands on deck” is so outdated nowadays, in a way it (almost) offends me; and definitely is not good for business (remember Henry Ford’s experiment on productivity.) “I didn’t see you at the office on Saturday”… what a BS! Do you think this will help building intricate software? For ex., a 4 days/week workload yields, as experiments confirm, a better productivity.
And then we/you have deadlines, with the project scope always expanding. Estimate the time you need realistically, and if it’s not done, it’s more a moral failure. David suggests starting from the budgets: work on the features, let people set the scope, define the problems, and if the team can work in a reasonable time and at 40hrs/week or so (even less,) you’re really great; or abort and start fresh, something new. This means trusting the people.
So, dear founders, be extremely cautious when you put stuff in people’s calendars. Let people do their work! Do not slice their days/weeks with useless meetings, making them miserable. Don’t get me wrong, meetings are a need. Having a small team to deliberate on the very important stuff is preferable, while the long, straight weeks of meetings after meetings should be history (or never happen.)
There’s also this misconception: some people are born superstars (thinking at managers, directors, developers, etc.); passion and training can craft stars. And then the CEO puts them at work. If they work in a supper crappy environment, you can imagine the result. People smell the shitty, toxic workplaces, and they leave; be them superstars or not.
Don’t forget: the world is full of amazing people, all over the globe! Go for them, don’t stay lazy and let the HR lady (no offense, Ma’am) play with the copy paste wording in the job announcements, followed by a biased selection.
Finally, get plenty of sleep and clean air, do sports, use Google’s Paper Phone (especially on weekends)… and you’ll be surprised.
My today’s preferred: Elliot.store — lets you instantly launch an online storefront to sell and ship products to over 130 countries (promoted by Product Hunt;) no code required.
