No matter how flexible a work environment is, some people will always try to test the limits and see how far they can take it.
So what happens when a startup with flexible hours hires someone who starts disappearing early without making up the time? Should they just ignore it as long as his work is done? Or should the company lay down the law?
In the following story, one manager deals with this very situation and opts for the latter. Here’s how it played out.
It was about 10+ years ago, and we were working at a software technology startup. It was a small company with only around 10 employees, and I led the software engineering team of around 4 employees.
We hired a software engineer, and he seemed good, but there were a few red flags. We would go out to lunch, and he would always order at least a few beers. We didn’t have any explicit rules against drinking alcohol during lunch, so I just let it slide since it didn’t seem to affect his work in the afternoon.
And then the guy started disappearing early in the afternoon. Hours were somewhat flexible, but most people would get into the office at around 9 am or so and leave at around 5 pm or so. For a standard 40-hour work week (taking time off for lunch), it seemed relatively normal for most people, and we had never had a problem with work hours in the past.
They weren’t strict with hours, but it seemed he was taking advantage.
But this guy would usually disappear at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon and was coming in at around 9 or 10 am.
I’m actually not really a stickler when it comes to enforcement of work hours, and I believe that as long as you get your work done, you should be ok, but as a startup, there was always stuff to do, and there was always a backlog of things to develop, etc.
As a small team, we didn’t have much redundancy, so guys would have questions for each other throughout the day, etc. It really stood out as well because since there were only 10 people in the company, the office space was pretty small, and his absence was noticed by the CEO, other employees, etc.
Here’s where he confronted the guy.
I asked him about his frequent early departures, and he just said that he had personal things to take care of sometimes, like doctor appointments, dentist appointments, DMV to do something, etc…just random errands.
I told him that it’s all good, and while we aren’t tracking time by the minute or anything like that, we generally expect people to work roughly 40 hours/week, and hopefully, that’s not too unreasonable.
I suggested that maybe if he has an appoint so needs to leave say 1 hour early, he can also choose to come in an hour earlier on that day or he can choose to work a little later (like an extra hour) on another day to roughly make it up.
The guy took the message literally.
He made some comments about how he’s never worked at a company so strict before when it comes to work hours and that all of the other places where he worked never had an issue, etc.
Sure enough, the next day, when I came into the office, I was told that when the office manager came to unlock and open the office.
He said that the guy had been waiting at the front door since 4 am sitting there in the staircase because he was told that he needs to come in early if he’s going to leave early and since he was planning to leave at lunch he came in 5 hours early…
He gave notice shortly after that, saying how unreasonable and strict we are…and he was gone a few weeks later.
Yikes! That’s a hard personality to work with.
Let’s check out what the fine folks over at Reddit have to say about this guy.
He turned it right around on them.
This person thinks he was just inconsiderate.
Here’s some great advice.
Here’s someone who thinks the guy is lying about having other flexible jobs.
Everyone was probably happy to see him go. Not only was he a drain on payroll, but he probably prevented projects from getting completed too quickly.
If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.
