The CEO recently informed employees that further blurring the line between work and life is the recipe for success and is pushing for staff to put in more overtime, according to an email Shah wrote to his employees, which was obtained by Business Insider last week.
“Working long hours, being responsive, blending work and life, is not anything to shy away from,” he wrote in the email. “There is not a lot of history of laziness being rewarded with success. Hard work is an essential ingredient in any recipe for success.”
Shah informed staff that this is a change that will be pushed for in the “weeks and months to come,” citing that the most successful people he knows follow this work culture.
“Everyone deserves to have a great personal life – everyone manages that in their own way – ambitious people find ways to blend and balance the two. I think that is what we all should do,” he wrote.
He is also encouraging staff to be “aggressive, pragmatic, frugal, agile, customer oriented, and smart” and to be more careful with spending company money going forward.
“I would also encourage you to think of any company money you spend as your own. Would you spend money on that, would you spend that much money for that thing, does that price seem reasonable, and lastly – have you negotiated the price? Everything is negotiable and so if you haven’t then you should start there,” he wrote.
“Pay your employees overtime for off-schedule work, and allow for flexible scheduling so they can slide their normal working hours around to match real life,” I said in reply.
I don’t mind putting in the hard work and I do believe there’s room for some amount of fuzziness between work and life. But I only get one life; I can choose another employer. If my employer runs me too hard, I’ll just find another. My employer isn’t going to take time away from my family, friends, or personal pursuits without compensating me. And there are some things I absolutely won’t miss. Datacenter is melting down during my kid’s play? You should have thought about that when you refused to hire additional support.
Saying I should be happy to put in extra work without expecting to be paid is like saying my employer should be happy to put in extra pay without expecting me to show up.
Even when I got paid overtime to work holiday hours during open enrollment it was not really worth the money. I’d come in at 6:00 am and work until 8 or 9 pm. I made really good money, but I had no life at all, and I could barely feed myself once I got home and crawl into bed to do it all again the next day. Money isn’t the only motivator, and people aren’t robots - we have a need for a break from the insanity now and then.