How can I discourage my new hire from working such long hours?

Question

I've recently hired a new mid-level developer (not a junior but not a senior yet) and have been really impressed with their performance. My only complaint about them is that I get work-related emails and messages from them at 7pm and later, indicating that they are still working. We are a fully remote team working a 7-hour day, this person is regularly working 9-10 hours a day. Obviously this is great for productivity but it's not sustainable long term and I don't want them to burn out. Also, if I do need them to work out of hours on system maintenance tasks, I need them to be available. As their manager, I try to keep to only a 7-8 hour day - work/life balance is important!

In the past I've replied to late night messages with a "speak to you tomorrow" or "thanks, we'll pick it up on Monday" as a way to let them know they can leave what they're working on, but they've always said that they don't mind working late as they enjoy it and don't have much else to do.

How can I encourage this team member to work more normal hours? I'm in the UK, managing the dev team for a startup in the scale phase. We don't pay overtime as work/life balance is an important part of the company culture and on the dev team "crunching" is not part of our working practice.

EDIT - to answer some common questions/points from comments:

Yes, I know they're working these hours and not flexing their hours. There are such things as git commit logs and the green "Online" status on Teams.

I personally don't mind being available to answer questions at 9pm. I do a lot of 3rd line devops support and being as available as necessary to keep my team working efficiently and our application running is part of my job description. For a mid-level developer OTOH, their main responsibility is to produce production-quality code that meets our acceptance criteria, for 7 hours a day. I won't ask or expect them to do more than that, this is the UK and people aren't penalised for not working long hours.

Another point I forgot to raise in the question is that if someone is working extra hours, that skews our velocity and other KPIs. If they've been calculated based on the fact that one member of the team is working an extra undocumented 10 hours a week, then one day they decide they're just going to work their contracted hours from now on, that will screw up our forward planning.

Answer 1

Order them to stop doing it

I had exactly the same with my recent hire. Awesome guy. Absolutely smashing it.

I brought it up in our first weekly one-on-one. Didn't stop him. So I started ordering him home at the end of every day:

"Right, it's 5:30. Can you guess what I'm going to tell you?"

"Go home?"

"Yes. Go home. I'll see you tomorrow."

And I also made sure to teach him why regularly working extra actually harms the company in the long run:

Because it makes you less productive. Lots of great research on this. For any kind of creative/thinking-heavy work, you tend to get the same amount of useful work done whether you work 4 hours a day or 12.

Because it takes time away from you. I tell my guy, if you're that motivated to help the company, spend those extra hours teaching yourself useful skills. That'll help us far more in the long run than anything you're doing right now.

Because it's not sustainable. If there's more work than one person can handle then we want to know as early as possible so we can work on hiring more people. If you try to cover up the problem by working overtime, you'll eventually burn out, and then we'll have a much bigger problem, and much less time to solve it.

Because most of the time, things aren’t time sensitive. But on those rare occasions when they are, we need you to be able to go above and beyond. If you’re already depleted from regularly working over when it’s not needed, you won’t be available when it actually is.

And so on and so forth.

Frame it as harming the company. Order him to stop. Make it a disciplinary issue if he still persists. He'll get the message eventually.

Edit:

People in the comments make a good point that you should check if your guy is actually working more hours, or just doing them at different times/more spread out over the day.

Answer 2

You should really ask them why they work that long in a 1-1 meeting.

I, for example, usually work longer in the evening because I want to finish a task. Might not be a sign of perfect mental health, but if I wouldn't finish the task before leaving, I would think about it the whole evening and probably half night. So if I want to have a relaxed evening I need the task to be done. I know this is my problem, and I absolutely don't expect my company to pay for the overtime, but being forced to leave early would stress me more than working unpaid overtime.

Not saying that the same applies to your employee, and it would be really bad if they work overtime because the feel pressured to do so, but the only way to find out is to talk to them privately.

Answer 3

'Fully remote' meaning working from home? Perhaps he's taking a long lunch and making up hours later. Let it go.

Answer 4

Are you certain that this person is actually making 10-hour days, instead of spreading his time?

I myself take extended lunch breaks to take walks around the block, and do some housework (cleaning/laundry) in between my work as well. This means that i only get 5 hours of work in the regular '9-5' day, and i make up the rest in the evenings; so yes, i am also often online and working at 9 or 10 pm, without going over my hours.

I try to not email during those times, but sometimes i do so in order to have it read by the recipient first thing the next day

Answer 5

As a young developer, I did the same thing. I was young and unencumbered, I was working on really interesting cutting-edge stuff, and I wanted to learn and do everything I could to be the best engineer I could be. I was working crazy hours, but I felt it was worth it. Mostly, I enjoyed doing it.

As my career progressed and my life changed, I decided I didn't need to do it anymore. I decided I didn't want to do it anymore. So I stopped, got back to reasonable hours, and did other things with my time. I have no regrets. I truly feel that the hard work I did early in my career has allowed me to work far less in my later career. The quicker you can gain experience and knowledge, the quicker you can use it. That will allow you to advance further and make more money.

In my experience, this is not unusual for developers. I had peers at the time who were doing the same thing. All the various places I've worked, I've seen young developers doing similar things.

Your new hire is going to do what they want to do. Accept the situation. Remind them every once in a while to seek work-life balance, but let them figure out what that is.

Answer 6

Make sure that your notion of what's good for them is actually good for them. I have been put in seriously difficult situations where I freeze up for days at a time because of anxiety of things that aren't done and management above me insists I don't work on it after hours, even on my own time. They say "I need work life balance" but what I really need is to get rid of the thing that causes me anxiety and shuts the rest of my life down.

But do make sure that they understand they always have the option to resume a normal work schedule and they do not need to feel bad when they do it. Now that I run my own business, this is how I operate it, by giving them agency and empowerment and I have very happy employees as a result.

If their actions are actively causing a problem, have them queue up their emails for the morning. Most email clients have the ability to delay sending emails. But don't discourage a happy, productive employee from doing the things that make them happy and productive just because you have an idea of what their work-life balance should be.

Answer 7

Most of the answers deal with the work-life balance and health concerns of your employee directly. But there is also your side of the situation, which shouldn't be ignored.

I don't know what laws are concerned with this in the UK, but In Germany (where I work) there is something called the "Working time act" (Arbeitszeitgesetz), which determines how many hours an employee is allowed to work. This is basically to ensure that nobody overworks themselves and to protect the employer from negative ramifications (negligence, substandard working conditions, etc).

If there is something similar in the UK, tell your employee that your company and yourself (personally) could get into real trouble, if employees don't comply with the law and reduce their working hours to a normal amount. If there ever was an investigation by a proper authority in that area, you are the one who has to take responsibility.

Answer 8

I think you should emphasize the work-life balance culture of your team/company to get across that overworking is not a value for the team or company. You might also try to show that no one else on the team does this and it won't help this person's performance review or career growth with the team, because it's important for team members to behave in a way that models the culture and mission of the company.

During a team meeting, maybe talk with everyone about what they do in their free time, or what they did over the weekend, etc. Maybe this will help this person see that other people have hobbies away from work.

You could also explain that overworking might give the impression that they're struggling a bit, in that it takes them 9-10 hours to do the same amount of work that another employee does in 7-8.

Hope this helps.

Answer 9

Here's the thing about humans: Humans, all humans, work in one common way: You can tell someone to do something, but you can't actually force anyone to do anything unless you can provide a greater disincentive than incentive. Right now, the disincentive to work lots of overtime is zero, and the incentive is, well, you don't know what it is, but presumably the person enjoys it otherwise they wouldn't be doing it, or they have some other kind of ulterior motive (e.g. getting promoted faster, or they think it will give them a better performance review, or what have you). So you have 2 choices: You have to even out the risk/reward, or you have to give up and let them do what they want.

If you choose to even out the risk/reward, you can call them out directly; not in front of others, but privately. By this, I mean something like, have a chat with them and say, in a friendly but direct way:

I know you've been working a lot of overtime, and it's not healthy for you. I want you to understand, clearly and directly, that working 10-hour days is not impressive to me and will not help you rise higher in the company faster or whatever (substitute with your own guess as to why this person might be doing this if you have a better one). I want you to stop working these long hours, immediately, for your own good."

Something like that. Don't create a confrontation, but make sure it is understood and crystal clear that this working lots of overtime is not helping him in the way he thinks it is. That might help resolve the issue. Before doing this, you may want to broach the subject by asking him what his motivations are and address those directly, that might help to guide the discussion, but you want to end the discussion by clearly and directly saying that his reasoning for working overtime is wrong.

If, however, he is just working overtime because he wants to and for no other reason (yes, some people like this exist), then you're going to have to put in a disincentive to work overtime; in the worst case you may have to threaten to fire him for working overtime. And what I will say to this is that it's not likely to turn out well; you may end up losing this developer to a company who will allow him to work his chosen overtime. I would advise against doing this; if the employee wants to work overtime, with full knowledge that it won't actually help him at all in terms of career advancement, compensation, etc, then my advice would be to just let him do so. Your responsibility as a manager ends at the point at which the employee, given knowledge that this is not good for him ("it will cause you to burn out") and knowledge that it won't help him ("it won't get you a bigger bonus, you're not impressing anyone"), chooses to do something like this anyway. At least, until those symptoms of burnout and etc begin to show; then it is your responsibility to do something about it then.

As for what to do in the meantime, let him do what he wants, but don't respond to your work emails or messages after hours. Just don't. By doing so, you are setting a bad example: "You're telling me not to work overtime, why are you working overtime?" The answer, of course, being "I'm the boss, I have different responsibilities than you do and some of them require me to work overtime; do as I say, not as I do", but that's not likely to fly well. So lead by example here: If it's 7pm and he asks you for documentation, just pretend you didn't see the message (you shouldn't even be checking anyway, but if you do see it, pretend you didn't) and respond in the morning, during work hours. If your subordinate gets to a point at which he is working on something but is blocked, he'll likely shut down for the night on his own. By responding to his messages after-hours, you're enabling him. So you should stop that.

Answer 10

Mind your own business

First of all, you have to accept simple truth : you are not manager of this person's life. He is an adult, and could do what ever he pleases, and be responsible for consequences . You are simply his project manager or team leader, and that is about it. Your duty is to monitor his work and make sure it does satisfy his contractual obligations.

What could be a problem for you are his messages and emails during non-business hours, when you do not want to work. And the solution for that is simple: turn off your business computer, or at least turn off your messaging application and email client. You do not have to work at non-working hours if you do not want to do it.