At AMD, exempt employees were expected to meet all of their deadlines. As long as that got done, you were exempt from the rules.

Best Buy or any other institutionalized company isn't going to be the best role model to follow in running a startup.

Once you are compensated with stock options, you are driving how much you and the company make, you are an owner, so act like one. No, the company won't live or die, because of your personal work habit. But, everyone follows everyone's example. The group is small. Everybody knows. Own it, lead it.

The best way to keep a project manager off your back is to demonstrate that you deliver on-time, every time. A project manager isn't going to clock you in or out.

I've read that the guy that runs the MySQL company doesn't hire young, unmarried people, because they focus on work. Working long hours can become the cultural norm without an effort to push back against that.

Mixing exempts and hourly employees in the same physical space confuses expectations. Mixing different functional units can do the same thing. Customer service is day in and day out job. Development, Documentation and QA deal with heavily asymetrical workloads when they try to do it all after the code freeze.

Mixing people who can and who can't work those hours causes problems. Know what you want up front. Sort them out. Move them around.

Comments about someone being AWOL have agendas larger than just being AWOL.

I go AWOL when I go to the bookstore to find some technical answer, or when I am upset about work. I'm always working anyway. If I were a consultant, I'd bill for everything except the two hours on both sides of being asleep, lunch, and tango time. I work 60+ hours a week, so what is AWOL when you work that much?

That's OK. If they want work-life balance, an entreprenurial situation is the wrong place to look for it. If they ran their own business, they wouldn't get work-life balance either. So they shouldn't apply at startups. They should work in institutionalized companies. Once you are paid in stock options with real consequences to your normal salary, then you are an OWNER, so act like one. This is your business buddy. If you don't want to be an OWNER, leave. No loss.

If there are no real consequences to your salary, as in you didn't tradeoff stock for salary, or maybe you are too far away from the decisions in a vast institutionalized company that uses your stock options to hide executive largess, then ok, you're an employee, and then you can act like one, provided you are not exempt.

The upside of startups is not free. The last quarter of million required you to do what? Be an employee, do the 8-5 job? You are kidding right? And, that insitutionalized 8-5 job is no more a gurantee of work-life balance than working in a startup. If you want work-life balance, learn to sell, sell what you need to life the way you want to live, and skip the being in your seat at 8 am thing. Sell, so you are in control of your schedule.

Why should I give stock options to people who will not take on the responsibilities of ownership, who won't own problems, and who think that they should punch a clock. Exempt means something even in institutional companies. You either get the work done, or you should be hourly.

So, yes, don't think you can run a nice company and then issue stock options later to become entreprenurial. This is how the situation arose in the first place, setting the wrong expectations initially. Or, its just a going public as exit exercise, which is not a good thing either, if it isn't your exit.

If you want work-life balance, the project managers have to set realistic deadlines that allow such a thing. If they don't, the work still has to get done, and it reinforces the lack of realistic deadlines. I've yet to meet such project managers. And, in non-project, operations situtations, particularly in IT, you are on call regardless, and you ARE called unless your company institutes the dreaded ITIL process improvement, then maybe you'll have work-life balance.

Work-lige balance is to be achieved during the layoffs while you are on unemplyment, because the entire industry you spent your life in isn't hiring. You have all the work-life balance you want. You'll choke on it. Or, maybe you'll find it in that non-compete you signed.

I'm not sure if this works well for many smaller organizations. It's very difficult to set boundaries and there are few roles that don't require customer or co-worker communication during the day. Not to mention the phone and network systems can be a challenge. We're in a "hurry up and get the answer now" society. Makes it hard to wait until 11 pm to answer an important e-mail - you may have missed the deal by then.

That said, we realize people are going to spend an hour or so each day doing something personal, which seems reasonable.

Back before the "internet" and email became the main modes of business communication I worked for a high tech company. Very little company time was spent on "non work" tasks by anyone. We even talked business on our lunch hours because we really enjoyed what we did. I didn't seem to find it a problem at all doing a personal errand on my lunch hour or asking for the occasional half day off. I didn't need a total "flex" schedule to be happy and none of my co-workers needed this either. Of course we also managed to get our jobs done within the 40-45 hour work week and rarely had to work late unless there was some emergency.

Today, according to recent surveys, employees seem to be saying they are unhappy with their work more than ever. Maybe it's not all the fault of the employers - but a shift in society that needs to be addressed.

If you sell to an international market perhaps it makes more sense to have totally flexible schedules. If you sell primarily to the US and Canada market, customers seem to expect you to be available during "regular" business hours for nearly all questions. At least in our experience.

Kelly,

Who in a software startup selling packaged software has customer contact? Certainly, not developers. A smaller software company has fewer of everybody, and still the developers don't talk to customers. Everybody works the eighty or more hours a week. No manager makes them do it. Peer pressure does.

Or everybody works eight to five, and still peer pressure is the enforcer.

Attendance or policy compliance is not the job. The job is getting things done. This too is a peer expectation.

In twenty plus years on my jobs in software and IT organizations, I've never seen a customer--not a single one. When I pulled my last batch of all-nighters, and I emailed a question to the programming lead. I was surprised, because he answered in less than three minutes. Nobody made us do that. We did that because of our expectations of ourselves. Never missing a ship date was a point of pride.

I like my work, when I can do my work. I don't like my work when I'm directed, particularly directed as to process. Those processes are mine. The direction doesn't make me more productive.

The problem is that as we moved into the knowledge worker age management didn't change. They still think that eight hours in a chair equates to eight hours of production. It doesn't. They sitll think that the other eight hours, our non-sleeping, off premise time doesn't equate to production either, and there too they are are wrong. A flash of insight, the answer, the understanding, the value creation knows no clock. The clock, the work day, the work week, the holidays, the timecard, the payday, and the overbearing manager are imposed on a continuous process. Even the myth of customer contact is managerially imposed.

If you are hiring knowledge workers who can't get the work done, no amount of managerial imposition is going to work. Fire. And, learn how to hire better. Or, hire someone to hire for you.

Today, nobody hires exempts that didn't graduate from college. But, then, they turn around and expect them to be brain dead. When they fight back, they just end up being next in line for the layoff. Congrats.

Yes, I thought the question was "What do you think?" not "Is it the only way to go or the right way to go?" There are pros and cons to almost any type of management.

Our software business speaks directly on the phone and via e-mail to our customers and prospective customers all day long - it's how we sell our product direct to businesses, government organizations and educational institutions - the vast majority who work within an 8 am - 6 pm time frame.

Our staff (and they may be unique) seem to enjoy "regular" hours as they can plan their lives I guess in a more predictable way. I suppose some could work at home but when we've asked most they say they feel they would be bored at home alone. I know I would be as well. Maybe we're old fashioned!

Bottom line is that we always ask what's important to employees before hiring and aside from a slightly more flexible start time to their day, so far they don't seem interested in working at home alone.

It's been 15 years for us -who knows what might happen in another few years...

I do agree that the work at home method can work great for many types of jobs and it sounds like in Lisa's case it is perfect.

Thinking about it in more depth...If we all worked at home the commercial real estate market would really change. A big reduction in office space requirements would mean more empty buildings (or conversions to condos at least).

Not to mention things like commercial insurance and other industries taking an impact. Just an off the cuff example, if you office at home and another employee comes over for a business meeting and the other employee happens to injure themselves in your home office is it your insurance that covers it or the business insurance? Most homeowner's policies currently may not cover it. Are their "telecommuting" insurance policies? What kind of desk and chair are you sitting on during work and is the employer responsible for back and wrist strains so commonly seen in workers comp claims if they don't have control over your office set up?

I wonder though about some of the other challenges - like how do you share resources such as books, higher end equipment and such? Does everyone have to have their own? Even the old hardware fax machine is still relied on by so many offices due to requirements like signatures or difficulty scanning certain docs- not to mention does everyone have their own scanner?

If you don't have office space how do you train a new group? Online training doesn't give you the physical presence required to know that someone is truly "getting it."

So, the ability to work at home, especially for the small organization seems to hinge on many factors moving forward. Legal liability issues are certain to arise and need resolution and technology and practicality issues are also to be resolved.

It will be interesting to see how it all pans out.

Are you paying for cable modems or DSL? Beyond that is a VPN, which requires a more expensive connection. Then, comes the security token, but I don't remember the vendor's name.

One former employer went so far as having a ground station built.