PDF Summary:It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried

In today’s “hustle culture,” many workers end up ruining their lives in their attempts to get ahead in their careers. They sacrifice the time and energy they should be spending on their lives outside of work. In It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, Basecamp founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson contend that there’s a better way to work: By establishing more reasonable, sustainable goals and business practices, companies can create a healthy, relaxed work culture that radically improves employees’ lives.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to build an organization employees would be thrilled to work for, without compromising profitability. We’ll detail the three qualifications to look for when scouting for any potential hire and explain why it’s vital to give your employees time to work in private. In our commentary, we’ll provide counterpoints from books such as No Rules Rules and The Cold Start Problem. Additionally, we’ll supplement Fried and Hansson’s productivity-related advice with ideas from books like Deep Work and Indistractable.

(continued)...

To build an organization in which employees have enough private time to get things done, Fried and Hansson offer three tips.

Tip #1: Maintain a Distraction-Free Workspace

Although employees need time by themselves without any distractions to get work done, Fried and Hansson explain that most modern offices give them the opposite: open floor plans in which people take phone calls or make loud conversation where everyone can hear them. Consequently, many employees feel pressured to work during evenings at home, or to come into the office hours early just to have time to get tasks done without distractions. They end up working far more than 40 hours a week and still get less done than they should.

To remedy this, Fried and Hansson recommend running your office like a library—everyone in the public space must be quiet and avoid distracting others. People already know how to behave at the library, so this kind of cultural shift is relatively easy to implement.

Balancing Distraction-Free Time With Collaboration

Although open floor plans are full of distractions, some research backs up the idea that they help foster creativity and collaboration. As Annie Murphy Paul explains in The Extended Mind, the farther away two people work from one another, the less frequently they’ll communicate with one another about their work—a statistical relationship known as the “Allen curve.” In turn, frequent interaction between co-workers leads to more insights and innovative breakthroughs—especially if they have different fields of expertise, yielding unique interdisciplinary insights. Open floor plans in which workers spend all their time right next to each other should (in theory) yield more of these insights.

Furthermore, running your office like a quiet library (as Fried and Hansson suggest) might not be enough to reduce all distractions. Paul argues that a worker seeing people move around them is enough to distract them from their work, even if no one is talking aloud or trying to get their attention.

To ensure that your employees can be productive at work without feeling pressured to put in extra hours, Paul recommends an office plan that gives workers the privacy they need to be productive while fostering collaboration. Give each employee a private workspace, but build the office in such a way that people naturally interact while they’re not working. For instance, have workers enter the building through communal spaces and eat together in shared cafeterias. This can naturally trigger conversations that result in valuable collaboration.

Tip #2: Let Workers Keep Their Schedules Private

Fried and Hansson also suggest protecting your team members’ time by allowing them to keep their schedules private. When a worker’s day-to-day schedule is publicly available, it encourages coworkers to claim that person’s time. For instance, if Miranda sees that Amir’s schedule is empty for the next two hours, she might pop into his office to quickly get his opinion on her ideas for improving the company’s training program. This interruption wrecks Amir’s productivity for the whole afternoon, and Miranda’s training program is only slightly improved by his input.

(Shortform note: By contrast, some experts prefer to post their schedule where everyone at work can see it, noting that it helps them keep themselves accountable and productive. You’re more likely to plan out responsible ways to use your time if you know that peers will be able to judge your schedule. You may be able to benefit from a public schedule as long as you plan blocks of time to work in private and make it clear to your coworkers that you don’t want to be interrupted during this time.)

Instead of leaving your employees vulnerable to interruptions whenever they have free time, Fried and Hansson recommend instructing your most knowledgeable employees to host university-style “office hours”: They should schedule a regular time in which coworkers can consult them and save the rest of their time at work solely for themselves. If a coworker needs an expert’s input, they have to wait for their office hours to roll around.

(Shortform note: Setting office hours is a form of “task batching”: the productivity practice of completing similar small tasks during a predetermined time rather than sporadically throughout the day. This saves you time because it removes the need to frequently switch between different types of tasks and adjust to each new context. You can use task batching to efficiently complete many different kinds of tasks—for instance, set a predetermined time every day or two to check your email rather than answering emails one at a time as they enter your inbox.)

Tip #3: Embrace Asynchronous Communication

According to Fried and Hansson, many organizations hurt their employees’ productivity by creating a culture in which they’re expected to constantly check their messages, stay aware of the discussion going on in real-time chatrooms, and respond as quickly as possible to anyone who mentions them. The threat of missing important information frightens employees into perpetually keeping tabs on all this synchronous communication—at the expense of their personal responsibilities.

To avoid this, the authors recommend relying primarily on asynchronous rather than real-time communication in the workplace. If someone needs to share important information, they shouldn’t just post it in a chatroom and assume that everyone will see it. Instead, they should create a permanent document that relevant team members can consult whenever they want. This way, workers are free to ignore real-time chats and concentrate on their work, trusting that they can seek out necessary information later. That said, if you need to communicate something urgent, real-time chat may be the right tool for the situation.

(Shortform note: In Indistractable, Nir Eyal agrees that real-time chat in the workplace often pressures employees into distracting themselves from substantial work. If you need to use real-time chat (perhaps for urgent matters), consider scheduling an urgent, time-limited chat meeting to resolve the issue quickly, rather than having a prolonged, sporadic ongoing conversation. Additionally, like Fried and Hansson, Eyal suggests using permanent documents to share important information. However, he notes that particularly sensitive topics (such as necessary criticism of someone’s work) should be addressed in person so everyone involved can read the emotional tone and body language behind their coworkers’ words—nuances lost in written communication.)

Another benefit of asynchronous communication is that it facilitates deeper thinking, Fried and Hansson note. When employees share important information and seek collaborative input, they’ll receive more intelligent feedback if other team members have time to think deeply. In contrast, people at most companies present their ideas in real time (for instance, in an in-person meeting) and expect immediate feedback. Consequently, their colleagues’ underdeveloped first impressions compromise their ideas and decisions.

(Shortform note: In Working Backwards, former Amazon executives Colin Bryar and Bill Carr explain how Amazon developed a different way of facilitating deep thinking in communication between employees. Like Fried and Hansson, Bryar and Carr observed that real-time PowerPoint-style presentations prompted underdeveloped immediate feedback from the audience. Their solution was to replace verbal presentations in meetings with refined six-page documents delivering the necessary information. Then, at the beginning of each meeting, all participants would silently read through and take notes on the material at their own pace. This gave the audience enough time to think deeply about the ideas at hand before giving feedback.)

Maintain an Effective Team

We’ll end this guide with a discussion of Fried and Hansson’s perspective that treating your employees as a long-term investment makes your organization a more effective and satisfying place to work. Let’s discuss two of their tips on how to invest in a productive team.

Tip #1: Don’t Hunt for Talented Employees—Create Them

Most companies get skilled employees by identifying the most talented workers in their industry and trying to steal them away from whatever company they’re currently working for. However, transplanting successful employees from other companies can end in disaster if the new recruits struggle to adjust to your organization. Fried and Hansson argue that the more reliable strategy is to hire employees who show promise and help them reach their full potential.

(Shortform note: Some experts argue that training employees rather than poaching them from other companies doesn’t just result in better work. This approach also makes it more difficult for other companies to poach employees from you. Training employees to flourish at work is an act of support, and it leads people to believe that you’ll continue supporting them for as long as they work with you. Such well-supported employees are less likely to leave if other companies try to poach them. You can reinforce this promise of future support by mapping out long-term career paths at your organization.)

Three Effective Hiring Criteria

This mindset of creating rather than hunting for employees means that your hiring process will look different from the industry standard. Fried and Hansson recommend ignoring traditional résumé items such as a prestigious education or impressive past job titles. Instead, ask yourself three questions to determine whether someone has the potential to grow into an exceptional employee.

First, are they likable? For the good of the team, make sure to only hire people that everyone would be excited to work with.

(Shortform note: Gary Vaynerchuk (Crush It!) argues that an employee’s personality can be more important than the work they’re capable of doing. He elaborates that likable employees don’t just make the workplace more enjoyable, they also make it more productive. Antisocial employees force their coworkers to spend time figuring out how to avoid interpersonal conflict instead of getting real work done.)

Second, do they add a unique perspective to the team? Hiring people from a wide range of diverse backgrounds helps the team produce good ideas and better serve a wider range of customers.

(Shortform note: Diversity arguably yields these benefits not only on an organizational level, but also on the level of teams within your organization. In Range, David Epstein asserts that managers can spark more valuable insights by encouraging employees to periodically work with different teams, increasing the range of diverse backgrounds each team has access to.)

Third, what tangible work have they personally done? Fried and Hansson note that the work someone typically lists on their résumé is too vague or exaggerated to illustrate what they’re actually capable of. Use the interview to uncover what specific tasks they executed in past jobs rather than inferring their skill sets based on their previous work experience. This allows you to avoid onboarding workers who appear valuable on paper but end up being a costly mismatch.

For example, imagine you hire a former software engineer from a prestigious company to be a manager at your new tech startup. Unfortunately, the leadership responsibilities and disorganized startup environment are too overwhelming for them, and they end up resigning after six weeks. If you had instead hired someone who’d managed a scrappy team before, they likely would’ve succeeded as a manager for your startup.

(Shortform note: In Rework, Fried and Hansson elaborate on what they look for during the hiring process. They note that cover letters are often more reliable indicators of how well a candidate will fit than résumé credentials—a well-written cover letter demonstrates that the candidate is a good communicator (an invaluable skill) and reveals how passionate the candidate is about your specific organization. Judging a cover letter may be effective for the same reason as judging tasks applicants have done at past jobs: The cover letter itself is work they’ve produced entirely on their own and serves as firsthand evidence of their skills.)

Tip #2: Supply Generous Benefits

Finally, Fried and Hansson recommend supplying your team with enough generous benefits to make them want to stay at your company for the long haul. Retaining your current employees by offering them benefits is more effective than replacing them for a couple of reasons. First, high employee turnover is expensive for your company. Second, every time you hire someone new, your team has to divert time and attention away from serving your customers to conduct interviews and get the new employees up to speed (a long, arduous process).

(Shortform note: Some business experts argue that the high cost of employee turnover is a worthwhile expense. In No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings reveals that Netflix encourages its managers to fire any employee they wouldn’t actively fight to keep. Their rationale is that if everyone in the company is an elite-level performer, it motivates the entire organization to maintain high standards. Netflix seeks to soften the blow of frequent firings by providing generous severance packages.)

Many companies entice employees with benefits that seem generous but that incentivize them to spend too much time at work instead of cultivating work-life balance. For example, they deck out the office with ping-pong tables or on-campus workout facilities that are free for employees to use but encourage them to stay at the workplace instead of going home.

In contrast, Fried and Hansson recommend offering employees generous benefits that genuinely support employees—especially their lives outside of work. For instance, the authors pay for their employees to take three weeks of vacation every year and even cover the costs of travel and accommodation for their workers.

Counterpoint: Excessive Employee Benefits Are Demotivating

In contrast to Fried and Hansson, Daniel H. Pink argues in Drive that excessive employee benefits of any kind will demotivate workers.

Pink asserts that any sources of external motivation (like employee benefits) reduce employees’ subjective sense of autonomy by making them feel like the work is something they have to do to get more rewards. This makes the job itself less appealing and consequently demotivates workers. Instead, Pink recommends fostering your employees’ internal motivation by giving them more autonomy at work—for instance, by letting them work on projects of their own devising for 20% of their time at work.

However, this doesn’t mean that businesses should scrap all employee benefits. Pink explains that workers need a certain baseline of external incentives to feel motivated; otherwise, they’ll be demoralized by how unfair their situation is. For instance, employees in many industries expect a certain amount of paid vacation. They may not expect you to cover the costs of their trip as Fried and Hansson do, but if you demand that they never take time off, they’ll feel cheated and won’t build a sense of intrinsic motivation.