Stop the Insanity!

Free Time Is My Time

"Work is personal." "My colleagues feel like family." "If it ain't fun, I don't want to do it." Those are all legitimate, worthwhile, genuine sentiments. They're what make today's workplace, at its best, feel so different from the workplace of 10 or 15 years ago. But that doesn't mean that work should be expected to take the place of family or that common "bonding" rituals such as ski weekends, Friday-night barbecues, and keg parties should be allowed to steal time from something much more important -- the bond between employees and their families. Even good ideas can be taken to extremes.

"If you have young kids or a spouse -- or even if you just don't ski -- how happy are you going to be about having to participate in this stuff during your off hours?" asks WFD's Fran Rodgers.

In today's frantic, 24-hour dotcom economy, free time is becoming as valuable as stock options. What does that mean for saner startups? "Never presume to know how people want to spend their time," says Slayton at ClickAction. That's why social events at ClickAction are brief, take place during work hours, and always have a specific purpose -- whether it's to celebrate a success or to make a company announcement. When the company landed a Sprint account last year -- "a big, big win for us," says Slayton -- there was no company-wide jaunt to Las Vegas or all-night beer fest. Instead, the CEO called all 150 employees into the conference room at 5 PM for some wine and cheese and a few short speeches. Thirty minutes later, the "party" was over. Hardly exciting, but Slayton believes that is all the company social time anyone really needs or wants. "Success is what bonds people, not beer blasts," he says.

Indeed, some startups are going out of their way to curb organized socializing on the job. Last fall, when Dion and Amy Lim of Simians.com were developing Wantifieds.com, the first company created by their incubator, they began holding daily 30-minute "smoothie breaks." At 4 PM every afternoon, the Lims' seven-person team would get together for a shake, some chitchat, and a video game or two. Then it was back to work. The message was clear: This was a time for goofing off -- the only such time during the day. "At other companies I've worked at, people would play video games at all hours, because they knew they'd be there all the time," Lim says. "I wanted people to be extremely focused on work during the week so that nobody worked on weekends."

Other companies are trying to infuse team-building activities with "deep meaning" -- play with a purpose. For William Rosenzweig, 41, an entrepreneur who has worked at several startups, that translates into off-sites that revolve around volunteerism. Rosenzweig, now CEO of Hambrecht Vineyards and Wineries, a 22-year-old company in Healdsburg, California that is in the midst of a reinvention initiative, recently invited 22 staff members to spend a day planting oak trees along a mile-long thoroughfare that runs through vineyard property in Sonoma County.

Traditionally, vineyard owners have cleared away trees to make harvesting easier, much to the dismay of environmentalists, who argue that the practice has a devastating effect on local ecosystems. By working with a Sonoma environmental group that promotes the tree-restoration practice known as "greening the land," Rosenzweig says the winery is making a powerful statement about the company's values -- to the community at large as well as to the community of Hambrecht employees. "It was incredibly empowering and healing," says Rosenzweig, adding that everyone on his team was equally enthusiastic about the tree-planting experience.

"At other companies that I've been at, people would complain that they didn't have the time when they had to go to off-sites or parties," he says. But no one complained about the tree-planting event. In fact, soon after that day, a bookkeeper at the firm volunteered to organize an Earth Day celebration. "When someone takes initiative like that, you see how an event can really be transformative," says Rosenzweig.

Less Email, More Communication

One reason why people spend so much time at the office is that so little of their time there is spent on actual work. It's not just that they're spending too much time at beer blasts; they're also spending too much time reading, sending, and responding to email. It is yet another example of the double-edged sword of startup life: Who doesn't want to be "in the loop" on critical decisions? How can people make smart decisions if they don't know everything there is to know?

Saner startups are coming up with answers to those admittedly tough questions. "Email can take up your whole day if you let it," warns Next Jump's Kim. "Meetings are the biggest time sink there is," says ClickAction's Slayton, who spent part of his career at McKinsey & Co., the management-consulting firm. Saner startups live by a basic principle: There's a difference between a democratic workplace and a debating society.