Joel Spolsky on lessons learned from the Army applied to Corporate Culture:
After several years of working days, nights, and weekends to build a company, after scrimping and saving and making a desk out of a door and two filing cabinets, business owners often forget that the employees they hired are not co-founders: They’re employees. When you give them a door for a desk or ask them to work on weekends, they’re not going to see it in the same way as you.
This is so obvious when you think about it but it bears repeating. Employees have contracts and they are entitled to keep to them. They’re usually reasonable and won’t mind being called at 6 am for an emergency but they should reasonably expect to be allowed to leave early as a result. This is the difference between employee and founder for sure.
The difference, however, is when you have an employee who wants a slice of the pie. They have to put in the effort that a founder put in. This means going above and beyond the salaried employee. It means working more than the contract, coming in early, leaving late and showing results from it. I busted my balls getting the company running, you can at least make the same effort if you want a percentage of the pie.
As a founder you’re going to have to have a way of measuring this performance because it has to be more than just turning up early and leaving late – especially when there’s people idle during the day because you’re in a support function and everything is working fine. It’s not about how early your bum goes on the seat but the output between those hours.
Does an employee deserve rewards because sales increased by 25%? I don’t think so, that’s them just doing their job and justifying their paycheck. Increasing by 200% and requiring additional staff makes a difference. I’ve had previous employees that worked 3 hours out of 7, pissed about on MSN for the rest, griped if their music wasn’t playing through the Airport Express, took extensive smoke breaks and turned what was previously a 2 day job into a full week of work with no return. This sense of entitlement is why they never went anywhere in the company. Anywhere other than out.
Some people will never be ready for founder culture however. I think that they’ll know who they are. They’ll always expect more (pay, time off, free stuff, dancing girls) and you’ll never be able to make them wholly happy.