It Doesn't Have to be Crazy at Work

by Jason Fried

If you, as the boss, want employees to take vacations, you have to take a vacation.

you want them to stay home when they’re sick, you can’t come into ...

you don’t want them to feel guilty for taking their kids to Legoland on the weekend, post some pictures...

Ever been in a relationship where you’re endlessly annoyed by every little thing the other person does?

Here’s what’s going on: The trust battery is dead.

“Another concept we talk a lot about is something called a ‘trust battery.’ It’s charged at 50 percent when people are first hired. And then every time you work with someone at the company, the trust battery between the two of you is either charged or discharged, based on things like whether you deliver on what you promise.”

The adoption of this term at Basecamp helped us assess work relationships with greater clarity.

By measuring the charge on the trust battery, we have context to frame the conflict.

If you want to recharge the battery, you have to do different things in the future.

The work of recharging relationships is mostly one to one.

A low trust battery is at the core of many personal disputes at work.

When the boss says “My door is always open,” it’s a cop-out, not an invitation. One that puts the onus of speaking up entirely on the employees.

Why on earth would they risk their career on an empty promise of an open door?

If the boss really wants to know what’s going on, the answer is embarrassingly obvious: They have to ask!

“What’s something nobody dares to talk about?” or “Are you afraid of anything at work?” or “Is there anything you worked on recently that you wish you could do over?” Or even more specific ones like “What do you think we could have done differently to help Jane succeed?” or “What advice would you give before we start on the big website redesign project?”

The fact is that the higher you go in an organization, the less you’ll know what it’s really like. It might seem perverse, but the CEO is usually the last to know. With great power comes great ignorance.

So at Basecamp we try to get out and ask rather than just wait at the door.

There’s no such thing as a casual suggestion when it comes from the owner of the business.

When the person who signs the paychecks mentions this or that, this or that invariably becomes a top priority.

So something as minor as “Are we doing enough on Instagram?” can shoot Instagram to the top of ...

An owner unknowingly scattering people’s attention is a common cause of the question “Why’s everyone working so much but nothing’s getting done?”

Low-Hanging Fruit Can Still Be Out of Reach

“We’ve never followed up with customers who cancel to better understand why they left, so I’m certain there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit to be had if we do those interviews.”

The problem, as we’ve learned over time, is that the further away you are from the fruit, the lower it looks.

Once you get up close, you see it’s quite a bit higher than you thought.

any estimate of how much work it’ll take to do something you’ve never tried before is likely to be off by degrees of magnitude.

The worst is when you load up these expectations on new hires and assume they’ll meet them all quickly. You’re basically setting them up to fail.

The same thing happened when we decided to start sending a few more follow-up emails after someone signs up for Basecamp to increase conversions of trial users into paying customers.

Previously, we had been sending users a single email when they signed up and nothing much after that. So we imagined that sending more emails over time would quickly move the conversion numbers north. It didn’t. What looked like low-hanging fruit was neither ripe nor within reach.

The idea that you’ll instantly move needles because you’ve never tried to move them until...

Most conversion work, most business-development work, most sales work is a grind —a lot of effort for a little movement.

So the next time you ask an employee to go pick some low-hanging fruit —stop yourself.

Respect the work that you’ve never done before.

Don’t Cheat Sleep

The people who brag about trading sleep for endless slogs and midnight marathons are usually the ones who can’t point to actual accomplishments.

Continued sleep deprivation batters your IQ and saps your creativity.

Nearly everything can wait until morning.

At most companies, work-life balance is a sham.

The typical corporate give-and-take is that life gives and work takes.

If it’s easier for work to claim a Sunday than for life to borrow a Thursday, there ain’t no balance.

And it’s also why if you decide you want to take a Wednesday to hang with your kids, that’s cool, too. You don’t have to “make up” the day—just be responsible with your time and make sure your team knows when you won’t be around.

If work can claim hours after 5:00 p.m., then life should be able to claim hours before 5:00 p.m. Balance, remember. Give and take.

Hire the Work, Not the Résumé

Few things in business are as stressful as realizing you hired the wrong person.

Whenever someone joins (or leaves) a team, the old team is gone. It’s a new team now.

What we care about is who you are and what you can do.

Someone the rest of the team wants to work with, not just someone they’d tolerate.

We look for candidates who are interesting and different from the people we already have. We don’t need 50 twentysomething clones in hoodies with all of the same cultural references.

since a lot of the work people do at their previous jobs is proprietary, hard to pin down, with a team of people, or ambiguous at best, at Basecamp we put a real project in front of the candidates so that they can show us what they can do.

when we’re choosing a new designer, we hire each of the finalists for a week, pay them $1,500 for that time, and ask them to do a sample project for us.