legal, ipoHere is a scenario that I am living for the third time in that many years:
A startup is doing well (or claims to do so), and wants to go for IPO. This desire implies many changes in behaviours, practices, etc. One that often shows up is the management of overtime work. Employees suddenly have to badge in/out of work, and formally apply for overtime.
Is that really necessary? This question surely depends on the legal system, so the answer should focus on the US, but bonus points for other countries.
This question stems from the irony behind such a requirement. A startup that succeeds in an IPO is very likely to have its employees work more. Why spending time on filing in forms and book-keeping everyone’s work, when most would surely use time in a more productive way.
One of the (many) informations that public investors are looking for when deciding whether investing or not is sustainability.
Sustainability comes in different ways. Cost control, growth strategy, hiring plans, to name a few. Understanding the ‘health’ status of a ‘workforce’ is as important as the points aforementioned. Now, we can argue that measuring each person workload, or the average, or the median, are not sensible metrics to infer that the workforce is healthy or not, but is for sure the easiest measurement to put in place.
My suggestion is to keep track of the over time, but define a better strategy to answer the question ‘is the workload sustainable?’.
Introduce some quarter questionnaire, ask your mid-level management to report a monthly ‘team health status’. Slowly replace those new gather informations when communicating with investors. Adding deeper meaning to a bare number should be what you are aiming for. If the average employee is working 2h+ a day but the quarterly survey returns a ‘morale never been so high’ is a completely different story than having average overtime 30m/employee/day with ‘morale never been so low’.
Few questions that you want to include in the questionnaire:
etc ..
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