How I prevent burnout at Forthright
Written by katie test davis
I really like being a company founder and CEO. But my CEO position isn’t the most important thing about me. Instead, my most important roles are friend, daughter, wife, volunteer, potter and neighbor.
I love what I do all day for work – but the person I am outside of work is much more important to me. And that’s exactly the way it should be.
In fact, the time I spend outside of work caring for myself, my communities and my family makes me a BETTER CEO and a more effective communicator.
So when I started Forthright five years ago, I made a commitment to myself that my roles outside of work would be honored as important, if not more important, than my roles AT work. That’s what sparked our policy of charging more for work we perform outside of our business hours.
As our clients know, when we’re billing hourly on a project, we charge more for work requested to be performed outside of our business hours (8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. EST). We’re upfront and transparent about it from the beginning of the relationship.
I recently shared more insights about what it took to create the policy and how it’s evolved with Buffer. You can read my post here:
As I wrote in my 2020 blog post announcing the policy, Why We Charge More for Work We Perform Outside of Business Hours, “I know that our teammates serve our clients best when they are well-rested and recharged for work… Asking them to work a full day and then add on more hours on top of that – without monetarily acknowledging what we’re asking of them and compensating them for that – feels, frankly, wrong.
Even in non-pandemic times, I know that our brains benefit from time off, sleep and that our productivity and creative ideas stem from our hobbies and unfocused time. This is even more important for our BIPOC teammates, who bear an additional burden from internalized trauma due to racism. So when client work regularly cuts into that critical time away from work — everyone, including the client, eventually suffers.”
We’ve grown so much as a team, as a company, since I first introduced the policy four years ago. Yet our core value of People First has always remained at the center of who we are and how we show up in the world.
As we head into the next five years, and we look to an uncertain future in many ways, I’m very sure of one thing. We’ll continue upholding policies that support our amazing team.
That starts with ensuring we protect our health and happiness, and the roles we play outside of work.
