What Your Working Hours Signal To Your Team

Dev Leader Weekly 139

May 11, 2026

TL; DR:

Your start time isn’t the signal you think it is
People will model whatever hours you actually keep
Overcommunicate the expectation -- silence sets it for you
Skipping the live stream one more week here... But I’ll be back!

What Your Working Hours Signal To Your Team

Someone over on the experienced devs subreddit asked a question that I think a lot of people quietly worry about: when managers or senior people see you coming in late and staying late, or coming in early and leaving early, what do they actually take from that? Is your start time saying something about your work ethic? And honestly -- I don’t think it’s saying what you think it’s saying. But there’s a different signal you’re sending (or that your manager is sending to you) that does matter, and most people miss it entirely.

You can check out my full thoughts on this in the video below:

What I Actually Care About As A Manager

I’ll just lead with this and get it out of the way: I genuinely don’t care what time you start or what time you finish. I care that you’re putting in honest effort, that you’re engaged in the work, that you’re asking for help when you need it, and that the output of you in your role is something we can work on together to optimize. That’s it. The clock-in/clock-out timestamps are not the thing.

The one thing I care about that is time-related is overlap. If you’re on a team of eight and seven of them have a sync at a certain hour, can you find a way to make that work? Maybe you literally can. Maybe you can’t and you partner with someone to represent you. Maybe you lean on async tools to catch the parts you missed. The answer almost always exists -- you just have to be an adult about it and figure it out with your team.

I’ve worked with people who needed to shift their schedule because they were taking a class, or visiting family on a different coast, or their parents were in town for two weeks. The answer is always the same from me: how can I help make this work? Because I want flexibility for my team. I think you get more out of people when they have flexibility, and I think they’re more engaged. The opposite -- being rigid about time -- creates resentment, fear, or quiet quitting. Pick your poison. None of those are good outcomes.

So if you’re sitting there worried that your manager is going to judge you because you walk in at 10:30 instead of 9:00, I would tell you: most decent managers don’t care, and the ones who do are usually using time as a proxy for something else they should just be measuring directly (which is its own conversation -- I went into that more in Measuring Manager Effectiveness on a recent issue).

Where The Perception Actually Comes From

Here’s where it gets more interesting, and where I think most people miss the real signal.

The perception around working hours doesn’t usually come from someone’s start time. It comes from the people they look up to. If your senior engineer is online at 10pm, or your manager is firing off Slack messages at 6am, you start to build a quiet model in your head: this is what success looks like here. Maybe nobody ever said it out loud. Maybe the manager would tell you with full sincerity that they don’t expect you to be online at 10pm. Doesn’t matter. The behavior is the message. People emulate what they see, especially from people they respect.

So you start asking yourself questions. They’re getting an extra two hours a day. They’re more senior. They’re probably smarter than me. How am I supposed to keep up? And whether or not that calculation is conscious, it shapes how you work, how you feel about your work, and how long you stick around before you burn out.

This is one of the most common patterns I see in newer leaders too -- they don’t realize the modeling effect their own habits have on the team. I wrote about this in Top Mistakes of New Managers and Leads and again in I Wish I Knew THESE Before Becoming A Manager. The same theme keeps showing up: the things you do without thinking about them become the rules your team thinks they have to follow.

My Own Trap (And What I Got Told)

I’ll be honest -- I’ve been on the wrong side of this. Going back to my startup days before Microsoft, I worked as much as I possibly could. Not because anyone made me. That’s just how I operated. And at some point I got told, more or less, “Hey Nick -- you shouldn’t work that much.” And the part I was hearing was “it’s not healthy” and that part I appreciated.

But there was a second part to it that took me longer to absorb: you’re setting an example, and people will model it whether you tell them to or not. The unspoken expectation on the team becomes the hours the most visible person is working. If you’re modeling 14-hour days and weekends, that becomes the standard people think they have to hit to be considered effective.

My initial reaction, embarrassingly, was “well that’s not my problem -- people are adults, they can make their own decisions.” Which is technically true and operationally useless. As a leader, it is my problem, because I do understand that people emulate behavior they look up to. I do understand that they form expectations I never said out loud. So pretending otherwise is just me being defensive about my own habits.

Actionable Tip: If you find yourself working long or unusual hours, don’t just hope your team interprets it correctly. Tell them, plainly, that your hours are not their expectation. Then back it up by reminding people to disconnect when they’re going outside the norm -- don’t force naything, just make space for them. The combination of explicit words and visible action is what actually shifts the perception. If you have a manager doing this and you’ve never asked them about it, that’s exactly the kind of thing to bring into your next one-on-one -- ask them directly what they expect of your hours and whether they’d actually prefer you sign off when your work for the day is done.

The Manager Who Got It Right

The cleanest example I’ve seen of this done well was from a manager I joined under. He had something in his email signature -- I’m paraphrasing -- along the lines of “my working hours are not a reflection of what your working hours should be” and another note about working with teams in different time zones. If you read that without context, you might think it’s a weird thing to put in a signature. The reason it’s there is exactly the perception problem I’m describing.

He was being very explicit about the unspoken expectation. Every email he ever sent carried that disclaimer. He was overcommunicating because the alternative -- staying silent and letting people draw their own conclusions -- always loses. People will fill the vacuum with assumptions, and the assumptions will skew toward “I should probably be doing what they’re doing.” So you fill the vacuum yourself, on purpose, with the message you actually want them to take.

This connects to a bigger truth I keep coming back to about the people side of this work: the soft skills that move you up are usually about being explicit about things other people leave implicit. Communication, expectation-setting, calling out the obvious that nobody else wants to call out. The stuff that feels almost over-the-top is usually exactly right.

A Funny Coincidence

This whole topic was on my mind because earlier the same day I recorded the video, I happened to be in the office on a Friday -- which not many usually do because, well, it’s Friday. I was making up for a day earlier in the week I couldn’t get in. Someone on my team was on a call with a colleague, and the person on the other end asked who was in the office. My teammate listed a few people, including me, and -- in a way they knew I’d hear -- said something along the lines of “yeah, because he’s a workaholic.”

It’s harmless. They were joking around. But it’s a really clean piece of evidence that the perception is real, regardless of how many hours I actually work (no one is timing me with a stopwatch). And it’s a useful reminder that if I don’t want my team to assume “this is the expectation,” I have to be even more deliberate about saying out loud what the actual expectation is. Otherwise the joke stops being a joke and starts being the standard -- and that’s what you’re trying to avoid.

Wrapping It Up

So if you take one thing from this issue, take this: your start time isn’t the signal. The hours you actually work, especially if you’re senior or in a leadership role, are the signal -- and they will set the bar for your team whether you intend them to or not. The best thing you can do is overcommunicate. Tell people what you actually expect. Send them offline when they’ve put their time in. Put the disclaimer in the signature if that’s what it takes.

And if you’re on the other side -- if you’re the person worried about how your hours look -- then have the conversation. Ask. Don’t carry around a perception in your head that nobody actually holds. The cost of asking is one slightly awkward minute. The cost of not asking is years of working to a bar that doesn’t actually exist.

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