I’ve worked with a freelance developer for over 5 years now. She’s good at what she does—and lives on the other side of the world.
The other day, discussing the fact that she won’t have access to electricity during daylight hours for a few weeks, I asked her if she’s going to pause working for me for a while. That’s fine, so long as you tell me. And her response blew me away. She told me, “no, I’ll just sleep in the mornings and early afternoons, and stay up all night every night to work for you, just like I did for our first year of working together.”
I said, “What? During our first year of working together, you did what?”
And yes, I had understood correctly. Her time zone is almost the opposite of mine, and during our first year of working together, she was so dedicated to working with me, she thought it was important to be there during the same hours as me so we could discuss issues in real-time—even though I never asked her to!—that, on her own, she just swapped her sleeping schedule to work all night.
While that was generous and awesome of her, I had no idea she did that. I couldn’t and didn’t appreciate it because I never knew she did that.
And our work very rarely has deadlines. So almost everything she did could have been done the next days or could have been discussed later. There was almost no reason to stay up all night.
Full confession: I know where she lives. I knew her time zone. But I just never consciously nor purposefully thought about it, nor realized it. On the one hand, I must have known. I knew she was working late into her nights sometimes, but I know some night owls. I was once a night owl and still am half a night owl now.
So, I knew it subconsciously, but I never realized it consciously. And that makes all the difference. Perhaps I didn’t want to know or perhaps I didn’t want to admit it to myself. Even if that Freudian analysis is true, it would be a very typical analysis of almost all managers. Sometimes there are things you just don’t want to know, “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” as the ancient saying goes.
Had I known it consciously, I would have acted differently—and the result would have been better for her. I would have purposefully encouraged her to go to sleep earlier. I would have made sure any real-time chats we had were on the earlier side. I would have forced her to go to sleep if I saw her delivering tickets really late and it wasn’t urgent. Possibly I would have paid her a bonus for changing around her life and missing the daylight hours for me.
For her part, I’m paying her very well by local standards, and she needs the work, so she happily did it. She was satisfied with what I was giving her—that’s one reason we’re still working together happily five years later. (Sounds like a married couple, right? Working closely with someone is just another type of relationship!) But it could have been better for her and, selfishly for me, I could have felt a bit less guilty about her staying up so late.
She probably also thought that I was sensitive to her working hours, taking it into account, and I wanted her to work the same time as me.
There’s an easy solution here, if you’re going “above and beyond” or doing something particularly awesome or particularly hard, don’t assume that your client puts together the pieces. Don’t assume that your client is calculating your time zone or realizing that you work 18 hours a day. Remember, he’s probably not looking into the details of how you work. Do you do timesheets? He’s probably not even looking at them. Just because you note and record it somewhere, that doesn’t mean he’ll see it.
So, you need to tell him. When you go “above and beyond,” make sure your client knows. There’s no point in going above and beyond with no one knowing because if they don’t, you can’t be rewarded for it, in the short or the long-term. You can’t even get a simple “thank you” because they don’t know.
The converse also applies, to harsh conditions. If you’re underperforming because of some challenges. Or if your boss is treating you worse than normal. Or if things get harder or harsher at work for any reason—your boss may not know consciously, even if he knows subconsciously. Is there a lot of inflation in your local country so your salary is devalued? Your boss may have read about it in the newspapers, but just not connected it to how much harder your life may be because of it. So not only share when you go above and beyond but also share when things are slower and more difficult than normal.
The broader version of this is, you can’t read his mind. So, if your manager appears ungrateful, maybe he is an ungrateful person (in which case, you should look for a new manager) or maybe he just doesn’t know what he needs to be grateful for. So, give him the benefit of the doubt, at first.
