How company can grow without relying on the 996 work culture?

If you have ever watched your team stagger out of the office late at night, you know that the 996 work culture is not just a headline about distant tech giants. It quietly appears in local start ups, regional tech firms, and remote teams that slowly normalise late nights, weekend calls, and a constant sense of “just push a bit more.” At first it feels like shared sacrifice and ambition. Over time it begins to feel like something else altogether, something brittle and unsustainable that quietly drains the very people you depend on to build the company. The uncomfortable truth is that most companies that drift toward 996 are not consciously choosing a culture. They are compensating for an organisational design that does not know how to grow any other way. Hours expand because strategy is vague, roles are blurred, and decisions still sit in the heads of a few leaders. Workloads stretch because the company has never truly decided what matters most. The good news is that there is another path. A company can grow without leaning on punishing hours, but only if leaders are willing to treat growth as a design problem rather than a test of stamina.

The core mistake behind 996 thinking is the assumption that more effort automatically translates into more growth. When revenue targets feel aggressive or investors are watching closely, the easiest lever to pull is time. People work later, cancel plans, and live inside messaging apps. It feels responsible. It feels committed. In reality, the organisation has quietly decided that time can make up for unclear strategy, incomplete tooling, and weak delegation. It is not usually a moral failing. It is a predictable stage problem for young companies that confuse “everyone helps with everything” with healthy ownership.

You can often trace the path into unsustainable hours through a few recurring patterns. One common pattern is that growth targets arrive before operational clarity. Leadership declares that revenue must double or that several large initiatives must ship within the same quarter, but no one maps who owns which outcomes, which projects will be delayed, or what support is required. When everything is a priority, the workday simply stretches to absorb the overload. Another pattern is that leaders set the emotional tone by being permanently available. Messages go out late at night, slide decks are edited at sunrise, and “quick calls” become a daily habit. No one announces that the company now follows 996. People just adjust their lives around what appears to be normal for those in charge.

A third pattern is that systems are introduced as decoration instead of infrastructure. Teams adopt stand ups, OKRs, or agile rituals because they have seen these tools in other successful companies. In practice, work still moves through private chats, last minute asks, and ongoing “small favors” that add up to heavy invisible loads. When processes do not protect focus or capacity, the only buffer left is individual effort. People become the shock absorbers for every gap in planning and coordination.

For a while, relentless hours can look like alignment. Everyone is online. Tickets move. There is a constant buzz of motion. Beneath the surface, however, the company starts to pay a price that does not always show up in simple dashboards. Velocity becomes fragile. Work moves fast but breaks often because tired people patch instead of design. Rework grows. Escalations increase. The backlog feels like a treadmill instead of a path forward. Trust also starts to thin. Exhausted teams react more sharply to minor issues. Feedback feels harsher. Colleagues become protective of their time, their scope, and their credit. Collaboration turns transactional. Eventually, retention begins to erode. Your best people may not storm out dramatically. They detach quietly. They share fewer ideas, avoid raising early warnings, and slowly stop believing that their boundaries will be respected. By the time you notice resignations, the real cost has already appeared in the loss of learning, initiative, and informal leadership within the team.

If you want to grow without relying on 996, the answer is not to swing to the opposite extreme and treat comfort as a strategy. Sustainable growth requires clarity about what truly drives progress, honest design of capacity, and a rhythm of work that people can realistically train for. It starts with naming what growth actually depends on. Many organisations talk about growth as if it is a single number, but that number usually comes from a few specific engines. A B2B company might grow mainly through higher win rates in a well chosen segment, or through improved onboarding and expansion of existing customers, rather than simply chasing more leads. When leadership clearly identifies the few levers that matter in the next six to twelve months, people stop trying to push everything at once. That alone reduces the impulse to stretch the day just to feel productive.

From there, roles need to be designed so that ownership is visible. In a 996 environment, many people are busy but no one feels fully accountable. Issues float until a founder intervenes. To move away from that pattern, it has to become obvious who owns which outcome and what decisions they are allowed to make without asking for permission. This does not require elaborate job descriptions. It requires simple maps that connect core business engines to named owners. Regular review rituals should reinforce that ownership by inviting owners to present progress, tradeoffs, and requests, rather than forcing leaders to interrogate raw task lists.

Capacity then needs to be treated like an asset rather than a personal preference. Teams steeped in 996 logic often talk about rest and workload as if they are individual quirks. One person can “handle more,” another “needs balance.” This language hides the fact that cognitive capacity and creative energy are shared infrastructure. If you burn them, you lose compounding quality. Sustainable growth means deciding how much capacity is genuinely available, where it will be spent, and what will not be done. It requires limiting the number of strategic priorities, assessing the real time cost of cross functional projects, and placing firm boundaries around meetings, urgent requests, and weekend work except in rare, clearly defined situations.

A company that wants to outgrow 996 must also choose a cadence of work that people can prepare for. Constant urgency keeps everyone in a permanent sprint, always braced for the next surprise. A healthier approach resembles training cycles for athletes. There are periods of intense effort, periods of testing and adjustment, and periods of integration and planning. This rhythm does not make the work easy, but it makes the load predictable. People can plan their lives instead of living in reaction mode, and the organisation benefits from more consistent output over time.

Processes should exist to replace heroic effort, not glorify it. Before introducing new frameworks or rituals, leaders should ask which specific friction each process is meant to remove. If a stand up turns into a daily report on how late everyone stayed in the office, it is simply reinforcing unhealthy norms. If OKRs become long lists of tasks instead of a small set of outcomes, they are just additional bureaucracy layered on top of overwork. Well designed processes do the opposite. A weekly roadmap review that explicitly decides what to drop when new requests arrive sends the message that focus matters more than breadth. A hiring process that values candidates who can renegotiate scope and push back on unrealistic timelines sends the message that discernment is as important as effort. Performance reviews that reward building resilient systems rather than just saving projects at the last minute shift the culture away from drama and toward thoughtful design.

All of this requires different leadership signals. People watch what leaders do far more closely than what they say. If founders respond to every message within minutes at all hours, the organisation learns that responsiveness is more valuable than judgment. If leaders consistently praise personal sacrifice while ignoring those who quietly prevent crises through planning and communication, the culture learns that burnout is safer than boundary setting. Leaders who want to grow without 996 need to become deliberate about what they normalise. Scheduling messages instead of sending them late at night, taking visible time off, and publicly appreciating team members who highlight overloaded plans are small behaviours that compound. They teach people that their responsibility is to protect the system, not to absorb infinite pressure.

There are useful questions that founders and managers can sit with as they redesign their approach. If you personally stopped working past seven in the evening for two weeks, what would break first. That fragile point is not a personal weakness. It is a signal of where your system depends on individual sacrifice instead of structure. If your three strongest performers had to reduce their hours, which projects would you immediately cancel or redesign. If a new hire joined tomorrow, how many days would it take before they assumed that real commitment in your company means replying to messages late into the night. These questions are not accusations. They are prompts for redesign.

Many early stage teams comfort themselves with the thought that 996 is temporary. It will just last until product market fit, or until the next funding round, or until the big launch is over. In practice, habits formed in the first twenty people tend to persist into the first hundred. Culture hardens around stories that are told repeatedly and behaviours that are rewarded. If people learn that heroics are the only way to succeed, they will recreate that pattern no matter how large the company becomes.

Choosing to grow without relying on 996 is not softness. It is a disciplined commitment to building a company that can translate ambition into structures rather than into exhaustion. It means designing roles that scale instead of burning out founders and early joiners. It means teaching your team that their value lies in how they improve the system, not in how many evenings they sacrifice in its name. Your people are not your buffer against unclear thinking or vague priorities. They are the ones who can multiply the impact of clear thinking, if you give them a company that is built to hold it.