How does 996 culture affect employee performance?

The appeal of 996 is easy to understand at first glance. More hours look like more output, and a busy office looks like a productive company. Yet the promise hides a deeper cost. When a workplace assumes that people should work from morning to late night six days a week, performance begins to shift in ways that are subtle at first and then unmistakable. Energy drains. Choices get fuzzier. The product or service that once felt sharp begins to dull. The issue is not whether people can push through fatigue for a period of time. Many can. The real question is what happens to the quality of work when a long schedule becomes the default operating system. That is where the gap opens between being active and creating value.

Teams in a 996 rhythm often confuse motion with progress. Presence becomes a proxy for commitment, and time in the chair becomes a stand in for alignment. True velocity does not depend on raw hours. It grows from energy, focus, and clean handoffs, compounding in small, repeatable ways. Stretch the day too far and that rhythm breaks. People start to protect their capacity instead of aiming for impact. They avoid risk and default to the tasks they can finish tonight. Inside a single day it can feel efficient. Across a quarter it becomes expensive, because the company ships a higher volume of lower value work.

The first visible casualty is decision quality. Long days tend to push key conversations into late windows when attention is thin and context switches are frequent. Leaders who want to stay in control ask for more updates. Teams respond with more packaging and status theater. Every cycle spent on packaging is time taken from design and delivery. The signal to noise ratio falls. Decisions move away from principles and toward preferences. Hours increase, but the work tilts toward the wrong things, which is a quiet form of waste.

Defect rates rise next. Professionals can grit their teeth and power through fatigue, but systems do not bend so easily. Tired minds produce more rework. Rework stretches cycle time. Longer cycles inflate coordination overhead. The rescue work usually lands on the strongest contributors, because they are the ones who can fix broken commits, stabilize fragile processes, and soothe unhappy customers. It looks like the company is getting more from top performers. In truth it is drawing down their future capacity. Burnout appears later as attrition in the very cohort that once gave the company its edge.

Creative throughput also suffers. Meaningful innovation requires slack. Not idleness, but a margin of time and attention where people can think, test, discard, and return with clearer models. A 996 cadence strips that oxygen from the week. Teams optimize for local wins rather than asking whether the system still makes sense. Internal dashboards light up with small victories, but the customer experiences no material improvement. The company appears busy while its product loses distinctiveness. This is how organizations drift into incrementalism without ever deciding to.

Founders often say that 996 is a temporary sprint, a moment of sacrifice that will not last. The baseline seldom resets once customers, board members, or revenue targets have grown used to the extra capacity. Rituals arise that reward stamina instead of clarity. Performance reviews equate presence with commitment, and the incentives harden. Culture becomes what is repeated, and under 996 what repeats is survival. People do what it takes to get through the day, which is not the same as building a system that scales.

There is a financial story underneath the cultural story. Many teams believe that longer hours help them outrun competitors. They forget to price retention drag. Each percentage point of attrition in critical roles inflates hiring costs and slows ramp time. In a growth stage, a revolving door destroys throughput even if the headcount chart looks healthy. You can raise another round. You cannot raise lost context. When the half life of institutional knowledge keeps shrinking, the unit economics of execution break. The team spends more of its calories replacing capacity rather than compounding it.

Planning behavior reveals the same distortion. Roadmaps built inside a 996 norm rely on heroics. Leaders commit to ambitious scope and compress discovery because they assume everyone will be available late at night and on weekends. The result is a brittle plan that sounds bold in an all hands and feels chaotic in a sprint. Sales starts to sell around reality. Product ships around bugs. Support absorbs the pain. Over time the company becomes expert at firefighting and poor at fire prevention. Performance becomes a story about effort, not outcomes.

Some managers argue that young teams prefer 996. They point to energy, ambition, and the desire to prove themselves. Ambition deserves structure, not sacrifice. Early career talent delivers speed and curiosity when the system protects sleep, makes outcomes visible, and prizes craft. A long hours norm replaces structure with pressure. People learn shortcuts that serve the day and damage the craft. Being responsive gets mistaken for being responsible. When the moment finally calls for depth, the habit is not there.

Cross functional trust erodes in quiet ways. When one team stays online past midnight, another meets them there. If product is editing specs at two in the morning, design follows. Marketing schedules Sunday launches to signal commitment, and finance approves because blocking feels political. No one wants to be the first group to defend a boundary, so no one does. Alignment appears to exist, but it is built on exhaustion rather than design. Everything seems fine until a serious incident requires someone to say no. In that moment the company discovers that it had compliance, not trust.

A better model respects urgency without worshipping hours. It begins by naming the true constraint. Time on a clock is not the binding limit. Quality attention on the few decisions that change the slope of the curve is the scarce resource. Protecting that attention is the path to performance. Shorter planning cycles reduce speculative work. Sequenced initiatives keep dependencies real rather than optimistic. Predictable response windows replace the expectation of always on communication. In that environment, clarity becomes the lever and hours stop pretending to be one.

Measurement must shift as well. Many 996 cultures revere volume metrics. Tickets closed. Lines of code. Hours online. These are comfortable numbers for leaders who do not trust their own process, but they reveal little. Replace them with a view of repeat value creation by customer segment. Ask whether the last two weeks produced a measurable gain in an experience that matters. Tie that gain to the time required to discover, ship, and validate. When those numbers improve without expanding the day, the team is scaling performance rather than stamina.

Leadership posture holds the system together. A founder can publish a policy about sustainability and then break it with one late night message that triggers a chain reaction of after hours activity. People follow behavior, not memos. If the goal is performance, leaders practice decision hygiene in public. They set daily cutoffs and keep them. They delay non urgent messages. When exceptions occur, they make the reason visible and close the loop the next day with what they learned. That tells the organization that urgency arises by design, not by default.

Energy management is not a soft theme. It is an engineering constraint. Cognitive work needs peaks for synthesis and troughs for processing. High performing teams architect the week around those natural cycles. Deep work happens during the hours when attention is strongest. Collaborative work sits in windows that suit social energy. Low energy tasks get clustered so context switches do not poison the best hours. None of this survives a schedule that assumes a person can push at the same intensity for twelve hours and produce the same quality of signal throughout.

There will always be counterexamples. Someone will cite a company that scaled under punishing schedules and shipped legendary outcomes. These stories ignore survivorship bias and the cost of replacements. For every tale of a heroic season there are many in which similar hours delivered the wrong thing faster, followed by a long slog to unwind technical and cultural debt. A legend can be inspiring and still be a poor default for most teams most of the time. Building a company on exceptions is a fragile strategy.

The alternative is not lower standards. The alternative is sharper systems. Teams that ship with consistency write less, but they write the right artifacts that keep interfaces clean. Work can advance when people are offline because the handoffs are well designed. Meetings that exist only to confirm presence are removed, while the gatherings that unblock decisions are protected. Rituals evolve that reinforce craft, such as weekly teardown sessions focused on a single user journey. Accountability flows from practice rather than adrenaline.

A simple test can reveal the true state of performance. Imagine the founding group is away for a week. Would important work continue at a high level. If the answer is no, the organization does not have performance. It has dependence. The 996 rhythm hides that dependence by keeping leaders close at all times. It feels like control. In reality it is fragility. The strongest signal of a healthy system is the absence of panic when the calendar is shorter. In such a system, architecture carries the weight, not human endurance.

So the effect of 996 on employee performance is not a neat equation where more time equals more output. It narrows the meaning of performance to what can be observed late at night rather than what customers can feel over time. It trains speed while eroding judgment. It celebrates effort while wearing out the very people who create leverage. It replaces thoughtful design with sheer endurance until endurance runs out. If the goal is to ship better work across many seasons, the answer is not a harsher schedule. The answer is a cleaner system that makes clarity, attention, and trust do the heavy lifting. When that system is in place, hours cease to be the headline. The work becomes the story.