Why Companies That Help Employees Prioritize Work Are Building More Sustainable Teams

After a brief lull, tech’s appetite for intensity has returned. The race to ship AI products is moving at breakneck speed, and for the first time in years, many builders are genuinely energized by what they’re creating. That combination has reignited hustle culture, along with an uncomfortable leadership question: how do you channel that momentum into durable progress without exhausting the people doing the work?

Vidya Narayanan is the Co-Founder of FinalLayer, where she is building LinkedIn AI agents for professionals. A three-time founder and technology executive, she has previously held leadership roles at Google and Qualcomm, raised $60M in funding, and holds roughly 75 patents. Her perspective on hustle culture comes from repeatedly operating inside high-pressure, long-horizon tech environments.

“If you expect employees to make the company a top priority, leaders have to actively reduce the personal burdens that drain their energy. Without that support, you’re asking for commitment without giving people the capacity to deliver it,” says Narayanan. Where some leadership philosophies focus on hours logged as a proxy for dedication, Narayanan suggests a different lens. For her, the focus shouldn’t be on time sheets but on a simpler question: where does the company rank on an employee’s list of life priorities?

• The long game: She frames this as a long-term strategy for building a defensible business, citing the marathon-like journey of companies like Clay, which took years to gain traction before seeing exponential growth. A team that burns out in the first lap can’t win that race. “You’re not going to succeed overnight. Even the so-called overnight successes have taken a couple of years,” Narayanan notes. “And if you did have a literal overnight success, then you question the moat of that. How can you sustain it?”

• Defining priorities: For Narayanan, earning a place in an employee’s top priorities means letting go of rigid ideas about an eight-hour day and focusing instead on sustained, high-impact contribution. “Is the company one of your top two priorities, or at least top three priorities? If you can’t do that, you should absolutely work in a place that doesn’t demand that energy,” she says. The same standard applies to her own role. “As a founder, it’s still not the top priority because I have two kids that I need to worry about. But it’s always in my top two priorities.”

But that kind of commitment isn’t automatic. Narayanan is clear that it must be earned through a leader’s proactive, empathetic support. While many companies rightly invest in perks and benefits, she advocates for a more targeted form of support aimed at removing specific life obstacles that drain employee energy and focus. The logic is simple: an employee stressed about a long commute or an unsafe journey home has less mental bandwidth available for solving hard problems.

• Run interference: By tactically removing those external stressors, leaders aren’t just being kind. They’re expanding their team’s capacity to focus and contribute, a manager-led solution to a workforce issue. “If you want them to prioritize the company in their top three priorities, then you should be removing obstacles they have in life so they don’t have to worry about certain other things,” states Narayanan. “It’s a two-way street.”

Narayanan’s playbook, then, offers a compelling model for leadership. First, reframe commitment away from hours and toward priorities, focusing on practices over rigid policy. Second, proactively remove the life obstacles that prevent your team from making the company a top priority. It’s a model based on reciprocity, where leaders invest in their employees’ lives so that employees can, in turn, invest more fully in their work.