You are Elena Vidal, and you have led Lumora Software's engineering team in Madrid for three years. On Tuesday 5 May, within a single hour, three documents land on your desk: a survey, a resignation letter and an email a client sent at eleven the night before. Before you write any rule, you have to decide what is really driving your team's exhaustion.
The situation
Lumora sells a logistics-optimization platform to retailers and carriers in Spain, Portugal and Latin America: €96 million of revenue, growing 24% a year, 540 people and 210 in engineering and product. The team works hybrid, with two anchor days in the office, and its clients span so many time zones that after-hours messages have become ordinary.
The survey: pride and commitment score well, but work-family conflict sits in the company's bottom quartile, and 71% of engineers answer messages after 21:00. The letter: a senior engineer, a parent of two, writes that there was never a real boundary between her work and her home; replacing her will cost about €65,000 in recruiting and ramp-up. The email: the project manager at your largest client, worth €4.2 million a year, asks at 23:00 whether the platform release due in three weeks is still on schedule. Missing it risks a penalty and the renewal.
Your bonus tracks the release calendar; your review carries the team's engagement and attrition. Spanish law already requires a digital-disconnection policy. Your eleven engineers are not short of explanations: some say the work has outgrown the team; others that nobody wants to be the one who did not answer; HR suggests the policy is simply not visible.