Find Out What People Find Rewarding

Job satisfaction is critical to employee retention and productivity but companies often misunderstand what people find satisfying. There isn't a simple answer because people are different so it is very important to understand your people.

One thing for sure is that while money can be a factor in retention, it is not a very good source of job satisfaction. In a frustrating environment, you might hear a common cliche, "Oh well. Another day, another dollar." If you hear that, you are in trouble. Money may be some consolation when you have had a crummy day but it is a meager consolation.

There is a dramatic variance in productivity. People can be many times more productive when they are motivated and satisfied than otherwise. It can really pay to understand what gives people satisfaction.

Junior and senior people have different needs. The needs may be similar but the scope will vary. Senior engineers need to see how their work contributes in the big picture and see that their recommendations and designs have visibility. Junior people need to see how their work fits into the part of the system they are working on and that their feature/piece is appreciated.

There are some common factors in job satisfaction and dissatisfaction:

• challenge, coolness
• visibility, appreciation.
• appropriate forms of support
• quality
• pain level

There are some common scenarios that can be satisfying or dissatisfying depending on how they are handled. Almost everything management does has some effect on individual people's job satisfaction and motivation. Be aware of the effect of your management decisions and style.

Challenge

Most software involves a certain degree of tedium. People who have significant responsibility for maintenance work, backwards compatibility, etc. may have a high degree of tedium. Don't forget to share out some of the cool work to all people. At least give them a chance to be involved when there is new/cool work. Don't get caught in the trap of thinking that a person is too busy and that you can't afford to have them work on something cool. 

Avoid a hero culture when a select few get all of the cool work and visible appreciation. Instead, create a culture where everyone contributes and gets visible appreciation.

Avoid a "give it to the Co-op" culture where work that would be interesting to a senior person is given to an overly junior person, especially when you will later expect the more senior people to live with and possibly maintain the thing. Instead, give the Co-op to the senior person to direct and mentor. 

One of the best experiences for junior people is to work with more senior people. You can easily spoil them by giving them a taste for glory too early.

Appreciate

Show appreciation at the level where the work is done. Regularly. As immediately as possible. If the only visible appreciation given is the open e-mail from the CEO congratulating engineering on a project that just achieved a General Availability release milestone, don't be surprised if this fails to make people feel appreciated. It's too little, too late. It could be months to many months after the work was done.

Appreciation should be based on tangible evidence that the work is complete. A unit test, integration test or demonstration. Don't be arbitrarily appreciative or you will encourage poor work.

Recognize initiative. If someone shows initiative in a valuable area, give them visible appreciation, give them a role moving forward. A financial bonus for initiative can be a very much appreciated and a better use of money than a raise.

Don't bypass people. If they've had a role in the past, involve them in the future.

Support

Listen to what your best people need. Be careful not to intrusively, forcefully help them, like taking a part they've done good work on and give it to someone else because you think they are too busy. Talk to them first. Find out what they want. 

If people ask for help, listen.

Quality

Have a quality agenda if possible. Allow people to feel proud of the product and their contribution to it.

Pain Points

Develop a good development culture. Recognize competency and allow your best people to work with your best people.

Some development activities are painful. Don't try to hide necessary evils but do try to minimize any unnecessary pain points. Avoid ADHD behavior, militant project management, finger pointing, etc.

Does Your Company Have ADHD?

It can be very important for a business to be reactive to changes in requirements, business opportunities, maintenance situations, etc. The ability to react is an aspect of a healthy, dynamic, adaptive company.

A startup may have one angel customer that is sufficiently lucrative to only require reacting to their needs. This is a fantastic situation. You don't have to guess what this customer wants. Reacting is easy. You don't have to have vision or make touch choices.

However, it can be habit forming. The flip side of the coin is the ability to stay focused. When you have more customers, when you are trying to anticipate markets, when you have to start prioritizing because of resource limitations it is essential to be able to stay focused.

Being reactive and being focused are competing forces.

When it is necessary to stay focused and people are having difficulty staying focused an organization can exhibit a collective personality and that personality can have disorders just like a person can. An organization that is having a hard time focusing looks a lot like a person with ADHD. And it can be as big a problem for the organization as it can be for an individual.

When the company needs to be reactive it's not a disorder. It's entirely appropriate. However, when focus is what is needed it can be a real problem. This post deals with the scenario when a company needs to focus.

There are several tell-tales that your company may be suffering from ADHD. Does an e-mail from a customer send people off immediately investigating some new opportunity or problem? Does a new bug send people off immediately seeking a solution? Do meetings get off topic. If they go off topic do they come back on topic? Do you have recurring discussions on specific topics? Are people working on what you think they are? Do you spend a lot of you meeting time talking about things that you don't end up doing?

People at all levels can be easily distracted. I've seen executives leave a meeting where important priorities were being set leave the meeting and go directly to an engineer and ask him to do something explicitly contrary to the priorities that were just agreed to. This kind of ADHD behavior is communicable. The higher up it manifests, the more communicable it will be.

When focus is required it is very important for management to set an example. It can be very hard for entrepreneurs to focus. The same damn the torpedoes drive that allowed them to step boldly into the unknown and found a company often leads to a reactive business approach. If the message is mixed it will likely be very difficult to keep people focused. People will learn that recognition comes from being involved in whatever new thing is happening and not from sticking to a plan.

It is important to think about new things as they come in the door. The need to focus doesn't permit a company to stick it's head in the sand. Companies still need to be reactive. The key is to compartmentalize the assessment (triage) of new information and the assignment/resourcing (action) of it.

The same distinction can be applied to a new project that may involve an entire department of the company and to the smallest maintenance issue in the field that might only take 5 minutes to fix.

The issue is being in control of when and how to react.

The assessment of a new project will involve substantial effort and will normally be formalized - a business case, a profit margin analysis, etc. The assessment of a new bug might only take 5 minutes. They are both important. You will have many bugs and even small ones can be distracting if you don't stay on top of them.

You want to make it clear that you are triaging everything that comes in the door and who is responsible for it. When it is clear other people equally clearly aren't expected to or desired to be involved.

Some triaged issues will be actioned. You want actioning a task to be equally clear and visible so that it is clear what is expected and who is expected to do it.

Triage and actioning can be brief and simple but it is essential that you do both. Together they concisely and unambiguously specify what is expected (and not expected) from people.

Staying focused requires good record keeping. Issues, features, opportunities, etc. will recur. If you don't keep track of the triage decisions you will end up having a lot of Deja Vu. It's a good idea to keep track of the reasons for and against an issue and any additional information like work breakdowns, estimates so that if the issue comes up again you can quickly review what you decided last time and why. If there is no new information then you don't need to do anything more than just review the decision. Just ask if there is new information and if the answer is no, you don't need to engage. If there is new information then record the new information and retriage the issue. You don't have to discuss it on the spot. Don't let people hijack your focus with wishful thinking, whining, etc.

For bugs I highly recommend a bug tracking system. There are many good open source options. You don't need to spend a lot of money. For features you can also use a bug tracking system. A bug tracking system inherently supports triage and assignment and they make it easy to record the reasons and any extra information about the decision. No one works on a bug/feature until it is triaged and assigned to them.

For strategic and tactical business opportunities most small companies can record an overview in a spreadsheet and backing information on a file server. Set up an incoming opportunity folder on the server, keep the overview spreadsheet in the main folder and create a subfolder for each opportunity. Create a project folder and only create a subfolder for a new project when an opportunity is assessed and there is a management signoff to spin up the project. During triage there may be specific actions to do high level R&D estimation, cost of goods estimation, market assessment, etc.

Many good ideas come up in meetings but they can be distracting. You want to spend your meeting time talking about what you ARE working on or are already COMMITTED to working on. If you find that you are spending a lot of time on tangents, consider setting up a brainstorming session on a regular interval (biweekly or monthly) so that you can ask people to use that venue to bring up new ideas that would otherwise distract your operational project meetings.

Focus is so often the key to successfully capturing market opportunities. There are lots of real challenges. Don't let ADHD create more challenges for you. Be a company that can focus. Advocate clear and concise triage and assignment and practice what you preach.

No Whining!

Whining is a symptom and, like a disease, it can infect others and spread. Anyone who is whining is wasting valuable energy and adversely affecting people around them. It can become quite destructive.

All companies have limitations. Decisions have to be made about what problems to tackle. Small companies often have tight limitations. Being good at one thing often depends on not diluting the focus on that thing. That means NOT doing some things, maybe even many things.

It is common for people to grieve that their thing is not be on the agenda. Getting people through the five stages of grief quickly (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) can be a real challenge. You want to get to acceptance as efficiently as possible.

Whining is a symptom of the first four stages. Its tone can change: during the Anger stage it is bitter whining, during the Depression stage it is sad whining. Constructive people that are moving forward don't whine. That's what you want. People that tend to whine may need to be trained.

How do you train people? It's easy. Don't tolerate whining. At all. Zero. Encourage people to present ideas and to lobby for them but they must accept a decision. It's Ok to reopen an issue after a suitable time period but until then their job is to accept it.

It is important to listen to your people and to allow some discussion after you have made a decision. However, don't weaken your message. Even if you are reconsidering it is better not to weaken your position by implying that you'll "think about it" in case you decide to stay the course.

It is better to acknowledge what you hear and respond by asserting the decision: the points were considered, the points are not compelling. At some point, ongoing discussion and questioning becomes whining. Usually it is when there is no new information. It is fair at this point to ask if there is anything new. If not, entertaining further questioning is enabling whining. At this point you need to stop engaging on the issue.

If you respond politely, firmly and consistently you will find that people take less and less time to get through the process. If not, consider a penalty for whining to emphasize your position - a fine.

Sounds easy? Well, there's always a catch. In today's politically correct world, anything that is phased politically correctly is hard to say no to. Don't be tricked by niceties.

Popular culture understands how boring, annoying and counterproductive whining is. For example, google "no whining" and click on the images tab.

Everyone knows it. Don't create an environment that encourages it. 

Should Is A Four Letter Word? Or Should Be.

It's easy for people outside of a thing to criticize it. It's so easy that people often aren't even aware of doing it.

One form of criticism is indirect, the statement of how a thing aught to be. How it should be.

It is considered politically correct for the most part so it is insidious even in many environments that outwardly foster a positive work culture.

In a technical environment, especially in small companies with limited resources, many expediences need to be taken. The current state of the union is the result of conscious decisions in the past - the best decisions that could be made at the time.

It should be just the way it is. Think about it.

It isn't appropriate to look at the current state of things and say that it should be different.

It's perfectly fine to say that we want it to be different. It's even fine to say that we should make improvements. Both of those statements are forward looking.

The problem is the fine line between a proactive stance on the future and a complaint about work done in the past. Assuming everyone is operating in good faith, the problem is that the context is ambiguous. That some usage is critical taints other usage.

It's safest just avoid using it.

There's an idea that relates should to another similar sounding four letter word. It is a pertinent comparison and thinking of it that way helps to avoid its use.

Don't should on people's work.