Archive for June, 2008

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Take Your Pick: Task Or Time?

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Stop counting IT work hours and start counting tasks

As we reach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the IT workplace is once again starting to change. For at least the next few years we’re going to be seeing three distinct generations working together side-by-side: boomers (born before 1965), Gen-X’ers (1965-1979), and Gen-Y’ers (1980-1999). This arrangement causes conflicts and friction in all parts of a company; however, the IT department feels it the most because of the rapid changes that have happened in IT.

In order to keep an entire IT department staffed and motivated (and avoid having unhappy IT workers), things are going to have to change. One key change is going to be how we all think about IT jobs. In the immediate past, IT jobs were simply 40-hour-a-week commitments that pretty much started and ended at the same time each day. We might work different shifts; however, the company was fairly insistent that we show up and put our time in. All sorts of tools were created around this structure: time clocks, time sheets, overtime, comp-time, etc. Things are changing now and it’s because Gen-Y has arrived in the work place.

The Gen-Y crowd clearly prefer jobs that are defined by their task, not the amount of time that they take. This of course means that they want to be compensated for what they produce. In a way this is sort of a step backwards. Back when everyone worked on a farm or in the early days of factories, people were paid based on their personal output. This had its pluses and minuses and after the Great Depression when manufacturing got more complicated and unions arrived, the shift to paying by the hour started.

Younger workers are used to working in an asynchronous fashion — something that older workers may do also, but they hid it better. Getting into the office by 8am or staying at the office until 5pm makes little or no sense to younger workers if they have completed their work.

You can call task based work whatever you choose (“virtual work” seems to be winning), but by necessarily text=”Virtual Work” it is catching on. At IBM, 40% of their employees have no official offices. So what does all of this change mean for those who are in charge of making sure that a multi-generational IT department produces results? Here are the three key skills that will need to be mastered:

  1. Clearly articulate the results that you expect — leave no room for misunderstanding. Then follow up by tying accountability to getting the job done.

  2. Make physical attendance at the office / meetings optional. Note that everyone still needs to show up for meetings and communicate with team members.
  3. Gage worker performance on the quality of the work performed.

What can you expect to gain from making these changes? Best Buy has implemented many of them and they claim to have seen a 35% increase in productivity and voluntary turnover drop by 320 basis points. What’s even more remarkable is that when asked, employees were unsure if they were now working more or fewer hours — they had simply stopped keeping track.

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Posted in 40 hour week, productivity, quality, work task, work time | 1 Comment »

Q: What’s Worse Then An Unhappy Worker Leaving? A: If They Stay…

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Unhappy Workers Who Don't Leave Can Cause Problems

We all know that having high turnover can at best be disruptive and at worst can throw projects off schedule, kill budgets, and doom overall employee morale. So you would think that if you are somehow able to have a low number of employees leaving that everything would be hunky dory, right? Wrong — you might now have lots of unhappy employees who have for one reason or another decided that they can’t leave right now. They’ll keep coming into work each day (or logging on if they are unhappily telecommuting), but they will be dragging their virtual feet and just going through the motions. They are not going to be helping the company be a success.

Why are so many non-leaving employees unhappy? I think that I know the reason and the author Patrick Lencioni has captured them quite nicely in his book “The Three Signs of a Miserable Job”. In his book, Patrick states that he believes that people become unhappy in their jobs when their basic social needs are not being met. Yeah, yeah, yeah — we all love a paycheck and the bigger the better. However, we really go to work in order to have some very basic human needs met: to get a sense of accomplishment, to boost self-esteem, and to feel that we are part of a community.

When we aren’t geting these needs met, Patrick calls the problems “anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurability”. Great, now you’ve got the silent problem of unhappy IT workers lurking in your department. What to do?

Don’t dispair! In order to reach out and change unhappy workers into committed employees you have to tackle these key issues one by one. One-on-one feedback is the key to providing emplyees with both a sense of accomplishment (they know who I am!) and boosting self-esteem (they like what I do!). Developing a sense of community is somewhat more difficult — in the IT field if this is done incorrectly, it can come across as fake. However, if done correctly you can turn a lackluster department into a team of overachievers. Now that’s something to cheer about!

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Posted in community, motivation, self-esteem, sense of accomplishment | No Comments »

Retention, Retention, Retention

Thursday, June 19th, 2008

How To Retain IT Staff
So you’ve finally built a great IT team / department and now you can’t sleep at night because you are worried that everyone is going to leave. Well guess what, you’re probably right — everyone will eventually leave; however, how fast they leave depends on you. The IT field has a rich history of job hopping and even in today’s lean times, this has not changes. Unfortunately it’s your most valuable employees that will be most likely to hop because they have the talents & experience that your competition is looking for. What’s an IT manager / HR manager / CIO to do?

IT workers are a unique breed. If they like what they are doing, they will stay. One of the first ways to ensure that this happens is to make sure that everyone’s connected with the mission of the business. Note that this is easy to say, but can be very hard to do. The larger the firm, the more disconnected most workers feel. Please keep in mind that the mission of the business can never have anything to do with money (i.e. “Grow profits by 20%”) because unless you work in accounting, you can never get excited about that.

Next is to make sure that IT management is open with the staff about business wins, losses, and hiring plans. When was the last time that you sat down with your staff and talked about where the company is going? For that matter, do you even know where the company is headed? If everyone feels as though they know what is going on, then they will better understand how their job is helping the company get there. Once again, please note that saying that you have an “open door” policy is really just so many words. Your actions will speak much louder than these words.

Promoting from within can be a key tool for getting folks to stick around. If everyone knows what a career path looks like at your company, then they will know where they stand and what their chances of moving up are. If you are constantly hiring from the outside to fill upper management positions, then the team will lose heart and move on.

Finally, be very careful when it comes to team building activities. IT staff are notorious for not wanting to participate in these events and if you are not careful, it could turn into something that looks like a scene from “The Office” TV Show . Instead, creating a challenge that requires a team to work together in order to win a prize or reward that has visibility (big trophy displayed in the office) or has a clear social value (donation to a charity in their names) can make a lasting impression.

One of the things that makes an IT so valuable is its creativity (“innovation” in modern speak). If you use this same creativity to actively work to create an environment in which the IT staff wants to keep working and looks forward to what comes next, then congratulations — you’ve succeeded.

Posted in company mission, IT staff retention, open, promotions, team building | 1 Comment »

Fix It & Forget It? Nope, Doesn’t Work For IT

Monday, June 16th, 2008

management tools to fix IT departments
If, like me, you actually enjoy reading the 100+ business books that get published every year then you are probably well aware of what I like to call “the silver bullet syndrome”. In any given business book, the author generally describes a problem, documents the approaches that had been tried to solve the problem, and then finally gets around to describing the solution that finally saved the day. You can pick your favorite management strategy: TQM, Black Belt, Just In Time, etc. and there are multiple books that basically tell the same story.

That’s why when I was leafing through the Theory & Practice section of the Wall Street Journal, my attention was caught by an article by Phred Dvorak titled “Experts Have a Message for Managers: Shake It Up”. The gist of the article was that management practices that solve a particular problem at a given point in time can eventually turn on a company. This has some significant impacts on IT teams.

The article goes on to say that if you keep doing the same things over and over, even if they made you a great department at one point in time, then they will eventually lead to problems. The reasons for this dire eventuality is because you can develop tunnel vision, start to resist new ideas, stop experimenting, start to build silos, and stop being able to adapt to new changes. Dang — I though that if I could only find & read the right book, then all of my problems would be solved.

It turns out that the experts recommend that in order for an IT department to succeed in the long term, you need to set up processes & procedures that naturally cause tension and collaboration at the same time. Having both of these conditions present at the same time will help keep the department open and able to change. You have to be careful to mange both of these — too much of either will result in a workplace that nobody wants to be a part of.

Ok you say, so how can this be done in my IT department? You have many choices: reorganizing the department is a quick and dirty way to shake things up quickly. How about telling everyone that their job descriptions are only temporary. There is the IT classic: give different managers different goals (reduce costs, produce twice as many products). Separating tasks and making mangers dependent on each other in order to complete projects will also introduce new challenges.

At the end of the day I guess we are all just a little bit like zoo animals. We can get very used to what works when it is working well. We say that friction is bad, but it turns out that we all need just a little bit of conflict in our lives in order to keep us engaged in what we are doing.

Posted in books, collaboration, management, silver bullet, tension, toxic managment | No Comments »

So How Do You Gracefully Leave An IT Job?

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

How To Leave Your Current IT Job
In the world of IT we seem to spend a lot of time talking about downsizing and folks getting fired. What hasn’t really been discussed is what the best way to leave a job is. Although in my younger days I was very good at burning my bridges behind me, these days I’ve come to realize that this is in fact a very poor long term strategy.

When I left my first IT job after 6 years in basically the same position for a job at a different company in a different town, I had no experience in how to break off the relationship. This very large company had a policy that you would sit down with someone from HR on your way out the door and ask you several questions. These questions dealt with issues like where are you going, why are you leaving us, and what suggestions would you like to leave us with that would improve how we do things. What I didn’t realize at the time (ah, how young we once were) was that the real reason for an exit interview is to determine if the firm is going to be sued by a disgruntled employee. Pretty much everything else that you say is nice, may be noted, but really doesn’t matter.

Seeing as most firms don’t know how to handle your leaving, what’s an IT worker to do? First, you need to realize that once you announce that you are leaving the company, everything instantly changes. Some firms will show you the door immediately. Others will give you two weeks to wrap things up, but you will instantly be treated as an outsider. Even if you are willing to work at full force for those last two weeks, you are now officially a “short timer” and nobody really wants to work with you any more. What this means is that if there is anything that you really need to hand off or wrap up, you should do it BEFORE you announce that you are going to be leaving. This is always tricky to do because your close team members may start to guess that something is up. You can handle this in two ways: lie, or tell them that you are considering some offers but have not yet made up your mind. Lying is never a good idea even if it seems like the easy way out — the truth always comes out eventually. Slowing introducing everyone to the idea that you might/are leaving seems to allow everyone time to come to grips with it.

The new job that you are planning on leaving your current firm for probably looks like the best job in the world: great cube, great people, fabulous pay, undreamed of perks, etc. Please note: the last thing in the world that you want to do is to tell everyone about these reasons for your leaving. No matter how good a teammate they were, this will make them turn green with envy and that is never a good thing. I’ve always found that telling everyone that I felt that I had completed what I had joined the firm to do and that the new firm had offered me a challenge that I just couldn’t pass up seems to satisfy most folks and does not produce a great deal of ill will.

I guess that it goes without saying that in the world of IT there is always a good chance that you’ll be working again with some of the folks that you are leaving. Yet another reason to leave on good terms!

Posted in envy, exit interview, new job, perks, short timer | 1 Comment »

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