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I've just finished reading the moderately-controversial book Corporate Confidential by Cynthia Shapiro.  Shapiro, a former HR manager in various companies, purports to give away "50 secrets your company doesn't want you to know, and what to do about them."  A lot of people didn't like the book on account of it being overly cynical, portraying a workplace filled with politics, backstabbing, and hidden agendas where work performance doesn't really matter.

Honestly, there wasn't much of anything in the book I found surprising.  Her primary insight is that people respond to incentives, and thus management is less selected than evolved.  Managers are people who are good at being promoted to management -- in other words, what should be rewarded and what actually is are sometimes different, and the system is self-reinforcing.  Management tends to promote people who they see as being like them -- they know their recipe for success and look for others in the same mold.

As a result, appearance matters more than reality in the workplace.  This plays out in a wide variety of ways:

• Dress and personal appearance still matter.  Most IT folk work in "casual" workplaces where there is no official dress code.  However, we younger workers forget that when the previous generation came up with the idea of "casual dress" at work, they meant khakis and polo shirts, not unthinkable clothing like jeans and T-shirts with pithy sayings on them.   It doesn't matter that the policy says there's no dress code, there is.  I work in a "casual" workplace, make only modest concessions to businesswear (i.e. wearing polo or button-down shirts rather than T-shirts, and forgoing jeans), and have been complimented by older managers on my "professional appearance" at least three times in the last year.  Managers only promote people who look "manager-y" to them, and they have very distinct attitudes on what this is.  Of course, it can be taken too far (someone in a suit and tie at Microsoft would just look flat out weird), but Shapiro's advice is to dress like people at the level you want to be at, not the level you are at.
• Projecting optimism and a positive outlook are vital.  Employees are evaluated based on this more than any other single factor -- they project an aura of sucess.  Cynicism and pessimism -- which are very popular in the IT workplace -- project an aura of failure.  If you expect things to fail, they will; no one ever achieved victory by conceding defeat.  Managers also know that cynicism is contagious -- cynical employees "infect" others with the same attitude.  Appearances are so important that Shapiro suggests visibly disassociating yourself from the more cynical elements in an office, to avoid guilt by association or a perception that you've been "infected."
  
• No matter what your job description is, your job is to make your boss's life easier and to make him or her look good.  If you don't do those things, you'll never be promoted, because your boss acts as a gatekeeper -- without his endorsement, other managers will be unwilling to promote you.  Your manager's opinion of you becomes your reputation among other managers who don't work directly with you.  Thus, an adversarial relationship with your manager, even when he really deserves it, does not benefit you. 
  
• What the company says it values and what it really values may be different.  They may have a "work-life balance" campaign with posters around the office, but look around -- do all the managers work long hours?  If so, the company doesn't really value this at all, because it promoted the people who don't show that value.  If the managers go home at 5:00 and use all their vacation time, then the company really does value that.  Likewise, they may say they value a cooperative style, but if the managers are all really competitive, then they don't.  And no company values openness and honesty to the point of liking or even tolerating complaints or negativity, no matter how much they champion it.  If you don't "toe the party line" and demonstrate the company's actual values, they'll never promote you.
  
• Many workplaces are divided into "camps" -- management and employees have a largely opposed relationship.  If this is the case, and you want to get promoted, management has to see you as "one of us," and not "one of them."  However, cultivating this perception may make office friendships impossible.
  

Overall, the book tells you that you need to manage your perception in the workplace, and that political skills like making your boss look good, appearing professional, being positive, being a "cheerleader" for the company and demonstrating love and loyalty for it (regardless of if you actually have any) are much more important than how well you do your job.  Of course, you have to do your job at a base level of competency -- all the perception-management in the world won't do you any good if you really, really suck at your job -- but excellence in your actual responsibilities will probably not yield as great a reward as excellence in politics.

After reading the book... well, I didn't really find it cynical, just true.  Microsoft has actually hired Shapiro as a consultant, and I can see why, as her book describes their management culture very well.  Whether they hired her to find out how to change this culture remains to be seen.

Alternative working arrangements, where you're not in daily contact with your manager and coworkers, go a long way toward alleviating these concerns.  The only office that really has no dress code is the one in your house.   You also have a great deal more control over your perception -- you don't directly fraternize with coworkers, and most communication is written (email), so it's easier to "fake" positivity if you need to do so.  (Personally, I'm preposterously optimistic, so this is not a problem for me.  I'd look on the bright side of a train wreck.)  And finally, since less of you is seen save for the actual output of your work efforts, you're less able to be judged by things other than the actual output of your work efforts.

In a way, Shapiro describes exactly what I hate about the office environment -- the subordination of productivity to largely irrelevant matters.  On the other hand, much of what she says applies regardless of work environment -- you can still look unprofessional in an email (hint: "u" and "ur" are not words), and your attitude and outlook shine through in things beyond just in-person communication.  Remembering that your job is to make your boss's life easier and improve his standing and appearance is useful no matter what your actual office environment is.

Posted by Grant at 03:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Vital to career success in the modern office environment is the concept of "Visibility."  This is the idea that, in order to get ahead, you have to ensure that your work is visible to managers and others who will be responsible for your career success.  In some places this is transparent (indeed, at one job I held employees were actually advised during their performance reviews about things that will maximize their visibility), whereas at others it's obscure, but it's always there.

On the surface, this doesn't seem like a bad thing.  After all, what's wrong with making people aware of the work you're doing?  If you work hard and accomplish a lot, shouldn't your managers know about it and reward you for it?  Besides, how can you be rewarded for things they don't know?

However, visibility can actually turn out to be quite a big problem in a software development organization, impacting both productivity and morale to a great degree.  And there are two fundamental reasons:

1.)  You may have heard the phrase "It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit."  This is by and large true.  So is its inverse.
2.)  The usefulness of a task and its visibility are not necessarily related.  In fact, it is often true that fake work is more visible than real work.

These are both a serious problem because people respond to incentives.  The attempt by various employees to achieve objectives in a maximally visible fashion means that they care very much who gets the credit.  From a purely self-interested perspective, it is important for you to get the credit for a task being completed well, no matter who does the most important work.  The initial result of this is that it encourages dishonesty and backstabbing -- people will emphasize their own role in a project while downplaying others.  After all, decreasing others' visibility increases your own.  But the worse impact this has is that it is better, in a purely self-interested sense, for a project to not be completed than for it to be completed without your visible effort.  After all, you can only work on so many things at a time.  If you don't have time to work on project B because you're busy with project A, you can do whatever you need to to delay project B until it can command your attention.  In addition, it strongly encourages fiefdom-building: ensure that you are responsible for everything whether you should be or not.  Managers try to get every project under the sun placed in their organization, not because of any logical synergy but so they can take the credit for the project when it's finally completed.  Often this results in overburdened organizations, unrealistic schedules, and delayed projects that could have been already completed by another team.

Fiefdoms are poisonous to any large organization.  When managers actively encourage their organizations not to cooperate with others, and to hoard tasks and responsibilities on their team, cross-group collaboration becomes largely impossible.  The product suffers as a result -- valuable integration opportunities are lost, and investigating bugs that cross team boundaries becomes very difficult.  A fiefdom environment cultivates the idea that another team's priorities are not your priorities at all; incentive to help others within the organization drops to zero.  Often this happens without the managers realizing what they've created -- they wonder why the members of their team are so slow to help out other teams without being directly ordered to, not realizing that it's their own priorities that have this result.

Thus, an environment in which everyone cares about visibiltiy creates an incentive to build fiefdoms and interact in a competitive fashion.  In addition, it creates an incentive to prioritize tasks based on their visibility, not their priority to the organization.

The most visible work is not always the most useful.  Indeed, a person's most useful work in a development environment is generally their day-to-day tasks -- writing code on features they own, finding or fixing bugs, maintaining the build system or IT environment, etc.  Maintaining the status quo is often a person's primary responsibility.  Of course, maintaining the status quo is entirely invisible; visibility requires being an agent for change.  Change, good or bad, is noticed.  Now, it's definitely preferable to be visible for good changes rather than bad ones, but there's some truth to the idea that all press is good press (unless it's really bad.)

Prioritizing based on visibility leads to make-work.  People invent their own projects and tasks that impact multiple groups and then pursue them because they know that impact will be noticed.  If this leads to neglecting their day-to-day tasks, so be it; no one notices those anyway.  The most vital work then coasts by with minimum attention (just enough to avoid appearing less productive than other employees), while the real work goes into "special projects."

This may seem mostly theoretical -- atfer all, most people are basically good.  They do not intentionally look for ways to abuse the system, to exploit their employer to get as much as possible out of them for as little effort, no matter what dishonesty or abusive behavior that requires.   Good employees do not want to engage in this sort of behavior -- we went into development and high-tech fields because we genuinely like the technology, and we want to see it work properly and succeed.  Surely we're not all out there neglecting the product and the organization in order to show off, are we?

Well, some people are.  People respond to incentives.  The degree varies -- the good people are harder to corrupt than the bad ones.  But if you reward bad behavior, and punish good behavior, you must expect to get some degree of bad behavior.  What's more, in the evaluation and performance review cycle is the worst place to do this, because it results in the worst people rising to the top.  Organizational hierarchies operate under Darwinian principles -- those with the best survival characteristics (visibility) will survive and advance.  The problem is that these people are the ones least likely to break the cycle -- they're the ones who profit from a culture emphasizing visibility over substance, why would they want to alter it?  I think most people who have been in an office environment for a few years have seen someone who moves up not by skill or ability in their field but by skill in politics.

Those of us who aren't manipulated by such incentives, on the other hand, face another problem -- morale suffers.  We're stuck with a choice of "do what you know is best, and be punished for it, or do what you recognize as worthless make-work, and reap the rewards."  Either choice leads to dissatisfaction -- either the feeling of injustice from not being rewarded for the contribution you know you've made, or the feeling of futility from spending time and effort on minutiae.  And where does this dissatisfaction emerge?  In the best employees, the ones an organization as a whole most wants to retain.  I feel like I'm wasting my time, but the politicians are satisfied.

So how does an organization fight the culture of visibility?  A few ways come to mind:

1.)  For God's sake, don't outright encourage it.  I don't think organizations that do this realize the ultimate conclusions that their policies lead to, or the incentives they're creating.  On the other hand, are the organizations consciously encouraging it... or are managers, recognizing the implications of the culture, just trying to warn their employees of the sort of system-gaming required to get ahead?

2.)   Use objective measures when possible.  In the development world this often isn't possible, since metrics like tests run or lines of code written are often meaningless absent some context.  However, some objective measures can be used -- such as on-time deliveries, deadlines met, budgets met or exceeded.  Any measure is better than "did the other managers like you."

3.)  Managers need to actually understand what their employees do.  This cuts down on fake work.  If your manager does not really know what you do, it becomes quite irrelevant how well you do it so long as you can spin it well.  While managers specialized in managing makes sense in most industries, it does not make sense in IT and development -- managers need to have actually done the sort of work their employees do.  This is a strong plus to promoting from within -- something that organizations seem increasingly reluctant to do, preferring to hire someone from without with "management experience" than take a chance on a bright internal.  It is extremely easy to pull the wool over the eyes of a development manager who doesn't do any development.

4.)  Keep people who don't understand what the employee does out of the performance review process.  Having other managers give their input may sound like a good idea -- after all, what better way to reward cross-group collaboration? -- but those people are even easier to fool.

Posted by Grant at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

The cubicle (or "systems furniture," as no one actually calls it) has to be the most reviled piece of office furniture ever created.  Ostensibly for fitting more office workers into a smaller space without compromising productivity, what the cubicle actually accomplishes is to create a work environment that produces the illusion of productivity, while actually making its occupants unhappy and possibly unproductive as well.

The primary message a cubicle sends is "you are being watched."  Walls that block no sound and wide openings instead of doors mean that you can't have phone conversations (and are forced to listen to everyone else's), and that you must be constantly aware that anyone walking down the hallway can see precisely what you're doing.  The book Workplaces of the Future called them "bright satanic offices."  We've created a panopticon workplace, and seem surprised that people feel like they're in a prison.

It's an open secret that almost no one in IT actually spends every moment of their workday working.  People (especially people with ubiquitous Internet access, which in IT is almost everybody) take impromptu breaks, check news sites, read blogs, look up sports scores, etc.  The openness of the cubicle environment seems to aim to eliminate all that, by making it obvious when people are not productive.

But this underestimates people's desire to get away from work for a moment.  People still do the same things they'd do in a private, enclosed office -- only now they do it with an eye over their shoulder (or stick a convex mirror on their monitor.)  Instant messenger clients include a "boss key" to quickly hide conversations.  How much stress is introduced into the workplace this way?  After all, now instead of just being unproductive, people get to be unproductive and worried as well.

The unfortunate fact is that the apperance of productivity is generally valued a lot more than actual productivity.  Actual productivity is sometimes difficult to measure -- but whether or not someone's surfing the web when the boss walks by is obvious and memorable.  The office workers know this, so they try to maintain the appearance of productivity all the time, regardless of if they're actually productive or not.

The problem here is that the managers designing offices are trying to figure out a way to make people work harder and more consistently.  After this much time in the IT industry, I've come to a different conclusion -- everyone has an individual level of productivity, and only they can change it.  What's more, everyone has an individual working style, and "an 8-hour block with a 30-minute lunch break" is not the preferred style for all (or even most) workers.  Anything done to attempt to force people into greater productivity instead forces them into greater attempts to disguise how their working style differs from the "norm."  And the time and effort used in this disguising doesn't come out of slack -- it comes out of work.  This isn't to say that people's productivity can't be improved -- it most certainly can.  But this has to be done by providing incentives to be more productive, and those incentives only work on people who want to be more productive.

Instead of spending 6 hours working and 2 surfing the web, if you make that employee feel he has to maintain the illusion of productivity all the time, he'll spend 5 hours working, 2 surfing the web, and 1 hiding the fact that he spent 2 surfing the web.  But he's rewarded for the illusion of productivity he creates, in a way he'd likely never be rewarded for actual productivity.

The biggest problem, from a my perspective, is that unproductive time spent at work is wasted.  It's not that people want to spend 2 hours surfing the web -- it's that they want to spend 2 hours doing something other than work, and the requirement of appearing productive means that they can't use that time on something useful.  They'd rather read a novel, or play a video game, or go shopping, or sit down with their families... but none of those activities have a "boss key."  In requiring people to work for a fixed number of hours under observation, we don't get more productivity -- we get the same amount of productivity for the company while destroying the worker's ability to produce for himself.

Indeed, some of my most productive time at one of my jobs was when I was sharing an office with a friend.  Using breaks to talk to someone I actually enjoyed talking to (as opposed to most coworkers -- while I've always liked my coworkers and gotten along well with them, in general I feel no desire to socialize with them about non-work matters) rather than pointlessly surf the web seemed to make the time "count for more" and make me better able to go back to productive work quickly.  And for me, the truly ideal person to talk to during such breaks would be my wife -- hence some of telecommuting's appeal.

People who work outside of the office environment (whether that's from a home office, from Starbucks, or wherever) are freed from having to maintain the illusion.  They can work, and not work, as their own preferences dictate.  Sure, there are some people who would never get anything done working from home -- but they usually know this.  They know that there are too many distractions for them at home and they wouldn't be productive, so if they were choosing a workspace "on their own" they would probably choose to go to some other environment to get work done (one of my friends uses the local library.)  They can work whatever hours they choose, subject only to the relatively lax requirement of being reachable via phone or email during some approximation of business hours.  And if those hours happen to be "30 minutes of each hour for 10 hours"... so be it.

"But, then they're not working an 8-hour day!" is of course the objection.  Here's the thing, though -- I bet that worker isn't working an 8-hour day in his cubicle, either.  Managers need to measure, not the amount of work time, but the amount of output a worker produces.  What does it matter if Mary only works 5 hours if she accomplishes as much as Bob does in 8?  Why should Jim get a raise for working 12-hour days if he only accomplishes what Fred does in 6?

Unfortunately, measuring output is hard.  You can't measure a programmer based on lines of code he writes -- some lines of code are harder to write than others.  You can't measure a tester based on bugs found -- when I was working on stress and performance at a software company, I would sometimes take a week or more to find, isolate, and identify a fix for a single bug (usually some hairy multithreaded race condition), during which time someone testing, say, UI components might identify dozens of bugs.   We'd both be doing a good job, just at different tasks that require different metrics.

This said, I am not delighted to waste an hour or two of my day because a manager can't tell if I do good work or not.  If a manager doesn't know who is and is not productive on his team he is failing to manage, just as a college professor who has to grade based on attendance is failing to teach.  If you can pass the class without showing up, then either the teacher isn't very good or the bureaurcracy put you in a class you never should have been in.  Likewise, if you can not do your job, routinely, without your manager noticing then either your manager isn't very good or your job is unnecessary.

It seems at least some people are noticing (from Fortune magazine):
If working at home is now part of the zeitgeist, one very large employer that seems increasingly tapped in is the U.S. government. Congressman Frank Wolf, a Republican whose Virginia district is home to many federal worker bees, has made telecommuting his pet project. "There is nothing magic in strapping ourselves into a metal box every day only to drive to an office where we sit behind a desk working on a computer," he told a congressional committee.

Wolf sees telecommuting as a way to decrease traffic, reduce air pollution, increase productivity, and frustrate terrorists. In 2004 he launched a campaign to penalize government agencies by docking funds if they fail to support telecommuting. Now the SEC, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and four other big agencies are required to offer every eligible worker the opportunity to telecommute.  [...]

Coming to the office for meetings and in-person collaboration is still important, of course, but as Brand points out, "People are realizing they don't need face-to-face time all the time."

It's a start.  Who'd have thought change would begin in the government?

Posted by Grant at 08:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)