What I Go To Work For

This is the (very slightly) edited text of an email I sent at work today to some puir wee soul who asked for my opinions on reward and recognition for IT people. After a long conversation with sil over Christmas I had a lot to get off my chest on this one. So here it is.

One other point. For the sake of this blog I work for a company known only as Large Bank, and I used to work for Large Brewer. Sooner or later I'm going to really put the boot in, so lets keep the lights off, eh?

Finally, I cut and paste this out of outlook, and its done that really irritating end a line halfway through thing, which is NFG. Why oh why oh why?

* * * * * * *

This is a response in two parts. The first is about what we did in
Large Brewer and how that went down with the guys, the second is more
about my own observations on this and the thoughts of friends of mine who
work in IT.

Just to start of with though, what are recognition schemes for?

Now, you'd be within your rights to say, what a daft question, its
obvious. Recognition schemes are there, to, well, recognise people.
Like, duh. Drilling a bit deeper, this means making a bit of a fuss of
someone who's done well and giving them a nice reward, a fountain pen, or
a weekend in the sun, or a slap up feed and a chance to rub elbows with
the great and good. Underneath that though, the ultimate underlying
reason is twofold. 1) make people prefer us as an employer, so they'll
come here in the first place and stay when they do, and 2) once they're
in, persuade them to work harder.

Unfortunately, I'm pretty certain that there are better ways to an
employee's heart than recognition schemes. But first, what happens down
the road and why it doesn't work

Large Brewer

We had a couple of formal recognition schemes, similar to the ones at Large Bank.
We had one process called Making A Difference (MAD), which was developed
and implemented by yours truly, in which employees could nominate their
peers for an award. The award was a Mont Blanc pen and a grand gala
dinner at Gleneagles. People's names were also published on the intranet
and in the company magazine.

After the conclusion of a large project we also used to reward IT staff
with holiday vouchers. The idea for that was to both reward people and
make them take some time off after several months in crunch mode.

In terms of building engagement, I'm not sure that either of them was
particularly successful. The holiday vouchers might have stopped a couple
of nervous breakdowns by making people lie on a beach for a week, but
that's about it. In fact, they jarred a lot of people off, because some
people got more vouchers than others and they couldn't see why, or they
couldn't redeem the voucher against they kind of holiday they wanted, or
they'd have preferred cash etc etc. In short, I saw no evidence
whatsoever that anyone stayed, joined or worked harder because of the
schemes. It was good to make a fuss of people who had toiled away in the
shadows for years, but we didn't need a formal programme to do that.

General Notes & Jottings On Recognition & Reward In IT

This is an article by a chap called Joel Spolsky. He's a very very good
programmer, used to work at Microsoft and a bunch of other places. He now
runs his own business in NYC. He's also got a lot of very interesting
things to say about managing people, and programmers in particular.

Here's the full article:

http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html

The key points are this:

* formal recognition schemes are counter productive and downright
damaging
* performance reviews are counter productive as well, because if you
get a cracking one, you just feel ok, but if you get a 3 or less, you feel
gutted. They upset more people than they motivate

And this is the reward scheme he's put in place at his own company:

http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html

He has a number of other interesting things to say about motivating and
rewarding IT people. I spent a while over Christmas talking about this
with a mate of mine who works in IT, me coming from an HR point of view,
and him as a hacker. (That's hacker as in good programmer, not as in
hack-into-the-CIA-mainframe-and-start-world-war-III, by the way.) We came
up with a few points after a lot of discussion (and a few beers). One is
generic, the others depend on the type of IT person you mean.

Generically, we agreed that the kind of recognition that works is the
informal kind from the business to the person. This is the same whether
its to a helpdesk or a programmer or what have you. There's no need for
formal schemes, they just get in the way (see above.) This recognition is
most effective when it come from a senior person in the business direct to
the recipient, not via their manager, though a cc to the manager is always
nice! Its simply good to feel appreciated and you don't need a branded
scheme to do it. IT people are a cynical bunch.

For people that actually write code for a living, its a bit more
complicated. I think if you are a knowledge worker, like a programmer,
then work environment is vital. Joel goes on and on about giving these
people their own offices where they can code away all day in peace without
getting distracted or their flow broken. We want them to spend as much
time in the zone as possible, so anything we can do to help that has got
be worth it.

The next thing is about kit. IT types love computers, so if they want
three flat screen monitors so they can see different things at once, or a
faster machine, or a palm pilot or a PowerBook to use at home, let them
have it. It costs less than a weekend in Athens and will make them very
happy. My friend tells a story about walking into his boss's office to
ask for a new laptop because his previous one was getting old. To his
utter astonishment his boss agreed, and his new laptop, a real cutting
edge one, arrived later that day. It made him think the company was
brilliant.

The final thing is about how they are managed. This is more important
than any recognition scheme on the face of the earth. In my own humble
opinion, the role of a manager of knowledge workers is to move things out
of their people's way to let them get on with it. This doesn't mean
fighting their battles for them, but it does mean keeping the battle field
clear. Good managers give their people clear tasks, the tools and the
support they need, and then let them get on with it. Then, when someone
succeeds, they watch the positive feedback roll in.

Oh, and free soda pop also helps.

Buy me an iriver

I've bought an iriver. Bet you never guessed from the title of this post. (By the way, sorry to my imaginary reader for the gap between my first post and this one. So perish all human dreams.) Anyway, iriver.

Its alright. Its got three significant problems and a whole bunch of things that are excellent about it, but I'm in a bad mood, so problems first. 1) its not as pretty as an ipod. So what if I like pretty? 2) It occasionally decides to slow down and speed up in the middle of songs. I sacked my tape walkman because it did that. And 3) it unmounts itself if you try to transfer a large file onto it. My thanks to sil for fixing that one for me when my only response was to scream abuse at it, which was theraputic but not very productive. It also irritating that I actually have to copy all my music onto it rather than it all appearing by magic, but I'm prepared to conceed that that is not its fault.

Now, good things. When I plug it into the computer it just appears as new icon on the desktop and I simply drag and drop music files into it, which is pretty damn cool. The remote control is rather natty as well, you just clip a thing the size of a box of tic tacs onto your lapel and control your music from there. So it doesn't matter that its ugly, 'cos it never leaves my pocket.

Anyway, buy one kids, 'cos that way you'll never have to listen to Hi-NRG disco in the gym again.

Incidentally, before Stu road over the digital horizon on his white horse and fixed my remounting problem, I emailed iriver about it. They replied thus:

"We are sorry that our products do not officially support Linux. Would you please connect your player with Microsoft Bollocks (I'm paraphrasing) and try again. Shira."

No I fucking won't. I like the "officially," but tell me Shira, does a little bit of your soul die every time you have to type something like that?

One of the problems with the Internet is that it provides a platform for muppets all over the wonderful world to give vent to their sloppy thinking, half baked invective and general witless ramblings where decent people may well come across it and be appalled, or at least mildly saddened. Holding a wide variety of daft and ill thought out opinions of my very own (or simply regurgitating them from whatever magazine I read last) I can't possibly let such an opportunity go begging, and have so decided to clog up one small corner of the world wide web with my own idiot ventings and dark mutterings.

I hope to bang on about a number of things on this blog until I get bored, forget or get a life, whichever comes first. Some of the topics I hope to move one jot away from common sense on this soap box include...

- Linux. I'm about a technically adept as a half brick in a sock, and yet I have just decided to run a Linux machine. The reasons behind this are a mixture of high principle and peer pressure. Anyway, I intend to catalogue my thoughts on my struggle with the penguin here.

- geopolitics. Some fool was once misguided enough to give me a qualification in history, which clearly means I can incisively analyse all aspects of world affairs, which I intend to do here. This may involve sustained personal attacks on the regime of George Sauron Bush (though not the good old USA as a whole, which remains a country I have the greatest affection for.)

- Football. I'm British and male and therefore think I know what I'm talking about here.

- Work. I work in HR (I also live in a warehouse conversion and drive a sports car. I'm going to hell, going to hell) and will record any insights I have into the balance between people and the corporate machine here. There must be some way to increase prosperity without buttfucking everyone involved in the process, and I will post it here just as soon as I think of it.

- anything else that oozes from the dank recesses of my mind, with may include but is not limited too - the works of Jack Vance, the music of Tom Waits, the treachery of England and the pride of France.

One other point. I can't spell, or punctuate, and have a flamboyant disregard for the rules of grammar, for all of which I apologise in advance.

Speaking of Vance, in one of his later novels (Nightlamp, if memory serves) he discusses an ancient people who each recorded their deeds in life in elaborate books that captured their personalities and acted as insights into their characters for others during their lives and after their deaths. The idea fascinates me, I have to say (I'd have loved to read a book in which my ancestors or people I admire recorded their impressions of the world) and it strikes me that a blog is way of doing this. Hopefully, the house ghouls that haunt the libraries in which these books moulder will not attempt to hide our journals from view. Woooooooo.

So, there we are. More news as it happens.