Wednesday 18 May 2016

Employee Churn - Finding the Curve

How relationships can help you find the curve drivers for employee churn

The old saying “employee's leave a bad manager, not a bad company” may have allot of truth to it but it’s not the full story.  A leave decision by an employee is often made after considering a wider set of criteria internal and external to the company including points of a more personal nature.

Did you ever note that exit interviews often provide a “nice” picture of the company by the exiting employee with a less flattering account on Glassdoor? This begs the question, what drives an employee to leave the company? Bad Manager? Sure.. this is a regular reason but not the only one… What about role, environment, organisational structure, peers, subordinates, other “silos” in the organisation, customers, 3rd parties, under use of talent, over use of talent and of course compatibility with company culture??? Do they factor in the decision to leave?

Forbes ran an article producing employee survey results where 31% of chronically overworked employees thought of leaving the company for another job and 15% of employees who ranked company culture poorly were of the same mindset. So, spinning up the correlation engine, what element has a strong correlation with everything else in the decision for an employee to leave? “Relationships” is the answer. How they are structured is critical to understanding and addressing the reasons for employees leaving, which range from small issues to structural issues within the organisation.

Does the fix sounds like a big task? It sure does but if you approach it from an angle of starting with the end in mind, you will see how your organisational structure, management style, business process management infrastructure, leadership styles, environmental management (Facilities & HR) and resulting company culture impact the employee’s ability to conduct and maintain relationships in the workplace. Contrary to popular belief, a normal person does not want to be a millionaire at all costs, they want to be happy by making a positive impact on their company and society in general. In order to be happy, an employee needs to be reasonably able to maintain relationships in support of this overall disposition within their company’s paradigm of existence. This is where relationships come in with peers creating a good atmosphere and managers/leaders supporting this through consultative leadership. This includes tactical delegation of the appropriate amount of tasks that are framed in a genuine manner as meaningful and important to the company. Many overlook this due to “been busy”, which is counter productive as a valuable employee moving on will make the leader even more busy coping with the loss of the employee and filling their shoes in an unplanned manner! Good leaders count as does a good company.

In my quest for understanding in new leadership roles over the years, my high level approach implementing the above in a functional role has been the following:
  • Know Your Team -   Know your team, what frustrates them, what makes them happy and what creates obstacles in getting the job done (start with the end in mind)
  • Know Who Interacts with your Team - Introduce yourself to management and leadership peers, find out what makes them happy, excited, frustrated and sad. Find out how they interact with your team
  • Understand the process - understanding the business processes around what your team does and how it interacts with the company internal and external to customers and 3rd parties noting bottlenecks, inefficiencies and pain points for your team
  • Research the Company culture and organisational structure - from experience there is no real point in creating an adhocracy sub culture in a company that has a dominant dictatorial culture. You will only be targeted at best by other “silos” if you succeed and it could send your team into even more disarray if you fail. Loosely align best practice to culture before you start to make changes as this factors into the happiness (& productivity) of your employees.
  • Be a genuine leader - I have met many pretend leaders who care only for their own interests and come across as fake leaders out for themselves. Don’t be that guy, your employees cannot have a genuine relationship with a fake leader!
  • Build together - as a believer in consultative leadership, I can tell you from experience that sustainable processes which work are built when collaboration (versus coercion) happens within a team in developing a process from the ground up. Its acceptance and deployment are far more successful then when a process is designed and deployed by force upon a team. We need to feel important in our roles and employees feel the same way, which is why inclusion not imposition needs to underpin any new team venture. After all, we need to know that what we do matters!




It’s a hard sell to some and an easy sell to others based on belief and leadership orientation. Even if you reject the above approach, just be consistent with your approach knowing that relationships are key to employee retention. If you do, you become more effective from the get-go leaving rest up to you…

About the author: John Mulhall is a Community Manager and newly Minted Software Developer. John is also a committed blogger and from February 2016 onwards, will be publishing blogs every second week on topics around Technology, Leadership and Sustainable Capitalism.

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Wednesday 4 May 2016

Open Source Software (OSS) - Let's Show The Love

Why community matters for the future of software talent, products and the industry as a whole

We all love those stand up guys who volunteer first, arrive early and are last to leave from meetups, collaborations and indeed anything software related. They are sharing the passion, they are showing the love!! This is the good side of software as defined by the people within the industry who seek a better world through software using their passion to drive progress in an impressive way.
These channels of passion ultimately lead to the open source movement and in recent years have transformed the industry into a collaborative landscape where more and more software professionals are building their own products. They are contributing to more and more engineering led projects that are “pure” software in terms of process and culture. Many in established business are not comfortable with this as the threat of disruption is ever present when you have a collaboration of highly skilled software professionals in a room focused on a single problem. This may in part arise from the need for management ‘control’ (v ‘influence’) in allot of company cultures. This has often caused culture clashes between software professionals and management trying to stamp a traditional leadership style on a team leading to resistance and culture clashes to boot. It’s my view that this lack of understanding coupled with passion for software is one of the elements that has fuelled the transition to the open source model where software professionals freely collaborate over common problems they are passionate about leading to real world solutions that often carry commercial value.
So, with the rise of Web 2.0, the startup industry and the freemium model for tech companies in full swing, there are some highly profitable businesses out there that have their origins in the open source movement and prove the open source paradigm of collaboration does work turning more and more its detractors into supporters as time passes. Since the “OSS” train has left the station, we all should not forget where we are and where we come from when it comes to the open source movement. We should show the love in OSS through the following:
  • Enable a better quality of life with a life long commitment to the open source movement and the real world problems it solves
  • Widen scope from the selective and often poorly structured curriculum of education, which produces newly minted software developers and engineers. This should be done by providing entry points into software through community education free of charge for those aspiring to be software professionals
  • Provide continuous learning and development for established software professionals in upgraded and newly released products via community learning and education
  • Provide facilities free of charge to identified open source community groups that engage in community education and learning for new as well as established software professionals
  • Understand what actually makes a good software professional and identify these personalities upon entry into a the community education network ergo the community will retain and develop such individuals as part of OSS succession planning.
  • Work with industry under a common mission statement on what makes for a successful partnership with the open source software movement




What makes it all happen? I think it's simply passionate software professionals who by nature, not by training or experience care deeply about they do and want their skills to make a difference in the world. The more we actively show the love, the bigger the impact we have as a community. If we draw from our past and not let our past draw from us, we can make a better future that allows the OSS movement to take its rightful and sustainable place in the world today as the premiere software partner to business and society as a whole.

About the author: John Mulhall is a Community Manager and newly Minted Software Developer. John is also a committed blogger and from February 2016 onwards, will be publishing blogs every second week on topics around Technology, Leadership and Sustainable Capitalism.
Sources/Credits:
Pics;
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