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Measuring Developers Isn’t Tyranny

Informing someone that you want to “measure” them is not a great way to start a conversation. Software developers, like all people, tend to look unfavorably upon having their performance closely measured. But measuring developers is one of the hottest trends for companies around the globe. So is it tyranny to measure people?

People are quick to note that numbers don’t tell the whole story and can become defensive at the notion their productivity should be quantified somehow. This resistance can become even more entrenched when teams become stacked against each other. 

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What Does a Transparent and Secure Digital Workplace Look Like?

Over 25 percent of employees don’t trust their employers, and an even greater 50 percent think that their employers aren’t open or upfront with them. The lack of trust among employees is due to the lack of transparency in the workplace. 

In digitally transformed organizations with digitized workflows, decentralized teams, and remote employees, embracing and maintaining transparency across different workplace tools can become even more difficult. 

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The Top Drivers of Employee Engagement

These women certainly look engaged on the job.

 (Could employee engagement be the key to customer happiness and business success? According to a recent study by the Harvard Business Review, they are directly linked as engagement performance indicators.

However, the study found that only 24 percent of respondents said their employees were engaged even though 71 percent rank employee engagement as very important to achieving organizational success.

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Employee Engagement Is *Not* HR’s Job

If only employee engagement could be solved with a ring...

I just came across a wonderful post from the Harvard Business Review on not only how to keep employees happy but also engaged in their work (because let's be honest, they really are an extension of the same thing).

As I'm sure most of you reading this are aware, keeping employees engaged in their work is a worldwide challenge for many businesses. There are, however, many ways to fix this challenge and improve productivity across the entire company.

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Agile Isn’t Just for the Tech Sector Anymore

Even doctors can learn a thing or two hundred.

These days, Agile has grown beyond the IT sector and is being successfully applied in marketing, sales management, logistics, corporate governance, and more. 

Agile encompasses both the culture and the methodology that allows companies to adapt to the changes in the most effective manner.

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Continual Adaptability > Digital Transformation

I had the opportunity to meet with and hear Mike Hendrickson, V.P. of Technology and Developer Products at Skillsoft, during their Perspectives 2019 user conference. Mike joined Skillsoft last July after long stints at O'Reilly Media, Pearson Education, and Addison Wesley Professional.

Mike is a big believer in organizations focusing on continual adaptability rather than digital transformation since every company will be adapting to changes like new markets, new technology, and ever-changing customer expectations until they are no longer in business. From Mike's perspective, about 20% of the companies are good at continuously adapting, innovating at an order of magnitude with a customer-centric empowered workforce.

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Stripe’s Will Larson on Designing a Performance Management System from Scratch

"In Engineering, we tend to hold this idea that these people systems —career ladders, performance reviews, calibration — are these evil things that aren't very valuable. They're thought of as bureaucracy. But it's a shame. These are really powerful systems, and I'm actually excited to personally spend a lot of time with them."

Will Larson, who was previously an engineering leader at Digg and then Uber, now leads Foundation Engineering at Stripe. His organization partners with Infrastructure, Data, and Developer Productivity teams to build the tools that support every Stripe engineer and keep Stripe reliable and performant.

You can go about building a performance management system in uncountable ways, but Larson points out that most of them are comprised of three core elements: career ladders, performance designations, and performance cycles. These combined systems focus your team's efforts on the activities and metrics that ultimately help the organization succeed, by providing direct feedback to engineers on how valuable their work is (and by measuring it against expectations).