Defining a “Good Job”

In line with establishing the right environment to achieve Excellence by Design, I thought it would be worthwhile to explore the various dimensions that define a great workplace.

In my experience, these conversations can tend to be skewed in one or two directions, but rarely seem holistic in terms of thinking through the various aspects of the employee experience. Maintaining a healthy workplace and driving retention is ultimately about striking the right balance for an individual on terms ultimately defined by them.

I’ll cover the concept at an overall level, then address each of the dimensions in how I think of them in our current post-covid and employee-driven environment.

The Seven Dimensions

At a broad-level, the attributes that I believe define an employee’s experience are:

What you do
Who you work for
Who you work with
Where you work
What you earn
Culture
Work/life balance

In terms of maintaining a productive workplace, I believe that a motivated, engaged employee will ultimately want the majority of the above dimensions to be in line with their expectations.

As a litmus test, take a look at each of the above attributes and ask whether that aspect of your current job is where it should be (in a “yes”/”no”/”sort of” context). If “sort of” was an answer, I’d argue that should be counted as a “no”, because you’re presumably not excited, or you would have said “yes” in the first place. If three or more of your answers are “no”, you probably aren’t satisfied with your job and would consider the prospect of a change if one arose.

While it can be the case that a single attribute (e.g., being significantly undercompensated, having serious issues with your immediate manager) can lead to dissatisfaction and (ultimately) attrition, my belief is that each of us tend to consider most of the above dimensions when we evaluate the conditions of our employment or other opportunities when they arise.

From the perspective of the employer, the key is to think through how the above dimensions are being addressed to create balance and a positive environment for the employees at an individual level. Anecdotally, that balance translates into how someone might describe their job to a third-party, such as “I work a lot of long hours… BUT… I’m paid very well for what I do”. In this example, while work/life balance may be difficult, compensation is indexed in a way that it makes up for the difference and puts things into balance. Similarly, someone could say “I don’t make a lot of money… BUT… I love the people I work with and what I get to do each day.”

The key question from a leadership standpoint is whether we only consider one or two dimensions in “attracting and retaining the best talent” or if instead we are thoughtful and deliberate about considering the other mechanisms that drive true engagement. What we do with intention turns into meaningful action… and what we leave to chance, puts employees in a potentially unhealthy situation that exposes companies to unnecessary risk of attrition (not to mention a poor reputation in the marketplace as a prospective employer).

Having laid that overall foundation, I’ll provide some additional thoughts on the things that I believe matter in each dimension.

What you do

Fundamental to the employee experience is the role you play, the title you hold, how well it aligns to your aspirations, and whether you derive your desired level satisfaction from it, even if that manifestation is as simple as a paycheck.

Not everyone wants to solve world hunger and that’s ok. Aligning individual needs and capabilities to what people do every day creates the conditions for success and job satisfaction.

One simple thing that can be done from an employer’s standpoint beyond looking for the above alignment is to recognize and thank people for the work they do on an ongoing basis. It amazes me how the easiest thing to do is say “thank you” when people do a good job, and yet how often that isn’t acknowledged. Recognition can mean so much to the individual, to know their work is appreciated and valued, yet it is something I’ve seen lacking in nearly every organization I’ve worked over the last thirty years. Often the reasoning given is that leaders are “too busy”, which is unfortunate, because no one should ever be so busy that a “thank you” isn’t worth the time it takes to send it.

Who you work for

There is an undeniable criticality to the relationship between an employee and their immediate manager, but I believe the perception of the broader leadership in the organization matters as well.

Starting at the manager, the litmus test for a healthy situation could be some of the following questions:

Is there trust between the individual and their manager?
Does the employee believe their manager has their best interest at heart and is invested in them, personally and professionally?
Does the employee believe their manager will be an effective advocate for them in terms of compensation, advancement, exposure to other opportunities, etc.?
Does the employee see their manager as an enabler or as an obstacle when it comes to decision making?
Does the employee derive meaningful feedback and coaching that helps them learn and develop their capabilities over time?
Does the employee feel comfortable, supported, and recognized in their day-to-day work, especially when they take risks in the interest of pursuing innovation and stretch goals?

At an organizational level, the questions are slightly different, but influence the situation as well:

Does the organization recognize, appreciate, and promote individual contributions and accomplishments?
Does the organization promote and demonstrate a healthy and collaborative climate amidst and across its leadership?
Do the actions of leaders follow their words? Is there integrity and transparency overall?

Again, while the tendency is to think about the employee experience in terms of their immediate manager, how they perceive the organizational leadership as a whole matters, because it can contribute to their willingness to stay and possibly become part of that leadership team down the road. Is that environment a desirable place for an employee to be? If not, why would they contribute at a level that could lead them there?

Who you work with

The people you work with in the context of your job can take on multiple dimensions, especially when you are in a services business (like consulting), where your environment is a combination of people from your organization and the clients with whom you work on an ongoing basis. Having worked with some highly collaborative and also some very aggressive clients over the years, those interactions can definitely have an impact on your satisfaction with what you do, particularly if those engagements are longer-term assignments.

From an “internal” standpoint, your team (for those leading others), your peers, your internal customers, and so on tend to define your daily experience. While I consider culture separate from the immediate team, there is obviously a relationship between the two.

Regardless of the overall culture of the organization, as I wrote about in my Engaged Leadership and Setting the Tone article, our day-to-day interactions with those directly collaborating with us can be very different.

Some questions to consider in this regard:

Do individuals contribute in a healthy way, collaborate and partner effectively, and maintain a generally positive work environment?
Do people listen and are they accepting of alternate points of view?
Does the environment support both diversity and inclusion?
Is there a “we” versus a “me” mentality in place?
Do you trust the people with whom you’re working on an ongoing basis?
Can you count on the people with whom you work to deliver on their commitments, take accountability, communicate with you effectively, and help you out when you need it?

Again, there are many dimensions that come into the daily experience of an employee, and it depends on the circumstances and role in terms of what to consider in evaluating the situation.

Where you work

In the post-covid era, I think of location in terms of three dimensions, the physical location of where you work, whether you can work remotely, and the level of travel that is required as part of your job.

For base location, there can be various considerations that weigh in on the employee experience, assuming they physically need to go to the workplace. Ease of access (e.g., if it’s in a congested metropolitan area), nearby access to other points of interest (e.g., something major cities offer, but smaller, rural locations generally don’t), the level and nature of commuting involved (and whether that is manageable), cost of living considerations, the safety of the area surrounding the workplace itself, etc.

Where remote work is an option, I’m strongly biased towards leaning in the direction of employee preference. If an individual wants to be in the office, then there should be reasonable accommodation for it, but conversely, if they prefer a fully remote environment, then that should be supported as well. In the world of technology, given that distributed teams and offshoring have been in place for decades, it’s difficult to argue that it’s impossible to be effective in an environment where people aren’t physically co-located. Where collaboration is beneficial, certainly it is possible to bring people together in a workshop-type setting and hammer out specific things. My belief is, however, that it’s possible to work in a largely remote setting and maintain healthy relationships so long as people are more deliberate (e.g., scheduling individual meetings to connect) than when they are physically co-located.

Finally, when it comes to travel, this is again measured on the preferences of an individual. I’ve gone from jobs where there was little to no travel involved to one where I did the “road warrior” life and traveled thirty-three weeks in one year… and it was grueling. That being said, I have friends who have lived on the road for many years (largely in consulting) and loved it, so empirically the impact of travel on job satisfaction depends on lot on the person and whether they enjoy it.

What you earn

Compensation is actually one of the easier dimensions to cover, because it’s tangible and measurable. As an employer, you either compensate people in relation to the market value of the work they are performing, or you don’t, but the data is available and employees can do their own due diligence to ascertain whether your compensation philosophy is to be competitive or not. With market conditions being what they are, it seems self-defeating to not be competitive in this regard, because there are always abundant opportunities out there for capable people, and not paying someone fairly seems like a very avoidable reason to lose talent.

Where I have apprehension in the discussion, both as an employee and a person who has communicated it to individuals, is when an organization approaches the conversation as “let’s educate you on how to think about total compensation”… and then presents a discussion on everything other than base pay. Is there a person who doesn’t consider their paycheck as their effective compensation on an ongoing basis? Conversely, is there anyone who has left a job because the primary reason was they didn’t like the choice in healthcare provider in the benefit plan or the level of a 401(k) matching contribution? The latter scenarios are certainly possible, though I doubt they represent the majority of compensation-related attrition situations.

Of course, variable compensation can and does matter from an overall perspective, as do other forms of incentives such as options, equity, and so forth. I’ve worked in organizations and seen models that involve pretty much every permutation, including where variable compensation is formula-based (with or without performance inputs), fixed at certain thresholds, or determined on a largely subjective basis. That being said, in a tough economy with the cost of about everything on the rise, most people aren’t going to look towards a non-guaranteed variable income component (discretionary or otherwise) to help them cover their ongoing living expenses. Nice to have? Absolutely. The foundation for a sense of employee security in an organization? Definitely not.

Culture

Backing up to the experience of the workplace as a whole, I separate culture from the people with whom an employee works for a reason. In most organizations, culture is manifest in two respects: what a company suggests it is and what it actually is.

Across the seven organizations where I’ve been fortunate to work over the last thirty years, only two of them actually seemed to live into the principles or values that they expressed as part of their culture. The implication for the other five organizations was that the actual culture was something different and, to the extent that reality was not always healthy, it had a negative impact on the desirability of the workplace overall.

The role culture can play can be both energizing and engaging to the degree it is a positive experience. If it is the opposite, then the challenge becomes what was referenced in the team section, which is your ability to establish a “culture within the culture” that is healthier for the individual employee. This is somewhat of a necessary evil from my perspective, because changing an overall culture within an organization is extremely challenging (if not impossible) and takes a really long time, even with the best of intentions. In practice, having a sub-culture that is associated with a team is, at best, a short-term fix however, because ultimately most teams need to partner and collaborate with others outside their individual unit and unhealthy behaviors and communication in a culture at large will eventually erode the working dynamics within that high performance team.

Work/life balance

The final dimension is somewhat obvious and, again, very subjective, which is the level of work/life balance an individual is able to maintain and how well that aligns to their goals and needs. In some cases, it can be that someone works more than is “required” because they enjoy what they are doing, are highly motivated, or seeking to expand their knowledge or capability in some way. The converse, however, can also be true where an individual works in an unsustainable way, their personal needs suffer, and they end up eventually becoming less productive at work.

From the perspective of the employer, at a minimum it is a good idea to have managers check in with their team members to understand where they are in terms of having the right balance and do what they can to help enable employees to be in a place that works for them. To the extent these discussions don’t happen, then some of the aspects of the relationship between an employee and their immediate manager may suffer and the impact from this dimension could be felt in other areas as well.

Wrapping up

So, bringing things together, the goal was to introduce the various dimensions of what makes a work environment engaging and positive for an employee, along with some thoughts on how I think of each of them.

If I were to attach a concept/word to each to define what good looks like, I would suggest:

What you do – REWARDING
Who you work for – TRUSTED
Who you work with – ENERGIZING
Where you work – CONVENIENT
What you earn – REASONABLE
Culture – EMPOWERING
Work/life balance – ALIGNED

To the degree that leaders pay attention to how they are addressing each of these seven areas, individually and collectively, I believe it will have a positive impact on the average employee experience, productivity and engagement, and the performance of the organization overall.

I hope the thoughts were worth the time spent reading them. Feedback, as always, is welcome.

-CJG 06/16/2022

Excellence By Design

Background

As I began this journey and subsequently to assemble topics about which to write, I noticed that there were both an overwhelming set of ideas coming (a good problem to have) and a very unclear relationship in the concepts that were running quite rapidly through my mind (not a good thing).

Upon further reflection, it occurred to me that the ideas all centered around the various dimensions of leading a technology organization at different levels of specificity. To that end, I thought I should set the stage a bit, in the interest of making things more cohesive in what I may write from here.

On the Pursuit of Excellence

At an overall level, what better place to start than a simple premise: Excellence is a choice.

Shooting for excellence is a commitment that requires a lot on a practical level, starting with courageous leadership, because it is a perpetually moving target, requires adaptability, tenacity, and a willingness to accept change as a way of life. Excellence isn’t accidental, it is a matter of organizational will and the passion to pursue aspirations beyond what, at times, may feel “realistic” or “practical”. It requires a belief in what is possible and is defined along multiple dimensions, which we’ll explore briefly here, namely:

Relentless Innovation
Operating with Agility
Framework-Driven Design -and-
Delivering at Speed

Relentless Innovation

Starting with vision, some questions to consider in the context of an overall strategy:

Is it clear and understood across the organization, along with its intended outcome (e.g., what success looks like)?
Is it one that connects to individuals in the organization, their roles and ongoing contributions, or are those disconnected concepts (i.e., is it something that individuals take to heart)?
Can it evolve as circumstances change while maintaining a degree of fundamental integrity (e.g., will it stand the test of time or need to be continually redefined)?
Is it actionable? Can tangible steps be taken to drive progress towards its ultimate goals?
Is it “deliberate”/intended/proactive or was it defined in a reactive context (e.g., in response to a competitor’s actions)?
Are day-to-day decisions made with the strategy in mind?

Overall, the point is to have a thoughtful, proactive strategy, that is actionable, connected to ongoing decisions, and embraced by the broader organization.

Where this becomes more interesting is in how we think of strategy in relation to change, which is where the next concept comes into play. Relentless innovation is the notion that anything we are doing today may be irrelevant tomorrow, and therefore we should continuously improve and reinvent our capabilities to ones that create the most long-term value. This is much easier said than done, because it requires a lot of organizational humility and a willingness to tear down existing structures and rebuild new ones in their place. That forces a degree of risk tolerance, because there is safety in the established practices and solutions of today, especially if they’ve created value. On the other hand, success can be very detrimental insofar as complacency can become part of the organizational mindset and change slows down to an environment that is essentially an iteration of the present.

Operating with Agility

Looking at IT Operations, a number of questions come to mind that may be the subject of future articles:

Is there a mindset of being cost-efficient (driving the highest value/cost ratio)?
Is there a culture of continuous improvement and innovation in place?
Is there a strategy for incorporating and optimizing the relationship of project and product teams (to the extent that a full product orientation isn’t feasible)?
Is there a sourcing strategy in place that is deliberate, governed, optimized (whether insourced, outsourced, or some combination thereof)?
Are portfolio management processes effective and aligned to business strategy?
Is there a highly transparent, but extremely lightweight operating infrastructure in place to facilitate engagement and value creation?
To what degree is talent rotation and development part of the culture? Are people stuck in the same organization or silo for long periods of time, or are high potential leaders moved between teams to facilitate a higher degree of knowledge sharing, development, and improvement?

Having worked in IT Ops, the largest issue I’ve seen in a number of companies is an overly significant focus on process and infrastructure by comparison with transparency and enablement. This is a tricky balance to strike, but arguably, I’d much rather have a less “mature” operating environment (IT for IT) that produces directionally correct information and drives engagement than a heavy, cumbersome process that becomes a distraction from producing business outcomes. A simple litmus test on the latter type of environment being in place is whether, in discussion, teams talk about the process and tools versus the outcomes, decisions, and impact.

Framework-Driven Design

Shifting focus to technology, I believe the opportunity is to think differently about the overall solution architecture of future ecosystems. Much has been written and discussed relative to modern or cloud native applications, data-centric design, DevSecOps, domain-driven design, and so on.

What fundamentally bothers me about solution design approaches is that, when focusing on one dimension (e.g., data centricity), other dimensions of the more holistic view of modern application design is left out, and then it becomes a challenge to delivery teams to integrate one or more of these concepts in practice without a way to synthesize them into one cohesive approach. This is where framework-centric design can be an interesting approach to consider.

In my definition, framework-centric design is focused on architecting a connected ecosystem and operating environment intended to promote resiliency, interoperability, and application-agnostic integration such that individual solution components can be upgraded or replaced over time at a rapid pace without disrupting the capability of the ecosystem as a whole.

I will explore this topic further in a future article, but the base premise is to design an overall solution that performs complex tasks given multiple components integrated in standardized ways, leveraging modern, cloud native technologies, with integrated data that feeds embedded analytics capabilities as part of the operation of the ecosystem.

The framework itself, therefore, becomes a platform and the individual components are treated as replaceable parts that enable a best-of-breed mentality as new capabilities emerge that become advantageous to integrate with the framework over time.

Delivering at Speed

From a delivery standpoint, as tempting as it is to write about iterative development (or Agile in particular) as a cure all, the reality is that more organizations suffer from a lack of discipline than a lack of methodology.

The unfortunate myth that needs to be explored and unwound is that executing with discipline means value will be delayed when, in fact, the exact opposite is true. It is a generalization, but the faster a build team moves (to the extent that process or rigor is abandoned), the immediate impact is usually a level of technical debt that will create drag, either in the initial or subsequent delivery efforts.

Quality doesn’t happen by accident. It is something that needs to be planned and built into a work product from the kickoff of a delivery effort, regardless of the methodology or operating model employed.

I will likely write more on this topic given the number of opportunities that exist, but it’s sufficient to say that you can’t achieve excellence when you don’t execute as flawlessly as possible… and discipline is needed to accomplish that.

Wrapping Up

Overall, the goal was to provide a quick summary of the various dimensions that I believe are important to consider in leading an organization. No doubt, there may be questions or omissions (intentional or unintended) as this was a first blush at how I think about it.

What about people and culture? Well… that’s part of operating effectively… as an example.

Hopefully this was a good starting point and provided some food for thought. Feedback, questions, and reactions are always welcome.

Looking forward to continuing this journey.

-CJG 10/28/2021

Where to Begin…

Seven organizations… nearly thirty years of challenges and learning… what a journey it has been.

In mid-2016, I had an idea to start a blog, “The First 25…”, which I envisioned as a set of reflections to commemorate the first twenty-five years of my professional life.

I began creating an outline, starting from my first work in Windows 3.1 tax software development at Price Waterhouse in 1992, jotting down concepts, anecdotes, and learnings that I had accumulated. I intended for it to be both a means to share my experiences as well as a mechanism to facilitate introspection and growth. I started writing the first set of articles, ran out of time, lost interest, and put the concept on the shelf for five years… until I recently felt like maybe it was time to revisit the idea.

It’s an odd truth that we learn to value experience only once we actually have it… and how relative that all becomes over the passage of time. In my early days as a developer, I remember looking at job postings in the newspaper, seeing ads for candidates with “15 years of experience” and thinking that you both had to be a dinosaur and some form of fully enlightened professional by the time you reached that point in your career. Fifteen years is a REALLY long time, after all, right? That had to be all you’d need to learn everything there was to learn and have it down to the point you were almost on autopilot with anything the business world could throw at you. In retrospect, perhaps that logic makes a degree of sense when you are 21 years old and 15 years represents almost 75% of your lifetime…

In any case, looking back, there have been many lessons and experiences that helped me become the person I am today. From the fear and inexperience of my first days managing projects, to the many late nights pounding away at a keyboard, trying to get that next piece of code working… the setbacks, the struggles, and quite often the painful mistakes that taught me the value of “how not to” do things.

My hope is to use this blog to share some of those experiences, thoughts on leadership, strategy, technology, and other topics as and when they arise…

A career is really nothing more than a collection of experiences and what we ultimately do with them to become better leaders and professionals… Hopefully the ideas will be worth reading, feedback is welcome and appreciated. I’m still on the journey, seeking that enlightenment I thought I’d have when I got to “15 years”… albeit today, I know I’ll never get there and just want to keep learning and improving to have as much of a positive impact as I can on the teams with whom I work and the organization(s) to which I belong.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and/or anything else that may follow. All the best in your professional endeavors…

-CJG 08/11/2021