Thoughts on Organization Design - Employee Engagement

This is exactly what's in my head when I picture engagement.

We've knocked off a couple of topics from our manager's handbook in the last few posts, namely - 

• Organization size
• Organization roles and titles

Today I want to focus on engagement.  Much of what I advocate for below actually starts with hiring.  If you're hiring for a culture that doesn't fit your business, engagement is never going to take hold, because the incentives won't match the workforce.  I'll address my thoughts on hiring later, as it's important enough and meaty enough to warrant its own article.

As with my other posts, I'll focus on the Tech portion of an org, but these principles translate easily to any part of a company of any size.

Here are the four tenets of employee engagement:

• Pay them reasonably well.
• Give them autonomy.
• Provide them with psychological safety.
• Ensure they have goals that can be tied to the business's success.

Pay them reasonably well

Pay is likely the most significant component of engagement, but it captures a plurality - say 40% - of what would make up an engagement score, not a majority.

The more you can pay, especially if the other three principles hold, the better.  But software engineers are expensive, and your business, regardless of how successful, may not be able to accommodate the top dollar in your area.  

A quick search shows that the current median pay for software engineers across all levels in Chicago is $122K.  The number seems reasonable given my experience.  It hints at a range of approximately $100K - $175K from the Software Engineer 1 level through the Principal Engineer level.  Larger companies can pay more, but this is a good range to start exploring for your employees' compensation.

That being the case, there are a few realities to keep in mind:

• You will inevitably lose good candidates because you cannot pay enough.
• You will inevitably lose employees because you cannot pay enough.
• If you struggle with the other areas of engagement, you will need to pay more to compensate for those deficiencies, but pay only goes so far.
• If your other areas of engagement (i.e. your culture) are strong, you will attract or retain talent that would otherwise go elsewhere for more money.  
• Most people won't take a pay cut to come to your company, but you should look for candidates making lateral moves.  Golden handcuffs are tough to escape.

Make sure you're paying a salary that people can live in comfort with and pay more if you can.  Perks and bonuses are useful means of augmenting the compensation, but - especially with bonuses and stock options or RSUs - conversations can quickly sour at review time if those numbers come up short of promised expectations.

For that reason (and for reasons I'll address when I write a post about performance reviews) prefer base compensation over variable compensation.  You provide people with a sense of stability and adjust their expectations accordingly.

Particularly with stock compensation - while people are happy to receive it - no one at a level below the C-suite has direct control over the price, so it has the potential to affect other areas of engagement negatively if it's not handled with care.

Give them autonomy

You've recruited highly-paid, well-educated, independent thinkers.  Don't micromanage them.  If you're recruiting curious people, they'll want to explore, and, more often than not, their ideas will bode well for the business.

It's also foolish to assume that the people actually doing the work don't have a better grasp of what functions well and what doesn't than you do.  As a manager, this is particularly scary, because you may control large parts of an organization that you don't understand well.  That's OK.

If you have engaged, intelligent employees, you can rely on them to be honest and provide solid results.  You should still learn more about new areas, because (a) your employees will be happy that you find their work meaningful, (b) you'll have enough insight to play devil's advocate or challenge hidden biases when necessary, and (c) assuming you're also an engaged, intelligent employee, you're augmenting your own skillset.

But there's a huge gap between understanding the teams you run and intimately tracking every detail.  Your job as a manager is to report status so your engineers aren't burdened by the task; to ensure that they're integrated within the organization, but aren't hounded by outside requests; that they're achieving their objectives; and to continue to motivate them to exceed the organization's expectations for them.

The details of the actual work should be left up to the team except when they explicitly ask you for help.  There are some exceptions for junior engineers and people new to a role - as many of them will have a tendency to want to prove themselves without asking for help even if it means they're getting buried (I speak from personal experience), but, if your team is healthy, those exceptions will be minimal.

With a small group of people, autonomy can signify tyranny (even if you're getting your hiring right), because they see autonomy as unchecked power.  But that's why autonomy is still only one pillar of engagement and the others hold those tendencies in check.

Provide them with psychological safety

This is probably the hardest principle to support given groups' desires to maintain the status quo.  At its core, psychological safety could be translated into the current corporate aphorism running amock - "assume positive intent," but that just papers over the hard work needed to uphold the principle and, in some cases, can work counter to providing safety.

Psychological safety is simply the principle of allowing reasonable people to speak their minds and have an expectation that they'll be listened to, even if others don't always agree.  It also recognizes the humanity of your workers - that some are quieter, some are louder, some are more meticulous, some are more spontaneous - and that everyone makes mistakes.

It also allows for a change in the company/org/team culture even if everyone believes the current culture is healthy.

From a management standpoint, it's loudly supporting someone when they make a mistake and showing there aren't negative consequences for stumbling occasionally.  Reinforcing this position makes the company stronger, because, if people know they can make mistakes and investigate those mistakes after the fact without fear of retribution, you'll have a much stronger root cause analysis shoring up your weaknesses.

It's also paying attention to subtleties stemming from unconscious biases that can affect some people more than others. For example, if you were an all-male team before, and had a woman join, there are likely routines that feel comfortable among a group of dudes, but may be less acceptable with a gender dynamic involved.  It may come down to seemingly inconsequential word choices like using the phrase "man-hours" instead of "engineer-hours," or pointing to a box in a diagram and referring to it as "this guy" instead of "this abstract representation of an architectural concept that we're probably glossing over anyway during this discussion"

It's also very possible that the women on your team aren't bothered by such small semantic differences, but, as a manager, it's important to show that you're paying attention and are demonstrating your willingness to be open-minded to a stronger and more inclusive culture.

If you're asking what the big deal is, why not turn the question around on yourself and ask why it bothers you so much to change.  If you can get past no response other than "it's always been this way," or "it's a slippery slope to a boring, insipid culture devoid of fun," you're doing a disservice to your own imagination and adaptive ability.  The world is nothing but constant change and grasping desperately for some nostalgic past in hopes that it will eventually circle around in the same manner you've modeled it in your head is just a disappointment waiting to happen.

Though I'm using gender as an example, the principle applies when anyone new joins the group, and it should be constantly examined to ensure the team hasn't been buying into a false sense of security at someone's expense.

Psychological safety, when coupled with autonomy, does a good job of empowering your employees while also establishing boundaries.  People have the freedom to explore, but they have to recognize that other people have the right to explore as well.

As to that phrase - "assume positive intent" - it's not bad advice.  Humans tend to assume their flaws are due to positive intent but poor execution, while others scheme to get ahead with nefarious intent.  Working past this bias and recognizing that most of us are just trying to get by helps deescalate the negative thoughts in our heads.

But, when constantly barked as an unyielding aphorism, it degrades psychological safety.  It gaslights people into questioning their own hard-won conclusions when intent has been demonstrated to be less than positive. 

Ensure that they have goals that can be tied to the business's success

As someone who's led backend, infrastructure-oriented teams for a significant part of my career, there are few phrases I despise much more than referring to a "cost center" (when used in conjunction with a revenue center).  If a team doesn't contribute immediately recognizable customer value, it doesn't mean they don't contribute value to the customer.  It means the value is more nuanced, and, much to the chagrin of those who like easy answers and straight-forward signals, equally important.

Innovation happens across all strata of a company.  A more robust infrastructure means your engineers working on the front end can focus more on cranking out features and less on reliability issues.  It also means, that as your site scales up (or you need to find innovative ways to reduce cost or complexity for an existing large-scale site), you've got a team of experts who can focus on the work while everyone else is concentrating on work that customers recognize instantly, so you don't have to sacrifice novelty for quality or stability.

It should go without saying, but - your customers will care deeply if your site isn't up, regardless of how cool the interface is when it does function.  As a result, it's always helpful to draw a clear line between the business's goals and the work everyone's doing (or, if you're not familiar enough with certain teams' duties, relying on your own management team to help you out), so everyone has an equal chance of recognition for the hard work they've contributed to making your business run.

And, that, in a nutshell, is how to keep a competent workforce engaged.

Until next time my human and robot friends.