Why working saturday’s is not the answer..

Reflections on an article in the TOI, about getting techie to work extra hours to offset the rise of the rupee :

As the value of the rupee against the dollar drops, there are frantic efforts to squeeze more work out of the employees.
Sqeezeis the right and the wrong word. Right in terms of the approach taken by management, wrong in terms of the end result.

It would be an understatement to say that most of the software organisations are still operating on concepts developed during the industrial revolution. The assembly-line era ideas emphasize the need for physical presence to obtain higher productivity.

We specially the IT organisations have migrated into the ‘think’ mode for productivity. It is only when a person is in a relaxed and reflective mode that great breakthroughs in idea’s and creative thought are achieved. What was Newton doing when he realized the Laws of Gravity. He was sitting under an apple tree. What was Archimedes doing when he screamed ‘Eureka’? Lolling in a bath-tub.

The following three points are essential to achieve higher productivity:

First, we just have to improve the caliber of the front-line managers. Specially in India, most people migrate into management based on their performance as technical contributors. There is a need to train these managers in the basic soft skills essential to front line managers. The technical capability essential to implementing a solution is at a marked contrast to the genteel skill of getting things done.

Secondly, the implement of a metric system. If you do not have some measures – on what basis can you evaluate your teams performance. Start small in terms of the no. of parameters being measured. The biggest problem that software teams face is in the need to show dramatic results. If there is no measure as of date, rest assured, the noise in your project process is going to be large. Just getting to know the noise to signal ratio is itself an achievement.

Third, be aware of the right triggers to motivate the team. A well motivated team can do wonders. The primary requisite for a well motivated team is clear performance measures and unambiguous direction. Most managers fail in this. The annual performance appraisal is the most dreaded event of the year. For the manager as well as the team member. It is necessary to induct the right processes to ensure that this is a collaboration activity which increases synergy.

This would be a good start. If the employee knows what he has to aim for, and how his performance is measured, the rest is just a matter of treating him decent and removing the myriad of obstacles from his way.

I have personally found that it was more difficult to keep engineers out of the office, rather than in it. So there is something fundamentally wrong if there is a need to ask an software engineer to come into work.