Managing Millennials - Is It Worth The Effort?

Quick review, here's how the generations and their cool marketing names break down:

The Silent Generation (ages 63-81)
Baby Boomers (ages 44-62) - 80 million strong
Generation X (ages 27-43) - 59 million
Millennials/Gen Y (age 26 and under) - 80 million!

The Millennials have entered the IT workforce in large numbers and yet there has been very little written about how IT managers can deal with this completely new generation. Remember, these folks may have never seen a vinyl LP, may assume that phones have been wireless forever, and can't understand why TVs need to have an antenna - the cable connection just goes into the back!

If you had to make some broad brush generalizations about the Millennials, they would probably look like this. Sarah Sladek who is the CEO of Limelight Generations says that the Millennials had the "...most provided for and structured childhood in history..." In a nutshell, these are the kids who got awards for just participating. Whereas the Gen-X crew is known to be self-sufficient, the Millennials are much more group activity focused. You can add to this a need for structure, feedback, encouragement, and a deep desire for instant gratification.

What's fascinating is that although you might not expect it, Millennials actually get along in most cases very well with the Baby Boomers. One reason for this might be that many Millennials still live at home and the Baby Boomers that they interact with in the workplace remind them of their parents. However, they really, really, don't want to be talked down to!

What's an IT Manager To Do? Several things, including finding ways to relate, involve, engage, connect, educate, and promote job benefits to staff. A key SPOKEN realization of the Millennials is that they realize that they won't be working for one company for 40 years. This means that more than any other generation now in the workplace, they need to know what their current job is going to provide to them right now. This means things like tangible certifications are very important to this segment of the workforce.

It's All About Connections: This group of workers is interested in being mentored. They really want to learn new things and they realize that people who have done the job for awhile have much to teach them. That being said, interacting with their own peers is just as important . This means that a good IT manager will provide both types of opportunities: mentoring and peer networking.

Use The Internet: This generation grew up online. That means that they are very comfortable socializing and exchanging information online. In order to minimize the potential security issues that the use of external social networking sites can cause, IT managers need to establish internal social networks that everyone can participate in.

The Millennials represent the future of every IT department. It is our responsibility to adapt to their ways of learning and show them what it will take to succeed in the IT industry.

Do you work with Millennials now? How's it going - does everyone get along or are there conflicts and misunderstandings? Have any special programs or changes in policy been put in place to adapt the workplace for this new generation of workers? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.


Tags: Millennials, Baby Boomers, it, employee, information technology, retention

After The Firings, What's A Manger To Do?

Thanks to a sluggish economy, we've been reading about more and more layoffs, firings, staff reductions, rightsizing, etc. Your firm may have done one of these, be doing one, or just have started to think about doing one. No matter - letting staff go is can be one of the hardest parts about being a leader. There is a lot of information out there about how to let people go with dignity; however, there isn't a lot of guidance on how to pick up the pieces after a big layoff. What's a manager to do with those who escaped the executioner's axe?

Since firing coworkers takes so much of a manager's emotional energy, we can be excused for not remembering to take the time to adequately reassure those who are left onboard. Motivation is hard enough to do in the good times, re-motivation after a layoff is nigh impossible. As much of a challenge as this additional task is, it's critical because studies have shown that the workers who remain quickly become unproductive and are unwilling to take on any risk now that they've seen what can happen to other workers. To top this off, all too often these disheartened workers end up leaving the company. Great - now you've gone from having to do layoffs to having to do interviews.

What's A Manager To Do? A good place to start is to once again realize that every employee is an individual. This means that everyone will process the layoffs in their own personal way. A manager needs to let this happen. Dr. Warren Bennis is a professor of management out at the University of Southern California and he says that "Respect is the key word..." Layoffs often seems so cold and impersonal. It's the job of a manger to work with the employees who remain and help them to understand why the layoffs are happening, acknowledge the pain that it is causing, and to let the employees know when the bloodletting will end. Having done all of this, then managers have to be able to sit back and listen. Allow the employees to react to the layoffs and realize that there are no right or wrong reactions.

What About Morale? Clearly one of the first victims of any layoff will be the morale of those employees who remain behind. One way that a manager can start to rekindle the light of motivation is to spend time with the remaining workers reviewing and discussing the organization's goals. There are fewer people now and the key question will be how to achieve the goals with a smaller team. This is an important way to ensure that employees realize that they have a future with the company and they really will be better off once they are farther down the road.

Any Way To Future Proof An Organization? The ultimate question for any manager is if there is a way to prepare an organization for layoffs before they occur. The short answer is no. However, if a manager is able to keep the employees involved in discussions about how the business is doing, then there should never be any surprises if another round of layoffs occurs.

Have you been able to get a team of survivors motivated again after a layoff? How did you do it? What was your biggest challenge - team members or messages that the company was sending out? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.


Tags: layoff, firing, termination, employee motivation, it, employee

Do You Suffer From "Munchausen At Work" Syndrome?

We all deal with problems that flare up at work, but some people do a better job than others. In fact, some people deal with workplace problems so often and do such a good job of dealing with them that they get awards, bonuses, and eventually promoted. Phred Dvorak over at the Wall Street Journal took a look at this situation and discovered something that most of us have suspected for a long time: some people are creating workplace problems and then jumping in to solve them. What's up with this?

A business professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Nathan Bennett, has come up with the phrase "munchausen at work" to describe the phenomenon in which workers actually go about causing problems so that they can come back later on and take credit for fixing them. In the medical profession, there is an equivalent syndrome called "muncheausen" which is a mental illness in which someone makes someone else sick so that they can be a caregiver to them.

This workplace equivalent of arson is very hard to detect. The folks who set the fires are often the ones who show up when the problem is burning out of control and through their Herculean efforts are able to get the problem back under control. One reason that this behavior is hard to discourage is because companies often reward it with either recognition or promotions. Hey - it worked to get me promoted last time, why wouldn't I use it again to get my next promotion?

In my career I've seen a lot of this. The challenge to the fire starters seems to be in determining just how big of a problem to cause. If it's too small, they won't get any recognition, if it's too big they won't be able to fix it or someone else will be brought in to solve the problem.

One interesting observation is that the munchausen at work syndrome is often seen among workers who have moved on to other jobs. They set fires so that they can swoop back in and solve them thus showing that they are still be best person for that job in the company.

You may be able to spot muncheausen at work staffers as they go about setting their fires. Common sparks that they set to dry timber include layoff rumors (so they can save your jobs), relationship problems (so they can "patch things up" between teammates), and reports of angry customers (so they can smooth things over with them and keep them as a customer).

Although the current downturn of the economy that we are experiencing may serve to reduce the number of fires set by munchausen at work suffers, spotting the deception is a good first step in stopping the behavior. Additional steps that you can take to put an end to this special form of workplace violence are:

• Be sure to always stress teamwork over individual problem solving achievements.
• Stay away from creating "office heroes" because it encourages munchausen syndrome.
• Keep an eye peeled for information hoarders - they may be trying to start a fire.
• Make sure that managers are always working to find out what employee needs are.

In this age of looser gun control laws, you might think that you'd be able to see any workplace problems walking down the hall towards you. However, munchausen at work may be a problem that you already have and yet didn't realize it!

Have you ever worked for someone who suffered from munchausen at work? What kind of fires did they start and how did they put them out? Have you ever caused a problem at work with the hope of being asked to solve it? How did this work out for you? Leave a comment and let me know.


Tags: munchausen, IT employee, personnel, promotion, information technology

Bad Money After Good: Preserving Your Employee Investment

The great thing about talent portability in today's IT market is that whenever you have a need to fill a position that requires a specialized set of skills or experiences, you can generally go shopping and find exactly what you need. The downside to this is the simple fact that your competition can do the same thing and they might be selecting from your employees!

Gone are the days in which firms developed their talent from within. Carefully nurturing those-who-would-be managers, giving them the training that they needed and rotating them among job assignments so that they would be ready when the trumpet sounded for them to take center stage in the Colosseum of business. Perhaps somewhat sadly, that model no longer exists.

Instead, today's IT professionals are free to move on whenever a better opportunity presents itself. Applicant-tracking company Taleo has done a survey in which it was revealed that 80% of firms that participated in the survey have moved away from this "we know whats best for you" model to now starting to use internal job boards that are designed to make it easy for employees to apply for open positions and move around within the firm instead of leaving it. The poster child for this approach is Dow Chemical who was able to cut its turnover rate in half when it moved to using the internal job board approach to fill positions.

A small note of experience is probably due at this point. I've worked at a number of large firms in which it was mandatory that all openings were posted on the job board. However, the position was often already effectively filled by the posting manager long before the posting. Once the rest of the firm starts to understand that the job board is basically just window dressing, its value and its ability to retain staff goes down significantly.

What's interesting about the shift to using a job board approach is that it moves the burden of managing an employee's career from the company over to the employee. This has, of course, caused a great deal of chaos. The disconnect comes when an IT team member wants to move on to another job opportunity and his/her manager doesn't want to let them go. Now we've got conflict! Welcome to the world of negotiations - somebody needs to be able to step in and find a way to preserve the investment that the company has made in this employee.

Different firms are finding different ways to deal with this issue. McKinsey tries to resolve this type of issue by (of course, it's McKinsey after all) using rankings: how did the employee rank the job posing opportunity and how has the employee's team ranked them on the current project that they are working on? If all of this analytical work does not resolve the issue, then the Senior Partner gets brought in to play the role of King Solomon. Before they imploded, Bears Sterns had created an office of mediation which took on the job of working out such differences between employees and their managers when an employee wanted to move on to another internal job.

In the end, the world of employee training and retention has been turned upside down. Where once firms were responsible for training and managing the careers of their employees, now that is no longer the case. Instead, the responsibility for managing one's career is now the responsibility of each employee and training, which used to be a given, is now viewed in terms of its short term payback to the company. The old system of talent management had been set up along the lines of an engineering system: given a set of inputs, a predictable set of outputs would be produced. Today's talent management is much more fluid. It is driven more by external market conditions and viewed through operations tools that are better able to adapt to increasing levels of uncertainty. It is possible to manage your pool of talent, you just need to update the tools that you are using to do it with.


Tags: employee, recruiting, retention, IT jobs, IT manager

The ROI For Employee Training Crisis - Where Is the Money Going?

So you've decided that your department / team needs to get some fancy training. Great - more knowledge is always better right? Hold on a minute, maybe not. What happens if after you've paid for all of this wonderful training and even some certification (CISSP, CNE, PMP, etc.) your employee decides to walk out the door? That would be the workplace equivalent of buying a new car and then driving it off the lot and immediately totaling it by smashing it into a wall. What can you do to boost your chances of getting a good return on your investment (ROI)?

Staffing flexibility is a challenge without your pricey investments leaving once you've sunk your money into making them better than they were. Now I must confess that I am a sinner when it comes to taking the training and running. I ended up getting three additional college degrees that were paid for by my then employers. This might be just a bit different from what we're talking about here because (1) that work was done at night, and (2) I hung around for at least 4 years each time so that I could finish the degree up. What we're really talking about here is the more expensive stuff.

Once upon a time, when the only way to get new management was to grow it inside the company it was probably ok to not keep track of what kind of payback you were getting from your training dollars. However, now that company loyalty has gone the way of the pension, it's probably a good time to take another look. Ultimately, training is an investment just like everything else the company spends its money on and you sure would like to maximize your return.

How to do this? One quick and easy way to get a better return on your training investment is to lower your costs. The fastest way to do this is to find a way to get your employees to share in the cost of the training. Sounds crazy doesn't it? Here's the thing: your employees fully understand that certain types of training will make them more valuable. Getting them to shoulder part of the cost may not be as difficult as you might think. Specifically, if the training is going to be accomplished by having the employee take on a learning project, then consider having them do this in addition to their normal job (this way you don't have to hire in order to backfill their position). The employee gets valuable experience and access to other parts of the company. The cost to them is that they pay for it with their personal time.

A slightly more Draconian approach is to ask an employee who is preparing to receive some training to sign a contract stating that after they complete the training they will stick around for some minimum amount of time or they will be responsible for paying back some portion of the training costs. It turns out that about 20% of U.S. firms have some sort of system like this in place already. What's interesting about this approach is that often times if the employee does decide to leave before their agreed to time is up, then the firm that hires the employee will end up paying the training fee. You will still miss the employee; however, your training budget will appreciate the pay back.

Finally, there is one more way to handle the issue of maximizing your return on training investments. If an employee that you've trained does leave, then perhaps keeping in touch with them and keeping them posted on changes and events at the firm would be a good idea. This is a relatively small investment and yet the next time that that employee decides to switch jobs, there is a good chance that if they've been kept in the loop then they may consider returning to work for your firm. Now that would be a real return on your training investment!

So which approach would work for your firm? Do you do any tracking today of what kind of return you are getting on your training investments? Do you feel that training an employee makes them more or less likely to leave once the training has been completed? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.


Tags: training, investment, employee motivation, employment, retention strategies

Staffing Flexibility Is Soooo Underrated!

If you thought that just barely getting by using skills to manage your IT staffing needs using both home grown talent as well as warm bodies that you purchased off the street was tough, just imagine how challenging it is when you try to move things up one level and adapt your IT organization to the uncertainty in demand for IT talent. Just think about that for a moment: how would your life be different if instead of running around trying to fill holes in your organization as they occur, you could actually be ahead of the 8-ball and be ready for changes as they came?

Here's a fundamental thought that will help you to solve this staffing problem once and for all. It's based on lessons that our supply chain friends learned the hard way a long time ago. Instead of trying to stock your IT department with every body that you think that you might need both today and for the next x number of years, instead do what the supply chain guys do. Bring in small batches of what you need more often. This will allow you to not have to attempt to predict your staffing needs so very far out.

For a good example of how the current IT hiring/staffing process is broken, take a look at how recent college graduates are brought into the organization. Most firms do almost all of their new graduate hiring right after the students get out of college. This means there is a wave of new recruits that enter the firm in June. Even if you allow for some new-hire orientation and perhaps some training, the firm still has a need to carve out a substantial number of new-hire spots all at once. If the company is struggling in the current quarter, then this can be especially difficult.

A different way to handle this issue would be to take this single large problem and divide it into two smaller parts. Not all college graduates really want to go to work immediately after finishing 4, 5, or 6 years of intense schooling. Some would more than willing to delay their start date by 3-6 months. If this was done, then the firm would only have to process half as many new recruits at a time. More personal attention could be paid to each incoming employee and better fits for talents and interests could be made. Having fewer number of new hires to place but having them more often makes the staffing challenge much easier - you never have too many or too few. Retaining non-working students for 3-6 months can be as simple as agreeing to pay them 1/2 salary until they start working full time.

Long and expensive training programs present the same challenge. A two year management training program could be broken up into four 6 month programs. Each smaller program could have its own goals and forecasts. The benefit of doing training this way is that should an employee in training decide to leave the firm, then the entire training program expense may not have been spent on them.

Finally, within IT organizations different programs are often allowed to maintain and run their own talent management programs. The end result of this is that all too often, one program will have too many potential managers and another will have too few. Since there is no centralized way to communicate these supply issues, the firm generally just deals badly with the imbalance. If talent management within the IT department was centralized, then this issue would not occur.

So now we have an understanding of where to find IT talent and we now know how to deal with fluctuation in the need for IT talent, I guess the next thing that we should talk about would be how to improve the Return on Investment spent on developing employees...

How does IT staffing work at your firm? Do you seem to have waves of new employees sweep in every so often? Is your department set up to handle this flood of talent? Have you ever tried to manage the process by adding fewer new employees more often? What was the result? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.


Tags: it, employee, personnel, employee motivation, training, staffing

Managing IT Talent In The 21st Century: Grow Or Buy?

Hopefully we can agree that the way that IT talent is being managed in most companies is just flat out broken. It's easy to point fingers and say that a process doesn't work, it's much harder to suggest a solution to the problem. Let's spend some time doing just that - the hard stuff.


Fix Suggestion #1: Make and Buy Talent In Order To Manage Risk

Back in the good 'ol days of the 1950's and 1960's there really was only one source for new talent within a firm - you had to grow it yourself. This growing process took a great deal of time so extensive management development systems were created to track how the next "crop" of talent was coming along. When an opening occurred in the organization, then either a new manager had to be harvested or else that part of the company and it's associated opportunities had to be discarded.

As you can well imagine, the folks in charge of growing new talent would "plant" more talent early on in the process so that they would never be caught without someone to harvest should the need occur. Back in the day, firms could afford to have more talent than they needed. That doesn't work today. If you are ready to be an IT leader and the opportunity does not show up quickly, then you are more than likely to walk out the door. Just to make things even worse, the Watson Wyatt consulting firm has done a study that shows that talent that gets trained and then is not presented with an opportunity to use that training will often leave the firm.

So what's an IT manager to do? Look, it will always make sense to grow your next wave of leaders internally as long as it is cheaper and less disruptive than going outside to get it. However, there is no way that we can grow all of the talent that we'll possibly need internally. Since hiring from the outside is a much quicker solution as well as allowing you to be more responsive to dynamic business conditions, you really need to be able to use both solutions.

How to go about doing this? The first step is the simplest, stop trying to forecast your IT talent demand with any level of accuracy. Just admit it - you really have no clear idea how many people you are going to need 1, 2, 3 or more years out. This wasted forecasting can be replaced with a different approach: simulations. Simulations won't provide an 100% accurate forecast; however, it can get closer. What's even better is that if a simulation shows that the company's current plan will result in an enormous need for new talent, then the plan can be changed.

Here in the 21st Century the ease with which employees can leave a company means that developing too much internal talent is a much greater risk (and expense) than developing too little. Since you can go outside and hire the talent that you need when your needs exceed your home grown crop, there are four trade-offs that you have to evaluate when filling a position:

• How long will you need this person? The longer that the person will be needed, the more likely you should be to develop internal talent to fill the position.
  
  
• How sure are you that you really know how long you will need the talent? If you are unsure of upper management's commitment to the company's current direction, then you should be less willing to develop internal talent to fill the position.
  
  
• Are Other IT Managers Available To Step In If Needed?: How specialized is the position - are special skills needed to perform the tasks associated with it? Could other IT managers easily step in to fill the position if required or would special training be required?
  

Now that we've come up with a strategy for HOW to fill positions using both internal and external talent sources, the next issue to discuss will be to come up with a way to adapt to the uncertainty that every company has in trying to figure out how much staffing is going to be needed in the future...


Tags: talent recruiting, retention strategies, jobs in information technology

A New Way To Think About IT Talent Management

So hopefully we can agree that most firm's approach to talent management is at best broken, and often missing-in-action. What's an IT manager to do? Well, let's first look for a process that actually works in the modern corporation and then let's see what we can do to model it for talent management. That can't be that hard to do can it?

If you very coldly view staff as "products" for just one fleeting moment, then you might be able to agree with me that one might be able to view talent management as some sort of soylent green supply chain problem. There has been a lot of work done on how to improve and optimize supply chains over the last 60 or so years and we can use this work to improve how we manage talent today. If you'll allow me to extend the product analogy just a little bit further, then you'll find that the nirvana of talent management would be if we could create a "just-in-time" delivery system that would provide the right employee at the right time to get the job done correctly.

Since inventing a brand new way to do talent management would be too risky, let's take a closer look at what supply chain processes can do for us here:

• The bane of talent management is forecasting how many people will be needed over time. Supply chain processes have exactly the same challenge; however, they've come up with a way to do it.
  
  
• Reducing the costs of manufacturing a product is very similar to a company's efforts to minimize the amount that they spend to develop talent.
  
  
• The common practice of outsourcing parts of a manufacturing process is equivalant to hiring outsiders to do jobs.
  
  
• The challenge of making sure that products get delivered on time can be thought of as being similar to planning for company events where succession is necessary.
  
  
• Finally, supply chain management deals with how products move through a supply chain and eliminating bottlenecks that occur in that chain. Managing a pipeline of internal talent is very similar as you attempt to have employees advance through development jobs with different responsibilities.

In the end, there are four principles that can be drawn from supply chain management and applied to talent management. What's interesting is that two of them deal with uncertainty that appears on the demand side (make vs. buy and forecasting) while the other two deal with uncertainty on the supply side (improve development ROI and how to protect that investment). We'll discuss these four principles in detail next time.

What do you think? Is it too chillingly cold to try to apply supply chain principles to HR tasks? Should we not try to fix something that you don't think is broken? Do you have another example of an existing process that would be a better model to use? Leave a comment and let me know.


Tags: employee, it careers, retention strategies, supply chain

The Myth Of Talent Management: Why It Doesn't Work

Everyone who has lead a team, managed a department, or run a company knows that in addition to all of the other "keeping the doors open" jobs that they have, the task that can sneak up on them at any time is staffing. This coin has two sides: you don't want to have too many warm bodies on your team if you don't have the paying work to support them. At the same time, you don't want to have to few or you'll not be able to secure new work and that will eventually lead to your firm's demise.

Two weeks ago I found myself in the wrong position on this issue. The project that a team that I was responsible for had run into some delays. This meant that the schedule had been stretched out and yet the funding for the staffing had not been changed. What this meant is that I had to start to shed project members. This ended up requiring me to to make several trips down to the cafeteria with team members to let then know that their time on the project was up. Needless to say this was not fun for me and it was clearly not fun for them. As I did this, I was wondering what's a manager to do to avoid this type of poor talent management?

After the bloodletting was done, I started to do some research in order to find a better way to manage talent. A smart guy by the name of Peter Cappelli over at the University of Penn's Wharton School has spent some time looking at this situation and he reports that things are pretty grim.

What is talent management? In a nutshell, it's an attempt to anticipate the level of need for staff and then creating a plan for how you are going to achieve it. Dr. Cappelli says that he's found that most firms fall into one of two groups for managing their talent: either they do nothing and run around when they have to fill a position or they have a staffing forecasting system that's left over from the 1950's which is now inaccurate because the world is moving so much faster.

Anybody remember internal development programs? When I worked at Boeing certain workers were identified as "Hi-Pots" (High Potentials) and they were placed on a career path that rotated them through multiple departments. This approach has pretty much gone the way of the Dodo. The few shining exceptions are at GE and PepsiCo that have their famous management academies that mangers attend as part of their job. While these are great programs, who cares since only a few managers in the world have access to them.

In the 1990's hiring folks from outside became all the rage. It was possible because there were so many people who had been shed from other companies that the pool of available talent was quite large. Bad news - that pool's all but dried up now. Additionally, as the pool got smaller, firms who had spent money training their employees started to see them leave and go to work for their competitors. This, of course, made them even less interested in investing in training their staff.

Ok, so where do we stand right now? Most companies / departments / managers don't have any sort of talent management plan in place right now. However, the upper management is starting to realize that this is one of their key challenges. The ultimate question is how can your firm's talent be managed in such a way that it will allow the firm to ultimately make more money (and spend less)?

I've got some thoughts on things that you can do, but first do you agree that things are as dire as I've laid them out to be? Does your firm have a talent management program? Are YOU being managed as part of a talent management program? Post a comment & let me know.


Tags: employee, recruiting, IT staff retention, retention, it+careers

But I WANT To Work 80 Hours A Week...!

Over the past weekend I got a call from Phil who is one of my long-time colleagues who works in the telecommunications business. We got to talking and then, as it always does, the macho game of "who's working harder" came up. This around Phil won the game: he had just put in 105 hours in the past week. I had worked hard, but I didn't even come close to that - remember, I'm a big believer in completing the most tasks, not spending the most time.

You just know that I couldn't be a graceful loser, so I followed up with some questions about how the rest of his life was going. Initially he said that things had never been better; however, after some probing on my part he started giving up the goods: his personal life was a wreck. His troubles seemed to fall into two main categories - personal health and love life. Phil is about 5"8' or so and, last time I saw him, had a fairly lean frame. On the phone he told me that in the last three years he's put on about 25 extra pounds. This has done bad things to his health as well as making a difficult home life even rougher. I remember Phil's wife as being gorgeous and very nice. However, Phil confided in me that because of the stress in their relationship, she had been gaining weight also. Additionally, she was fed up with him for never being around to help out with the kids.

In the IT field, this "love of work" or "work as a gigantic black hole" syndrome can swallow us up at any time. What's interesting is that by hunting around on the Internet, I found an article by Kelley Holland that said that this is a relatively recent occurrence. The folks over at the National Bureau of Economic Research keep records on this type of stuff and they say that back in 1983 the lowest paid workers worked the most. However, by 2002, the highest paid workers were 2x as likely to work longer hours as the lowest paid.

Why do we do this to ourselves? It turns out that the old Puritan work ethic seems to be alive and well and working in IT. It seems as though since we are being well paid for our work (are you?) we feel the need to work more. Additionally, we seem to like our jobs more than other people do. Finally, now that we don't HAVE to work 12 hour days in the mill, maybe we are more willing to do in order to maintain our conspicuous consumption lifestyle.

What's the downside for IT workers? Stand up & look down at your shoes. If you can't see your shoes, then you know what's going on here. Early days require a stop at some drive through on the way in and late nights often involve a run to the food machine at the end of the hall. There's no reason to wonder why we are getting bigger! Toss in the fact that we're getting too little sleep and we try to make up for this by multitasking which by now everyone should know is a really, really bad idea. Click -- now you have a snapshot of Phil's life.

What to do? I talked for a little while longer with Phil and asked him, now that he had set a new personal record for hours worked in a week, how he was going to fix his life? Phil said that he had started taking fruit with him to work and eating that instead of worshiping at the powered doughnut cathedral at the end of the hall. He had also started to take the stairs at work more often and tried to go out for a walk at lunch time. He was cutting back on work by leaving on time on Friday and having a set time to work on email on Saturday and was trying very hard (but currently failing) to go unconnected and do no work on Sunday.

So what do you think? Do you think that Phil has a fighting chance? What's your life look like - are you on the fast track and have the baggage to show for it? Leave a comment and let me know how you hold it all together both for yourself and for your team...


Tags: burnout, health, overtime, stress, weight gain, work time

IT Workers Believe That The End Of The World Is Coming (Soon)

Just in time for the end of July, The Wall Street Journal Tech Blog is reporting that the folks over at Technisource Inc. have gone and released the results of a survey on how IT folks feel about their jobs based on talking to about 450 IT staffers. In a nutshell, nobody's very happy right now.

Right now the U.S. economy is in the dumps, gas costs $4.00+ / gallon, milk costs $5.00 / gallon, and let's not even get started talking about electricity and home fuel oil costs. However, IT employment is one of the few rays of sunshine in an otherwise gloomy picture. In fact, IT hiring is up about 10%. Yea! What's so damming is that despite this good news, the survey reveals that IT folks are overwhelmingly negative about our prospects. Clearly we are looking at this as a "... glass half empty..." situation.

But wait, there's more bad news! Here's some other doom-and-gloom results from the survey:

• 70% - said that the economy will get weaker
• 59% - said that fewer jobs are available (not true by the way - tech hiring is up)
  
• 20% - don't believe that they could find another job
• 17% - doubtful about the future of their employer
  

Ok, so now that everyone is thoroughly depressed, maybe we should ask ourselves why there is this apparent disconnect between what IT staff is thinking and reality? Is it that so many IT workers don't feel that they have the perfect IT job? I don't think so. Instead, I think that there are at least two reasons (and probably a bunch more). One is that within companies IT staffers are seeing a constant stream of "... we must find more ways to cut IT costs ..." emails, programs, and words rolling down from leadership mountain. We all know that this generally leads to headcount reductions and so we await the inevitable chopping to begin.

Additionally, the median salary for IT workers has dropped to $73k in 2008. It was at $74k just last year. It's not that big of a drop; however, what is much more worrying is that this is the first time that its dropped. It sure doesn't look like anyone is going to be getting a big raise this year.

To wrap this gloom-fest up, let's tackle one last question: what's an IT manager to do? Let's assume for a moment that you don't have access to a pot of cash that you can use to boost everyone's salary. Let's also assume that you can't gurantee everyone that their jobs are safe from the chopping block. Do you sorta feel like both of your hands are tied behind your back? Here are three simple steps that you can take to boost team morale and help everyone to become more productive:

1. Change the focus from the short term to the long term: the depressing news is in the paper (or online) every morning. Change your team's focus and get them to take a long term view. Have them anticipate how they will feel when the milestone is reached, the project is done, the users start to send their thanks back to the team.
   
   
2. Work On Self Improvement For Each Team Member: You can't guarantee everyone a job for life, so start to put some life into their job. Specifically, make sure that everyone has an assignment that stretches their abilities and makes them do something that they haven't done before. Additionally, work out a skill training plan for each team member. You can't control the future; however, you can help them make sure that they have the strongest resume possible.
   
   
3. Strengthen The Team: Provide every team member with the ability to perform some task that makes the team stronger. Although you may not be able to cheer up each and every team member, if they start viewing their work as supporting the team, then all of a sudden their level of commitment will shoot up.

I'd just like to leave you with a few words from one of my favorite Broadway musicals, Annie:

The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
Bet your bottom dollar
That tomorrow
There'll be sun

Just thinkin' about
Tomorrow
Clears away the cobwebs,
And the sorrow
'Til there's none

When I'm stuck with a day
That's gray,
And lonely,
I just stick out my chin
And grin,
And say,
Oh

The sun'll come out
Tomorrow
So ya gotta hang on
'Til tomorrow
Come what may

Tomorrow
Tomorrow
I love ya
Tomorrow

You're always
A day away

Tags: employee motivation, motivation, it career, jobs

What Makes A Job The Perfect IT Job?

Sorry in advance for going off on a bit of a rant here, but I've become fed up with both IT workers and managers who continue to completely miss the boat when it comes to creating, working, and managing exciting and fulfilling IT jobs.

This time my trigger was going out to lunch with a group of my friends who have gotten themselves roped into running one of those internal "High Achiever" IT management programs. You know the type: your boss identifies you as having management potential and so you get picked to attend a weekly/monthly class where they teach you about teamwork and, perhaps, introduce you to other parts of the company. This particular program selects the team to run next year's program from the students who are participating in this year's program. My friends had participated in last year's program and were now complaining about how much of their time running this year's program was taking up and that they didn't feel that they were getting anything out of it.

I didn't actually reach across the lunch table and grab them by their shirt collars; however, I was sorely tempted to do so. My frustration with them came from the simple fact that they were not taking the time to notice that they had been given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I asked them how many management training courses their company had sent them to. The answer was, of course, none. I then proceeded to point out to them that what they were doing as a part of running this training course was basically real-world practice for becoming IT directors, executive directors, VPs, etc. The challenge was that none of the students in the class worked for them. This meant that they couldn't get things done by telling people what to do (managing), instead they were going to have to convince folks to do what they wanted them to do (leadership). This was where the real learning for them was going to take place!

At the end of our lunch, my friends were reinvigorated and pumped up about what they now had to accomplish. Their job had not changed one bit, but the way that they looked at their job had undergone a complete transformation. At the end of the day this is the key to making any IT job a success: you have to clearly identify the challenges that it will be required to solve and the acknowledgments that will be given for solving those challenges. This is exactly what IT staffers are looking for in a job and they will stay if they find it and move on if they don't.

What really got my goat was trying to understand where were my friends' managers in all of this? Instead of having to go out to lunch with me to get re-focused and re-energized, their managers should have been doing this on an almost daily basis. Once again it appears as though IT managers have allowed themselves to get too focused on project schedules, code delivery, and server configurations and have missed the key role of IT management: creating challenges and providing acknowledgments. How good of a job are you doing at this?


Tags: IT jobs, employee motivation, IT staff, retention, self motivation

Work + Personal Life = Super Creativity On Projects

Amazingly enough, everyone on our teams has a world outside of work. If you can find a way to leverage the skills and talents that your team have developed "out there" then you just may have found a gusher of creativity that will propel your team to success and improve employee morale and boost retention.

Simona Covel over at the Wall Street Journal ran a story this week about Chris Wallace at SuperGroup Creative Omnimedia Inc. (try saying that three times real fast). What's interesting about the Web site design company that Chris has set up is that in the early days he didn't always have enough customer work to keep his staff busy. Chris did something unusual: he allowed his staff to work on their own projects, on the clock, during downtime. His initial motivation was that he didn't want to lose his staff just because there was nothing for them to work on right then. The unexpected side benefit was that the personal photography, video, music, etc. skills of his employees spilled over into the ideas that they pitched to their customers. Chris reports that some presentations to customers contained upwards of 40% of work created by his employees during their downtime.

Now we don't all have the luxury of working for a cutting edge media company like Chris'. I don't know about your company; however, many of the companies that I've worked for would have a hard time paying for their employees to do non customer (internal or external) work. However, perhaps there is a middle ground here. Simply being aware of your teammates outside interests is the first step in being able to tap into their unknown skills. If you know what they can do, then you are well situated to be able to turn to them when the need arises and ask them if they can contribute a solution.

IT is not known for its need for artistic creativity on the job (media companies aside). However, we do have IT parties, we do create documentation, and our apps do have splash screens and use sounds. All of these open the door to taping into home grown creativity. The biggest payoff is that the more that your team is able to put of themselves into the product that they are working on, the greater their job satisfaction will be and the higher your overall retention will remain.

Tags: creativity, downtime, retention, personal, morale, IT, staffing

"You're Fired!" (How To Let People Go With Class)

Ouch! one of the worst parts about being an IT manager is when it comes time to fire someone. It really doesn't matter if the person truly deserves it or this is one of those "cut 10% from every department" exercises. Handling the situation where staff decides to leave by themselves is hard enough, this just makes a manager's life that much more complicated. Some companies have training for their IT managers on how to handle this part of their job correctly; however, most just leave it up to the individual managers to learn how to do it over time.

If we can agree that there is no easy way to turn somebody that you work with's life upside down, then at least we can take a moment and talk about a few guidelines for how you can terminate people with some measure of class for both you and them.

• Best Time To Fire Someone: hands down it's best done at the end of the day. Most often the person is going to be in shock and will need time alone to deal with what has just happened to them. Going home is better than sitting around at work. Additionally, if they need to clean out their desk, then they don't have to put up with EVERYONE dropping by to tell them how sorry they are for them / glad that it wasn't them.
  
  
• Have A Good Reason For The Firing: Being fired is hard enough for IT professionals, but not being given a reason for your termination seems to make it 10x worse. A weak excuse like "I was told to fire you" or something like that is no better having no good reason.
  
  
• Do The Firing Face-To-Face: The IT industry is full of really bad ways to fire people using technology. Bad examples include leaving voicemails telling people that they've been let go and sending termination notices out via email. As much as it hurts to deliver this news in person, it is really the right way to do it.
  

One of the best ways of thinking about why it's important to do a good job of firing people was said by Bob Wilson who is the Chief Human Resources Officer for Elliott Davis: "We never want to lose sight of the fact that the person is forever an alumni." Amen to that brother.


Tags: attrition, downsizing, firing, job loss, rightsizing, termination

Employee Motivation: What To Do When You Feel Passed Over

I recently had a chance to talk with a friend of mine who works as a developer in the information technology department for a major telecommunications firm. I was surprised to discover that he was very angry and was thinking about quitting his job. It turns out that he had just completed a major project. He and two others had put in those non-stop 60-70 hour days. He had been away from home for the better part of two months and he was very proud of what was finally produced.

However, what had gotten him angry was that two other individuals had joined the project late in the game, had not worked nearly as hard as the core group of three had, and in the end they not only got credit for the project's success, but they also got promotions while the core group of three were not promoted. Is is any wonder that my friend was so angry?

We spend a lot of time recruiting the best information technology employees and then we spend at least as much time worrying about employee motivation all too often only to end up with angry, bitter staff. In the case of my friend, what had gone wrong was instantly clear to me because I've done it to myself countless time. I call this situation, the "engineering field of dreams" problem.

Jobs in Information Technology allow us to focus on building things using only our minds and hands (for typing). As engineers we have a bad habit of completely focusing on solving the technical problem that we've been assigned and not lifting our heads up until we have a finished product. The problem with this is that we then expect the rest of the world to look at what we've made and realize what a great worker we are. In my case, I blame my Mom because whenever I took something that I had made to her she always reacted with joy and surprise and told me that it was the best thing that she had ever seen. Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn't work that way.

So what should my friend have done? While he was working on the project he should have realized that he had another job to do at the same time. In IT management speak we'd call this an "overlay job". Every single day he needed to be managing his career -- thinking about what he needed to be doing in order to get recognized for what he was doing and get considered for a promotion the next time an opening showed up. You know what he said when I told him this: "Hey Jim, I just don't like to brag about myself!" Two quick replies to that: (1) if you don't, then who do you think will? and (2) bragging would be bad, informing others would be good.

I ended up having a very long talk with my friend; however, here is the gist of what we talked about. He needs to identify who he needs to make aware of his contributions (his boss, his bosses boss, and the bosses of any department that his project interfaces with). He needs to communicate with these people regularly (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). Communicating does not mean sending them mindless status reports. He needs to send brief, concise emails that provide valuable information such as "We had a problem, but here is how we solved it..." When he sends an email to these important people, he needs to address it to only them -- don't CC them or send it to a distro list. One-to-one sends a powerful message. Finally, he needs to do more than just send emails: he needs face time with the decision makers. I suggested that he use the excuse of "checking to make sure that you agree with the decisions that we've made" line to set up a meeting.

So remember: you are in charge of your career and nobody else. As technical professionals we all suffer from a "love my work, love me" syndrome and we need to do a better job of communicating with those in charge in order to move our career along.

IT Employee Motivation: Fixes Are More Important Than Problems

The engineer in all of us can rise up and take over whenever a problem shows up. In the world of information technology, when either ourselves or one of our staff screw up, personnel issues can get shoved aside as we focus on finding a solution to the problem at hand. However, if you can take a step back for just a moment, you'll find that this is a rare opportunity to define your career. In this day and age in which IT employee retention is so important, the ability to pause can be critical.

We all make mistakes and the same goes for those who either work for us or work on our team. When somebody really makes a mistake, the whole world seems to come to a screeching halt when both the problem and the person who caused it are finally identified. What you do next will define how everything turns out. You've got a bunch of options:

• Don't Go Bi-Polar: All of us tend to favor an extream reaction when we realize that a mistake has happened. Either we blow our top and insist that someone else is responsible or we get very embarassed and think "Oh no, I really screwed up this time." Both reactions are the wrong response -- instead, take a step back to evaluate the situation and keep calm even if that is the hardest thing in the world to do.
  
  
• Plan, Plan, Plan: don't ignore the problem. And yes, you should probably tell your boss about it so that he hears it from you and not someone else. Be sure that you accept responsibility (I mean, what else can you do?) and make sure that you have a plan for what to do next BEFORE you tell him.
  
  
• Don't Point Fingers of Blame: Focus on finding a solution to the problem instead of focusing on the source of the problem. One key aspect of IT jobs is that we seem remember and reward the heroes who fix problems and we rarely seem to remember how the problems happened in the first place. This is your time to shine!
  
  
• Find A Problem Mentor: If ever there was a time in your career to find someone to talk to about your situation this is it. Keep in mind that they may not be in your office and may not even work for your company. Find them, explain the situation, and seek their guidance as to what you should be doing next.
  
  
• Say That You Are Sorry: Amazingly enough, this may be the perfect time for you to simply say "I'm sorry". A sincere apology may be the hardest thing in the world for you to do; however, it may act like a sudden rain storm over a forest fire. If an apology is not appropriate or needed, then at least state how you feel "This is a bad situation and I'd like to help correct it" and then move on.
  

We have all made mistakes in our career and we will probably make even bigger ones as we move forward. However, it's how we react to these mistakes that really defines who we are.


Tags: apology, calm, career, mentor, mistake, plan

Motivation For Your Team Provided By MIT's Sloan School of Managment

What if...you could somehow find the time to fly out to Boston and take two days to attend the MIT Sloan School of Management's course on "Managing Technical Professionals and Organizations"? This course is designed for "senior management" but no matter what your title is, you've got my permission to attend. Umm, I guess there are the separate issues related to travel to Boston for your two days of training and, of course, the fee for taking the class ($2,600). Dang -- those restrictions just about put this opportunity out of reach.

Those of us who work in the Information Technology field need more of that: information. I've secretly obtained information on this MIT Sloan course and, for free, I'm going to share it with you. Please feel free to share it with your team.

If you took the course, what would you hope to get out of it? How about:

1. Learn ways to avoid turning the organization into a parking lot for bright folks whose abilities to generate new ideas far outstrip the ability of your organization to do anything with them.
   
   
2. Get a hand on how to manage functional relationships between different functions within your company including research, development, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, and, of course, finance.
   
   
3. Identify and find ways to reward those individuals who act as gatekeepers and yet who are able to break down internal barriers and help to promote technology transfers.
   

Sound like a good set of goals? Great -- lets take a look at the four sections of the course and what you'd cover in them:

• Making Technical Organizations Work: On Corporate Culture, Technology Transfer, and Effective Reward Systems.
  During this section, you'd learn from the rest of the class that their companies are just as screwed up as yours is. The classic problem of different departments not wanting to share information would be discussed. The solution to this would be presented as finding information "gatekeepers" and convincing them to allow information to flow more freely between departments. Once this was solved, you'd talk about the sticky problem of how to reward technical professionals. You'd discuss the "technical" ladder approach and would agree with the rest of the class that it doesn't always work well. The class would brainstorm on ways to provide technical professionals with increasing challenges in the workplace without trapping them in obsolescence.
  
  
• Managing Performance and Productivity In Technical Organizations:
  This time around you'll be spending your class time talking about motivation and how employee motivation is the key to a successful technical team. A great deal of time will be spent on helping the team deal with uncertainty and the stress that it causes. Finally, you'd work with your classmates to find ways to integrate your technical professionals in with the rest of the company (can anyone say alignment?).
  
  
• Sustaining Innovation and High Performance:
  We're all familiar with this issue -- how do you manage star IT individual contributors? You'd talk about how you can move star performers into management roles and what kind of training they are going to need for these new roles. The key issue of how to teach them not to be a "scary" manager due to their deep knowledge will be covered. We'll wrap this section up with a discussion of how to keep that "creative tension" alive in the team in order to maximize everyone's productivity.
  
  
• Structuring The Technical Organization:
  Welcome to the world of organizational behavior! You'll be told that the matrix approach to management is the best approach for managing technical professionals on projects. Your two days of classes will wrap up with a discussion of the physical structure of the workplace -- where we work has a big impact on how we work.
  
  

There you go! You've just successfully completed your MIT Sloan class and you still have $2,600 in your pocket. You might complain that this was just an overview and you'd get more out of the real class. I think that you'd be correct; however, how much of the class would you remember a month later, a year later, etc? The nice thing about blogs like this one is that, you can always come back and take this class again -- for free!


Tags: course, MIT, Sloan School of Management, technical professional

But I Don't WANT To Work With You!

In the April edition of the Communications of the ACM, Peter Dennine and Peter Yaholkovsky discuss an interesting topic: just how do you get a group of people to stop thinking about "me" and start thinking about "we"? They are talking in broad generalities; however, it did get me thinking about how this can be accomplished in IT departments & teams.

Messes are defined as large, complex, problems that appear at first glance to be unsolvable. Really big messes have a special name: "wicked problems". Peter & Peter point out that the only way to solve problems like this is through the use of collaboration. Collaboration is defined as a working together synergistically. Here in the 21st century, this should be easy to do, right? We've got blogs that talk about important things, wikis, IM, and cell phones. How hard could this be?

Well, it turns out to be quite hard. Most of the collaboration tools that we have turn out to be pretty poor at enabling collaboration. Things got even more complicated when researchers did some testing and found out that you and I don't really like to collaborate. When we are working on a wicked problem in a group setting, we first like to use authoritarianism, then competition, then finally collaboration. Researcher Nancy Roberts says it best when she said "People fail into collaboration." So why do we do this? Two guesses: first, we seem to think that we can win in every negotiation by standing our ground. Secondly, we have a hero culture - we look for a hero to arise and solve the problem. If they solve it, they'll get the credit so why make the effort because you're not going to get any credit.

In IT we seem to encounter more than our fair share of "wicked problems". What can we do to encourage collaboration within IT teams when our very nature resists it? If we adopt a three stage process for dealing with wicked problems, we can solve them together: design, collaborate, and follow-through. The design stage simply requires us to identify all of the affected parties and what questions that they need to answer. Hosting a meeting where a moderator leads the team through a series of follow-through steps can cause collaboration to occur. Basically, you want to state the problem, have everyone discuss it, have folks start to throw out ideas, and then when people start to refine the ideas offered by others, that's when you'll see the real collaboration start to happen.

The authors finish up by asking one last intriguing question: how far up can you scale this approach to solving wicked problems? They've shown that it can work in groups of 50-200 people. The open question is if it can be scaled up beyond that. From an IT perspective, it doesn't matter because that size works well with departments or specific project teams.

In the end, collaboration happens when a team or department comes together to create a solution to a wicked problem that takes care of everyone's concerns at the same time. It sure sounds like we should be trying to make this happen just a little bit more often!


Tags: authoritarianism, collaboration, competition, problem solving

Take Your Pick: Task Or Time?

As we reach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the IT workplace is once again starting to change. For at least the next few years we're going to be seeing three distinct generations working together side-by-side: boomers (born before 1965), Gen-X'ers (1965-1979), and Gen-Y'ers (1980-1999). This arrangement causes conflicts and friction in all parts of a company; however, the IT department feels it the most because of the rapid changes that have happened in IT.

In order to keep an entire IT department staffed and motivated (and avoid having unhappy IT workers), things are going to have to change. One key change is going to be how we all think about IT jobs. In the immediate past, IT jobs were simply 40-hour-a-week commitments that pretty much started and ended at the same time each day. We might work different shifts; however, the company was fairly insistent that we show up and put our time in. All sorts of tools were created around this structure: time clocks, time sheets, overtime, comp-time, etc. Things are changing now and it's because Gen-Y has arrived in the work place.

The Gen-Y crowd clearly prefer jobs that are defined by their task, not the amount of time that they take. This of course means that they want to be compensated for what they produce. In a way this is sort of a step backwards. Back when everyone worked on a farm or in the early days of factories, people were paid based on their personal output. This had its pluses and minuses and after the Great Depression when manufacturing got more complicated and unions arrived, the shift to paying by the hour started.

Younger workers are used to working in an asynchronous fashion -- something that older workers may do also, but they hid it better. Getting into the office by 8am or staying at the office until 5pm makes little or no sense to younger workers if they have completed their work.

You can call task based work whatever you choose ("virtual work" seems to be winning), but by necessarily text="Virtual Work" it is catching on. At IBM, 40% of their employees have no official offices. So what does all of this change mean for those who are in charge of making sure that a multi-generational IT department produces results? Here are the three key skills that will need to be mastered:

1. Clearly articulate the results that you expect -- leave no room for misunderstanding. Then follow up by tying accountability to getting the job done.
   
   
2. Make physical attendance at the office / meetings optional. Note that everyone still needs to show up for meetings and communicate with team members.
   
   
3. Gage worker performance on the quality of the work performed.
   
   

What can you expect to gain from making these changes? Best Buy has implemented many of them and they claim to have seen a 35% increase in productivity and voluntary turnover drop by 320 basis points. What's even more remarkable is that when asked, employees were unsure if they were now working more or fewer hours -- they had simply stopped keeping track.


Tags: 40 hour week, productivity, quality, work task, work time

Q: What's Worse Then An Unhappy Worker Leaving? A: If They Stay...

We all know that having high turnover can at best be disruptive and at worst can throw projects off schedule, kill budgets, and doom overall employee morale. So you would think that if you are somehow able to have a low number of employees leaving that everything would be hunky dory, right? Wrong -- you might now have lots of unhappy employees who have for one reason or another decided that they can't leave right now. They'll keep coming into work each day (or logging on if they are unhappily telecommuting), but they will be dragging their virtual feet and just going through the motions. They are not going to be helping the company be a success.

Why are so many non-leaving employees unhappy? I think that I know the reason and the author Patrick Lencioni has captured them quite nicely in his book "The Three Signs of a Miserable Job". In his book, Patrick states that he believes that people become unhappy in their jobs when their basic social needs are not being met. Yeah, yeah, yeah -- we all love a paycheck and the bigger the better. However, we really go to work in order to have some very basic human needs met: to get a sense of accomplishment, to boost self-esteem, and to feel that we are part of a community.

When we aren't geting these needs met, Patrick calls the problems "anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurability". Great, now you've got the silent problem of unhappy IT workers lurking in your department. What to do?

Don't dispair! In order to reach out and change unhappy workers into committed employees you have to tackle these key issues one by one. One-on-one feedback is the key to providing emplyees with both a sense of accomplishment (they know who I am!) and boosting self-esteem (they like what I do!). Developing a sense of community is somewhat more difficult -- in the IT field if this is done incorrectly, it can come across as fake. However, if done correctly you can turn a lackluster department into a team of overachievers. Now that's something to cheer about!


Tags: community, motivation, self-esteem, sense of accomplishment