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I am reminded of campaign by Paul O'Neill to improve worker safety at Alcoa. O'Neill was the first Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush -- to his credit, he

I am reminded of campaign by Paul O'Neill to improve worker safety at Alcoa. O'Neill was the first Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush -- to his credit, he got fired early on. I came across this in Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit. It's summarized here: http://www.post-gazette.com/business/businessnews/2012/05/13/Habitual-excellence-The-workplace-according-to-Paul-O-Neill/stories/201205130249 http://www.post-gazette.com/business/businessnews/2012/05/13... In my DevOps experience, I've seen a lot of room for the application of his approach. Unfortunately, what often prevails is hurried workarounds and post-facto ass-covering. Here's how O'Neill sums up his approach in the article above: > He saw his safety goal as part of a broader emphasis on creating "habitual excellence." > "I believe an organization has the potential for greatness if every person can say yes to three questions without reservation," Mr. O'Neill said. "The first is, 'Can I say every day I am treated with dignity and respect by everyone I encounter without respect to my pay grade, or my title, or my race, or ethnicity or religious beliefs or gender?' And you know, there are not a lot of places like that. > "The second question is, 'Am I given the things I need - education, training, tools, encouragement - so I can make a contribution to this organization that gives meaning to my life?' > And the third question is, 'Am I recognized for what I do by someone I care about?' > "Every company I know of says somewhere in its annual report, 'People are our most important resource,' but my observation from all these places I had worked was that there was no evidence it was true."

devonkim 10y ago
This goes back to the recent findings that are leading to how to motivate employees better now instead of the tradition of compensation (staying under inflation for most workers while management bonuses trend upward, anyway) and stability / loyalty (which nobody has anymore culturally besides small companies perhaps). The new drivers to motivate modern workers is around three of their core desires: autonomy, mastery, purpose. With most corporations, workers get mostly none of these and so you get decreased engagement, lower productivity, etc. which translate into just plain worse outcomes despite the old fashioned idea that spending more money on people will correlate with better results. Start-ups are a clear antithesis to the usual corporate model, but I have almost no faith that managers at large corporations really look carefully at how small companies succeed because they tend to be suffering from being beaten down by the same cultural problems that led to them giving up on changing anything - even managers have little autonomy, mastery, and purpose relatively, after all. I know we hate anecdotes here, but I left my last position despite feeling like I was respected (my opinions were taken into account somewhere) and provided certain tools and some recognition. The problem was that I was given responsibility with no authority to enact sufficient changes to improve conditions for those that did not feel the same.

devonkim 10y ago

This goes back to the recent findings that are leading to how to motivate employees better now instead of the tradition of compensation (staying under inflation for most workers while management bonuses trend upward, anyway) and stability / loyalty (which nobody has anymore culturally besides small companies perhaps). The new drivers to motivate modern workers is around three of their core desires: autonomy, mastery, purpose. With most corporations, workers get mostly none of these and so you get decreased engagement, lower productivity, etc. which translate into just plain worse outcomes despite the old fashioned idea that spending more money on people will correlate with better results. Start-ups are a clear antithesis to the usual corporate model, but I have almost no faith that managers at large corporations really look carefully at how small companies succeed because they tend to be suffering from being beaten down by the same cultural problems that led to them giving up on changing anything - even managers have little autonomy, mastery, and purpose relatively, after all. I know we hate anecdotes here, but I left my last position despite feeling like I was respected (my opinions were taken into account somewhere) and provided certain tools and some recognition. The problem was that I was given responsibility with no authority to enact sufficient changes to improve conditions for those that did not feel the same.