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B- environment merits B- effort
- ry0ohki 14y agoWhile I certainly think a bad environment can make people perform worse, I'm not sure the reverse is true. There are just some people who don't give a shit regardless of the awesome trusting environment you give them.
- jameskilton 14y agoHe covers this point in the first paragraph, basically saying that they aren't worth your time. In short, fire them.
- arkitaip 14y ago"the statistical outliers who do not follow this are not worth focusing policy on" This is a great idea that 37signals keeps coming back to, i.e. don't shape HR policies based on outliners and exceptions.
- DannyBee 14y agoThis is because they don't have a large enough group of outliers to matter. So yeah, I wouldn't shape HR policy in a small company based on outliers. But if i had a company of 50k people, i probably have at least 3500 significant outliers, performance wise.
- rescripting 14y agoWhat does the size of the company matter? If 5% of the workforce in a 100 person company slacks off, vs 5% in a 50k person workforce, why is should policy be any different for the 50k workforce? If you're implying the percentage of slackers scales non linearly as the size of a company grows then I'd love to see some research to back that up, as I'd be genuinely interested if that were the case.
- joshuacc 14y agoOne possibility is that as the number of slackers grows, the amount of damage that they can do increases at a greater-than-arithmetic rate, particularly if they tend to cluster together. For example, if 5% of a company overall is composed of slackers, but 25% of their customer support department are slackers, they may do outsized damage.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y agoSo get rid of them. The trick is to get rid of them without enacting policy that negatively affects the morale of your productive workforce.
- DannyBee 14y ago" Fundamentally, everyone wants to do a good job (the statistical outliers who do not follow this are not worth focusing policy on)" You have just said you should focus a policy on getting rid of them. I agree with this, but it goes against what the article just said to do. I posit this is because he does not have a large enough company to have enough slackers that he needs to deal with them systematically, and instead can simply deal with them on a one-off basis.
- cmaher 14y agoCorporate policies can miss their targets. If a policy targeting the slackers existed, than part of it's job would be to target said slackers, which it would only be able to successfully do with some probability. However, if there isn't a statistically significant number of slackers, the policy could end up falsely targeting more hardworking employees than slackers. It's a classic probability/confusion matrix problem and goes to show that you have to be damn sure that your policy is only targeting the right people. A company willing to risk harming its honest employees for minimal benefit is not one I would like to work for.
- DannyBee 14y agoYou seem to assume there isn't some minimum non-relative performance bar you can set for what "slacking" is, without harming hardworking employees. Also, nobody said the policy had to be completely rigid, but having no policy will become a disaster as the company grows larger, and HR actually becomes significant.
- cmaher 14y agoFair enough. But my experience tells me that large corporations + many policies = many missed targets.
- zeidrich 14y agoI don't think he meant let those people hang around being disruptive. Just don't structure policy around them. If they are outliers in that respect, then will any policy you come up with make those people productive? Will it have overall positive benefit or will it damage the ability for the other 95% to work? If you have 95% of your workforce who want to succeed and 5% of your workforce who are "slackers', you can provide tools to help those who want to succeed and fire the slackers. On the other hand, you can force through workflow policies that force the slackers to do minimal work while frustrating and slowing down the workflow of the rest of the staff who want to excel. As well, the more freedom you give to those staff who want to excel, the more rope you give those staff who will not to hang themselves with. Force them to jump through hoops to show that they are working and they will do what they can to hide the fact that they're not. Give them free reign to slack off and they will not have false metrics to hide behind, nor will they feel the need to hide so much.
- DannyBee 14y agoI agree you should fire the slackers. But that is a policy, and you've focused on them and structured it around dealing with them, which goes against what he just said you should do :)
- absconditus 14y agoI think that he means do not do things like create a process that everyone must follow, full of red tape, simply because your worst employees cannot perform a task correctly.
- calinet6 14y agoAnd you should still not focus on them! That is a statistical fallacy. Improve the system, and everything improves. Don't focus on outliers—they will always exist. You'll be killing individual ants when you really want to go after the queen.
- DannyBee 14y agoThis makes no sense. Those outliers often cause greater than expected effect. One slacker on a team of 10 people will often drag down the entire team. Yes, you will always have below average people, statistically. That's pretty much irrelevant. You can still have a non-relative minimum performance bar. If people aren't meeting that, you need to deal with that, or else everyone suffers.
- calinet6 14y agoSure, you can always deal with individual cases as they come up. You can't ignore that there are differences between the performance and fit of different employees. So hire and fire the best you can. The key is what happens after that. You'll still have a rough bell curve of how people perform. You can keep chopping off the bottom of that bell curve, but the problem is that that practice is in itself demotivational. It's bad for culture, it's bad for your company. Basically it's negative reinforcement for all your employees, and the response to negative reinforcement is—to put it lightly—not optimal. Your bell curve will be sucked backward by the firing black hole and people will start acting out of fear and individual motivations, which include: 1) not being fired, 2) keeping their job at all costs, and 3) looking better than everyone else. Rarely does the fear response motivate people to actually work harder. Instead it leads to a culture of in-fighting, blame, and ladder-climbing games. And in no part of this story are the overall goals of your company recognized, let alone respected or achieved. This is why you don't concern yourself with the slackers. If they really are slacking and not getting anything done, you may fire them—no one is stopping you. But this is not your focus. Your focus should be on moving the entire bell curve up by 20%, motivating people to perform beyond their basic abilities, and empowering them to work. These are fluffy phrases, but they are also true. You start from the top down, make sure everyone understands the overall goals of the company, make sure they are well educated about the means and purpose of their work, and that they are enabled to work as well as they can. This is the essence of W. Edwards Deming's philosophy, and yes, it does work this way. Because, more often than not, your "slacker" is not simply a bad person who can't work. Very few of those exist in reality. He is probably a person who has not learned the right things, encountered the right motivations, or understood the true purpose of his work, or he has confounding factors preventing him from reaching his true abilities (see Maslow's basic needs theory). Most people want their work to be meaningful, because people fundamentally want their lives to be meaningful. This is what I'm saying: it's far more effective to improve the system surrounding your employees than to simply treat your employees as unaffected robots whose performance is static. Again, I'm not saying you can't fire people when they don't work: I'm just saying that it would be dumb to only focus on that strategy as though there were no other variables, and in fact, the system variables are the important ones when you actually look at it. Best business advice of the last few hundred years: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
- calinet6 14y agoAbsolutely. It's just good statistics and systems thinking. In other words, "the truth." See: W. Edwards Deming and his Key Principles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principle... —I'm consistently dumbfounded why this systems thinking genius from over 50 years ago has not become prevalent or even decently respected in this modern world.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoDeming is both prevalent and respected. He acheived demi-god status in Japan, there are several channels of business shows dedicated to his work, and everyone, but everyone who writes a business book says the same as you... He is like a hermit buying drinks at the bar while people talk: - it is so sad that hermit is tucked away in his cave, - ignored by everyone, - no ice in mine thank you W.E., - Shame really
- calinet6 14y agoExactly. Very well respected and prevalent in certain circles, but outside that there's very little visibility. His ideas would revolutionize American business, IMHO. But for some reason they seem incompatible with it at the same time...
- slantyyz 14y agoCulture has a lot to do with it.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoDoes certain circles mean most business "thought leaders" for the past twenty years? I mean Tom peters was lamenting demmings low profile at the start of the US "quality" movement. Demming was all about tight observe/act loops and planning for human frailty. These are not new concepts now, but like healthy eating and regular exercise everyone knows about it and yet businesses don't do it. I would hardly say he is under recognised in the mainstream of business thought (I mean he never is going to compete with Brad Pitt for recognition status).
- jheriko 14y ago"Being a slacker is not an innate human quality" I really can't swallow this. Laziness is /the/ primary motivator for invention. People want to do the least possible to attain their goals - this isn't a negative quality - but in the context of earning a paycheque it hurts the employer. I've noticed the larger the company i've worked at, the more people treading water and hiding inbetween people who actually do work. On the other hand I do broadly agree that window dressing is not enough. We end up judging employers by actions more than words by nature...
- kolektiv 14y agoLaziness does not have to equate to being a slacker. Lazily (or inventively) pursuing your employers goals is not a problem - generally if you find a way to satisfy them with less work, everyone's happy. Slacking would be following your own goals (loafing around, hiding) when they conflict with your employer. As the article says, if your people aren't bothered or motivated by your goals, they probably shouldn't be there (at least in skilled positions - of course there are plenty of jobs which are purely for the paycheck). It's not worth changing your company based on the attitudes and motivations of people who shouldn't be there anyway. It is easier to hide in (many) big companies, but that doesn't mean that the solution should be to remove all potential hiding places - it should be to remove (or re-motivate) those who are hiding.
- GhotiFish 14y agoI've got that kind of mind that can drift off while reading. By the time I had regained my focus, the article had descended into this: "If you’re doing work in a less than star environment, you owe less than star effort. Quid pro quo. By all means, do yours to affect and change the environment. Nudge it towards the stars. But also, accept the limitations of your power. You can drag a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink. So ration your will and determination. Invest what’s left over, after meeting the bar of your work environment, in your own projects, skills, and future. The dividends is what’s going to lead you to the next, better thing. Everyone deserves to work at a place that inspires them to give their very best. Don’t stop reaching until you have that." Thank goodness I was worried I was going to run out of platitudes today.
- thetrumanshow 14y agoOnce you earn the spot of a visionary with an audience, you have to continue to espouse ideas. Movements require that ideas be constantly re-framed to draw more and more people into the fold. Also, you must reinforce the same ideas for the existing audience. If you're beyond the need to receive the "milk of the gospel" and are ready for the meat, then its probably time for you to be a producer and not merely a consumer. But, don't blame the minister for continuing to feed the babes.
- anoncow 14y agoThat is exceptionally deep, my friend.
- addlepate 14y agoYeah, and I was worried I was gonna run out of HN comments written by self-important dickfaces. (Just kidding.)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- sageikosa 14y agoPersonally I was hoping for something a little more mathematical, since I was re-reading Melvin Conway's: How Committee's Invent yesterday and came to expect a heuristic for efficiency versus organizational style.
- gohwell 14y ago"It can serve as a cherry on top, but if the rest of the cake is full of shit, that’s not going to make it any more appealing." Got to love that
- zenogais 14y agoReminds me of a lot of shitty start-ups out there - where management is terrible but thinks it can bribe people into sweatshop-style labor with meaningless perks.
- rquantz 14y agoI used to do freelance work in a big open office setup with a lot of different companies all owned by the same big holding company. Once or twice a week one of the partners of the parent company would come in with a box of brownies or some such thing. The startup kids who hadn't paid themselves in months would all stand around eating the treat, saying "god, this is the best place to work."
- pekk 14y agoIf you can afford not to get paid for months...
- hipsters_unite 14y ago"If you’re doing work in a less than star environment, you owe less than star effort. Quid pro quo." This describes every bad job I've ever had. You do a great job, nobody cares, you do a mediocre job, you feel bad. Lose lose.
- slantyyz 14y agoDHH leaves professionalism and personal pride out of his analogy. I try to do good work even for bad employers. Instead of reducing the quality of my work product, what I would do is quit and find a better employer.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dyno12345 14y agoAnother 37signals post! Let's get started! > If you want star quality effort, you need to provide a star quality environment. No, window dressing like a free meal is not it. Boy, we've all been there. I know what he's talking about! Now I want to know what specific advice he has. > It can serve as a cherry on top, but if the rest of the cake is full of shit, that’s not going to make it any more appealing. Hahaha, now he's got me on the hook! > Make people proud to work where they work by involving them in projects that matter and ignite a fire of urgency about your purpose. Find out who you are as a company and be the very best you. Give people a strategic plan that’s coherent and believable and then leave the bulk of the tactical implementation to their ingenuity. Oh. No specific advice. Free food isn't good enough, so... do some other stuff to get people excited. So this is another Chicken Soup for the Startup Soul post. Or maybe a more charitable interpretation, instead of just blowing hot air at us, he's asking us to blow hot air at employees?