In a recent 1-to-1 meeting I had with my colleague, he asked "Are we not risking the attrition & business by letting the employees interact with our clients directly? Should we not deploy an interface in the middle to cover the risk?"
The question did not surprise me, since this is a standard practice in many organisations. However, having this layer only makes things worse than what you fear of. Removing this layer will let every member in the team to focus on the core task and core task only. This will eliminate issues with communication, productivity, morale, scale-up, quality etc.
One of my earlier organisation has outsourced a module in their key project to a company in down south India. Being few weeks in the project, they found that the resource was not performing well, which caused lots of issues with quality. Even though they had a good rapport with the client, they hesitated to inform this to the client thinking that it will spoil their reputation and continued with the non-performing resource to show the progress until they find a good replacement. The client found out the issues in the code at the time of the release and the code has to be completely re-written at the cost of an organisation.
Communicating the right status in a right way to the client would have made them understand the situation and the motive to do the right thing, which would have made the client to support them in finding the right replacement which would have avoided from adding junk to the product. By not communicating the facts at the right time, we are only making things worse by hiding the correct information and paving the way for an issue to bite us back at a later stage.
One of my colleague was working on few critical tasks, but he had to be @ home for a week due to some personal demands. He committed to complete those tasks by working from home. Upon checking the status after 2 days, we heard that the task is completed and the code check-in is on the way; We waited, waited & waited; The code check-in never happened. There were many reasons given for the same, but it was not really helping the project. At the end, we had to become independent of him and wrote the code in our own to meet the deadline.
The productivity is not expected to be the same as the normal working days when working from home, especially when there are personal demands. However, if something is committed, it has to be honored or at the least the fact has to be communicated clearly to the relevant people, so that an alternative plan can be made to get those tasks done. By not doing so, the consequences will only spoil the morale of the team and the reputation of an organisation.
One of our employee was very dull and lowzy. He was very unusual and not as normal as the other days. When asked about it, he pretended that there were no issues. However, as the days progressed, we found that he was distracted, not productive and failed in his commitments. Later we found that he was going through some personal issues.
Now a days, having a personal issue is as common as we comb our hair every day, but if you have any serious personal issue and you think that you need time to recover from the same, it is quiet important that you let the right people @ work know about it. It will only help them to understand why you are not 100% @ work and you will get their support on the work front, so you can focus more on resolving your personal issues and get back to normal soon.
After too many delays, finally the project was about to be delivered in a week. The developers knew that the deadline cannot be met, but they did not communicate the real status to their manager thinking that they can put some additional effort to make it happen. They pushed themsleves hard to deliver it on time, but things did not work out. On the day of the delivery, the manager found out that they need 4 more days to complete the task. Doh!
Informing about the delay to the client on the day of the delivery is the last thing the client wants. Also, rushing up the delivery will not help in ensuring quality. No one can get the estimations right, hence missing the deadline is fine, but not communicating the real status at a right time is a serious issue. It will only cause surprises and cripple the system. Keeping the right people informed about the right status of the project @ the right time would only enable the organisation to help teams perform better and to plan things well without hurting anyone involved in the project.
If you have observed, there is one common thing missing in all of the above incidents, it is an attitude of being open, yes a value called Transparency. Most of us have a nature of hiding things without our knowledge in our defense, where that practice needs to be sent to grave if we want to keep Transparency alive in us.
"Helping the team and an organisation to plan things better to deliver quality by communicating the right fact at the right time on the progress, issues, risks, availability and other impacts regardless of the personal consequences is called Transparency. It is a value, it is a commitment from every individual to share and it has to become a core habit of every team member."
So, what blocks people from being transparent?
Over confidence: Confidence is good, a bit over will just poison your mind. Many think that the task assigned can be easily achieved without analysing it well. So, they commit to something initially and work to honor that commitment, but when they find out that they made a mistake by committing too early & their commitment is in stake, they will be pushed to cover things up in their defense.
Fear of failure: Failure is not a bad thing, but not learning from it is an issue. Not all of us see failure in this way. People want to succeed, but if they face otherwise, they try to escape from the situation fearing the embarassment and wash their hands of it thinking that it might affect their career.
Fear of blame: People's real values are tested only when they are in crisis. When the progression of the task is not going well as planned, you might think that communicating the same might upset your manager/lead and instead of providing a solution/support, they might blame you for the issues caused by you. Yet again, you have to make up for the situation.
Lack of planning: There is a saying, "Planning is bringing the future into the present, so that you can do something about it now". Many think that Software Engineering is just about coding, but it is also about understanding, analysing, estimating, communicating, risk handling, deploying, maintaining and much more, very importantly PLANNING. Lack of planning will lead to failure, many are not comfortable facing the same, hence the information is hidden.
Lack of Visibility: When employees do not have a visibility on what/when/why things have to be done, they do not know the purpose of their tasks, which leads to assumptions and assumptions are bad. This hurts the organisation very badly all across, since the team is left in the dark and it creates all sorts of moral issues and never encourages the team to come forward and speak about any issues or anything else for that matter.
Closed attitude: Sometimes it is to do with the culture, the way people are brought up or the environment they grew up. Personally it might be alright, but it does not work well in the profession.
Not sure about the role of transparency in other areas, but it is quite critical in the area of team building and project management. Saying that, it is simply unfair to expect just the employees to be transparent while the organisation is not. Transparency has to be practiced all across the team, and an organisation should create an environment/platform where Transparency performs well. The organisation should practice their values in everything they do, literally in everything (Marketing, Sales, Recruitment, Training, SDLC, Events, Policies, Awards, even in maintaining a toilet), not only in the speech OR in a big banner at the office reception. Transparency is one of the core value which needs to be practiced and promoted in every organisation to see great results in all departments. If not, everyone in the organisation are expected to shoot in the dark and still hit the target, the only way this can be achieved is by being lucky. If so, it is better to be in a Casino rolling dies than being in the business.
In one of the organisations I have worked, the structure and the process was defined in such a way that it focuses only on the revenue and hardly promotes or reflects any of the values they marketed to the industry or employees. They are big, but at the same time, very innefficient. Their structure and the process promoted a closed culture and the employees are never encouraged to question or suggest. Most of the communications are hidden and not spread across the team. The employees did not have a view on where the organisation is running towards and what is their focus, similarly the organisation did not have an idea on whether the employees are aligned with their goals.
If an organisation wants to deliver quality, they have to make their vision and goals visible to the team and need to nurture the team with the right values to make them understand on what the team is doing and more importantly, why they are doing it. This will enable the team to understand the purpose of every task they do, will make them feel more involved and add more value to the delivery. This helps the organisation to run unbelievably faster towards their goals.
Ofcourse every organisation needs support from their employees to promote a transparent environment @ work. To facilitate the same, an organisation has to let the right people enter into their doors, yes, hiring the person with the right attitude and values is key. When hiring employees, organisations focus more on hard skills, but forget to put their soft skills to test. Skills can be learnt, but attitude?... hmmm, doubtful. Mostly changing the attitude is hard. Possible, but hard. Underestimating this would affect the team and the business very badly in a long run.
The minimum an organisation can do...
- Make the vision/goals/values public and nurture the team in the same.
- Practice the values, do not just speak about it.
- Values should be reflected in every policy devised.
- Hire people with the right attitude.
- Instead of just saying what has to be done, always say why it has to be done?
- Encourage questions, opinions & suggestions. Simply, provide an environment to be open.
The minimum an employee can do...
- Understand the vision/goals/values of an organisation, align yours with it.
- Focus on the quality of the delivery and delivery only, ignore the politics.
- Never underestimate any task, Resepect everything coming in your way.
- Be open, communicate the right facts to relevant people as soon as you know it, register your opinion.
- Planning is like completing half of the task, always plan.
- Mistakes happen. Admit the mistake, learn from it and share the same.
If the mind of an employee is shy and covers its thoughts in the name of the culture, then his mind is not naked enough to practice Transparency in his value system OR if an employee refuses to undress his mind for any mentoring, he does not qualify to be in an organisation. Equally, if an organisation refuses to be naked in its thoughts and not practicing or promoting Transparency as part of their culture, it is not the right place to be in for any professional.
