Employee Engagement Is the Only Metric That Matters

When you want to succeed in software development and its adjacent business activities (which is pretty much everything now), only one metric matters: employee engagement.

Why do we say this? Employee attrition is a financial hemorrhage that only some organizations can afford, if any. Finding people who know how to work in complex spaces and understand the cross-disciplinary nature of building and maintaining software is a piece of the challenge, but it's not the most significant.

The most significant piece is how to keep them.

Given how long it takes to ramp employees up to become productive in challenging, fast-paced environments and how much longer it takes to build domain knowledge and institutional memory, retaining those employees is critical. The average employee only creates value for the organization once they have been with it for two years. The average tenure of tech employees is currently two years, dropping all the time, as we know from the Great Resignation. That means the average tech org loses their talent right when they become their most valuable.

How do you think you could flip this script?

Guess what? Knowledge workers prefer to be treated differently than we treated factory workers. They want freedom and autonomy.

Managers that can create a culture with high employee engagement will outperform their peers by up to 25%, execute better customer experience, and their organizations will be 2.01x more profitable than the competition with less engaged employees and higher attrition rates.

Most of us who are managers now, came up through very autocratic management styles. These old ways of managing don't work anymore. We are used to one person calling the shots and the team underneath them executing without questioning. The game has changed. Software is a team sport. You need multiple intelligent people to execute, and each of those persons needs to be embraced as an expert in their domain. Simple intelligence doesn't suffice, either. They also have to be people that enjoy working in uncertain and always-changing environments. They have to be comfortable working in spaces that are too complex to understand quickly and easily, which requires nerves of steel and unshakable confidence. And that confidence can't just be swagger; it can't slip into a cockiness and arrogance that won't allow people to admit mistakes or to confess when they don't know the answer to something. They must be confident enough that they don't worry about appearing stupid.

The trouble is that intelligent people with these qualities are hard to manage. As your IQ rises, it makes you more successful in business, but it's a bell curve. Past that point, it starts to create social problems that interfere with your success at work. This compounds if you are high-IQ and in any other category of under-represented person: female, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, disabled, multi-lingual, immigrant.

Even more to the point, people who can handle risk, stress, and confidently innovate have low thresholds for social behavior. What do I mean by that?

One of my intellectual heroes, Malcolm Gladwell, explained this perfectly in an episode of Revisionist History called "The Big Guy Can't Shoot." Referring to Wilt Chamberlin, he talked of his poor technique and success rate with free throws. As it turns out, the "Granny Shot" has the highest accuracy rate of any other free throw posture or technique. But most people won't do it. Gladwell tried to find out that if it is true that the underhanded free throw is more accurate, why don't people use it?

After interviewing people, the answer was quite simple. If the crowd isn't doing it, it takes more than good reason for most people to do it. They fear social rejection. He interviewed Rick Barry, one of the few pros known to use the Granny Shot and use it well. He discovered that Rick doesn't care about what other people think about what he does as much as he cares about the outcome of what he does. To him, it is ridiculous that others persist in avoiding the Granny Shot, even though it would improve their accuracy significantly. Gladwell also notes that Rick allowed his mother, sibling, and wife to say unflattering things about him in his biography. To Rick, the truth is messier and more fun, and he doesn't want to control the image. He'd prefer it to be true.

Despite what some might identify as admirable integrity and innovation-friendly characteristics, Rick doesn't enjoy popularity for them. While Rick enjoys lasting family ties and friendships, his teammates don't always like him. As Gladwell puts it, half the team disliked him, and the other half hated him. This illustrates another truth about knowledge workers that people must learn to accept to lead them: the qualities that lead to excellent outcomes don't always lead to likability. Likability is different from courtesy or manners or decent behavior, mind you. However, other "personality" issues are harder to define. Sometimes people will express low likability in the workplace as "abrasiveness," "strident," "she's too direct," or "arrogance." This hits women even harder than men because we have unconscious expectations that women should be likable and agreeable, and when they defy this expectation, it can heighten the perception that she is not only unlikeable but intolerable. Things do not go well for people who defy gender norms in any socially governed domain.

So how might we leverage knowledge capital well when people who possess it can pose such problems in the workplace?

Think of Rick Berry. He wasn't hard to manage---he was hard to control.

It's a mind set shift. The perfectionist high performer with valuable knowledge in important domains is easy to manage when given what she needs to perform.

Control.

One of our top advisors, clinical psychologist Dr. Guissoo Nabavian and I are researching this issue under the Project Flipper initiative that focuses on health and wellness in optimal performance in the workplace. The study is in phase 1 right now, but we have these top 5 insights on how organizations that rely on higher IQ employees to deliver in today's complex work environment can create cultures that attract and retain them. Management of knowledge capital is different. Management theory of the past was built upon Taylorist models of time punching and metrics management. This can't and won't work for knowledge workers. Here are some tips on how to start moving toward the Future of Work.

1) Provide opportunities for learning and development.

People with advanced training and degrees usually end up there because they embrace continuous learning and like to study, learn, and master new things. Make continuous learning a part of the fabric and build it into the workweek.

2) Autonomy is vital.

Normalize allowing managers and ICs alike to be in control of their schedules. Knowledge work requires time for unconscious processing and exercise to keep the brains healthy. Focus on delivery that isn't tied to an arbitrary time to be chained to the desk.

3) Use time as a reward as well as money.

When employees succeed and perform well, give them time back as well as money. One of our clients gave clients "artist days" where they can pursue intellectual or creative passion---which led to share and learn days where people shared what they did. This created a sense of vibrancy and positivity that contributed directly to innovation successes because they knew that cross-functional activities require an openness to experience. That openness to experience requires that we practice new horizons and vistas regularly.

4) Take time to analyze success and failure.

Knowledge workers need to know that it is safe to try new things to fail and that their efforts will be used to learn about optimal performance and success. Poor managers focus on failures, and then they focus those efforts on shame and blame. Please take regular intervals to perform safe, no-judgment evaluations of successes and failures and then itemize what works and what doesn't so that the team shares all fails, and all wins together.

5) Reduce bureaucratic friction.

No one likes red tape. Knowledge workers are mainly hampered by it because what they do requires much mental energy, which poor working tools and a lot of bureaucratic red tape can slowly leech away. We worked with one of our clients to create an employee journey map so that the employees could collectively identify those activities that saved them the most time and energy. Co-create a bureaucracy-free future for your team by consistent and concerted efforts to reduce red tape and paperwork.

Dr. Nabvaian and I are excited about this internal initiative and have already seen the findings at work for our clients. Feel free to reach out for a consult about how we can help you attract and retain the top tech talent in the industry. Remember, Singular XQ is a non-profit technology incubator that performs open-source research and development to build a more inclusive and sustainable tech ecosystem. We do for-profit consulting at subsidized rates for our sponsoring orgs, but if you are a start-up, a leader, or NGO that fits specific criteria, you could qualify for subsidized or free services. Reach out to [email protected]