Employee Engagement: The Magic Potion?

I am sure by now most people understand that there is strong correlation between employee satisfaction and business results. If you need more convincing have a read of these two articles: Forbes & Research Paper

So how do you best go about measuring it?

On my current project I have decided to go with the following 4 questions:

• I would recommend this account and my project as a good place to work
• I have the tools and resources to do my role well
• I rarely think about rolling off this account or project
• My role makes good use of my skills and abilities

For those of you who have read Jez Humble’s “Lean Enterprise”, these questions will look familiar. I have adopted them to the project setting that I work within. We have just set out on a cultural transformation to become truly Agile and adopt DevOps in a large complex legacy environment. To me measuring the above will give me the best indicator that we are doing the right thing. Of course there will be other measures who determine the quality of the outcomes and the levels of automation among others, but changing the culture of an organisation is critical if your Agile and DevOps adoption is to be successful. I will report back throughout that journey to tell you what my experiences is with the above questions.

IT delivery is complex and it is not always clear what the right solution is. I found in the past that it is near impossible to create processes and tools that work by itself, you need to have the right mindset that people use the processes and tools with the right intent. It’s very frustrating when you implement great automation only to see a few months later that the solution has degraded. It is with hindsight that I understand that the solution is to not just implement process and tools but to instill the right culture and mindset for progression,
a culture where we blamelessly identify a way to avoid the same mistake again rather than looking for the person in fault,
a culture where we strive for automation and lean processes and are not concerned about the size of our teams or budgets,
a culture where you don’t have to protect your fiefdom and where you are happy to collaborate with others to solve problems no matter where the root cause lies.

I think we all in IT need to understand this dynamic between employee satisfaction and outcomes better, I for sure believe that I have come across a magic potion that I aim to bring to all my future projects.