June 26, 2009, 6:43 PM — In the original British version of The Office, Tim Canterbury, the series' everyman character, remarks, "The people you work with are people you were just thrown together with. I mean, you don't know them. It wasn't your choice. And yet you spend more time with them than you do your friends or your family. But probably all you have in common is the fact that you walk around on the same bit of carpet for eight hours a day." It's a particularly bleak moment on the show -- and the show is a great example of how a bad workplace culture can really kill any possibility for success an organization might have.
There is something of a stereotype that techies don't have the greatest social skills around. But when it comes to figuring how to get along with those people they spend eight -- or ten, or twelve, or sometimes more -- hours a day walking around together on the same piece of carpet, they actually seem to learn how to get along with them. Maybe they aren't as close to family, but for many of us, they become much more than just people we're thrown together with.
Photo by: Dawn Endico/flickr
But how can you can make this happen -- in either a leadership role, or just as an ordinary employee? When I started talking to people for this article, I half expected to hear nothing but horror stories, but I heard from a lot of people who knew that they had a good thing going in their workplaces -- and who were eager to tell me how they kept things going that way.
A question of trust
One of the most common themes that underlay many of my discussions was trust, even though that word wasn't always used. Often, the level of trust that a company has for its employees comes out in the amount of freedom they're given to arrange their time as they see fit. Packy Anderson, a senior software developer at GridApp Systems, is pleased about the schedule flexibility he's afforded. "Since we pretty much work on our own, I'm able to set my own hours (within reason) and come and go as I please. Just this afternoon, my father came through town and wanted to have a late lunch. I knew that nobody would bat an eyelash at my working straight through until 2 p.m. then taking off for an hour and a half, because nobody's watching over me making sure I log a certain number of hours each day."
While some people might think that that level of freedom will inevitably be abused, people in engaged workplaces often end up working harder because of it. That seems to be the case at IBM, which got rid of formal vacation time a few year's back and lets employees organize their time on and off themselves. And Anderson notes that, after his late lunch, "I'll probably be here until 8 or 9 p.m. to finish up the work I would have been doing during that time -- but that's because I want to get my work done, not because I'm toiling away trying to meet a daily quota for time spent at my desk. Besides, I really enjoy what I'm doing."
Of course, trusting employees goes beyond just not keeping precise track of the amount of time they spend at their desk. You also have to trust that they have something important to contribute, trust that their ideas are worth consideration. As Carlin Wiegner, CEO and co- founder of CubeTree, puts it, "Everyone needs to have a voice." While companies aren't necessarily run like a democracy, he says that "crazy- good ideas can come from anywhere," and favorably cites Google's policy of giving employees time to work on projects they think are interesting. He suggests that employees use Twitter and other social networking sites to put ideas out there that could benefit the company.
Of course not every idea is going to be a winner, even from the smartest employees; but people are less likely to go out on a limb if they feel that any slip-up will torpedo their career. Theo Schlossnagle, CEO and founder of Web design firm OmniTI, says that at his company, "we struggle from the business level all the way down to technology architecture decisions to ensure that human failures have minimal business impact on our clients or ourselves. This provides a foundation to sustain a culture where employees can make decisions outside the shadow of fear that typically comes with failure ... Having a culture where employees can make an occasional bad judgment without fear of losing their job adds tremendous value to our company by developing experienced staff with significant domain knowledge."
It's the little things
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