How tech bosses manage their teams for fun and profit

'Whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my org chart...'

People aren’t constants

Each worker's motivations changes over time. The need for money has peaks around life events. They learn that skills are getting hotter and cooler and can feel they are being seriously underpaid. That’s getting harder to monitor as the number of different skills only ever increases, which means you need a good relationship with the right bits of management to do buybacks, which are a lot more common since regular automatic pay rises for IT people aren’t much of the new normal. (Oh you didn’t know that? You thought that if you just kept doing your job well enough, they’d up your pay? No.)

As people get better paid or more experienced or have kids then the extra value of a bit more money goes down and here you need to have a good hard constructive talk with your HR director. You have to look at things like extra annual leave and flexible working, which will be valued more and be cheaper.

This is a real competitive advantage for retaining and motivating people, since too many firms still have a “presenteeism” culture where more hours at your desk is seen as always better than fewer, meaning that you can give things that the people trying to poach your staff can’t.

Yes, before you ask this does mean you keep your female staff longer, and that will usually help you sell it to HR. But blokes have kids too and it doesn’t have to be domestic. Being able to dodge the evil rush hour at London Bridge station can be worth more to some staff than a pay rise. But as above, flexibility must not be seen as favouritism.

The toxic cultures created by some HR departments by fawning over “parenting time” (which just happens to coincide with HR people having kids) doesn’t help cohesion with staff who aren’t parents one little bit. Shirkers, whether real or imagined do far more harm than just their lower output.

Part of the “fairness” challenge is that job specs in our industry are a mess. We lump together disparate skills sets, “rank” job titles are simply there to get people paid the right money and in some firms they reflect a technology structure created 20 years ago, and which isn’t even in use any more.

But I learned that there is a rigorous structure for job titles. You can see it right here.

Did you know that? How about those from the BCS. Have you read them?

No, me neither, and they may or may not be good. But aren’t we both just a little embarrassed that we hire people, spending hundreds of thousands employing them for years and upon whom our own careers are dependent without a spec as detailed as we’d expect for a bit of VB that wasn’t used much?

So that’s one reason the IT execs were scornful of the way interviews are run: random tech questions; a bit of “gut feel”; and an attempt to believe their CV. The idea that recruiters, especially the clueless RPOs, could even try to do any useful filtering was the idea that got the biggest laugh all evening.

That being said, the one-hour interview, maybe with a bit of checking the candidate has an acceptable number of heads by HR, is still the norm. No one had any constructive ideas of how to make this very much better. The nearest I can get to a positive spin on this for you as a reader is that you shouldn’t feel too bad at the shambolic process you use.

HR (aka “Human Remains”) got a lot of stick from the IT execs with some HR units, especially the outsourced ones, seen as relics of the bad old days of management: frustrating change; spending their time making policies that no one wants let alone reads; generally being a waste of space. But as one of the execs said, “if you swap HR for IT, a lot of firms would say that about us”.

As the laughter from that faded, the consensus moved to the point that individual HRs do get it, offering self service tech for evaluations, appraisals, succession planning, managing vacations and cover and helping choose good recruiters rather than those who bought them nice lunches.

In the best firms HR really is now a strategic part of getting things done, even offering useful advice. Realistically their role as bag men when you need to lose people means they are never going to be loved, and without the pay and benefits structures they create, there’d be a lot more ill feeling amongst the troops.

So what did we learn?

A lot. This is less than half the insights and anecdotes covered in our session. Clearly successful IT execs can’t just see themselves as “part of the management team” and issue orders. Debugging defective people and cultures is like debugging code.

It is an up close and personal thing which cannot be done at a distance. You have to be smart about identifying the right motivating factors and agile enough to change them as your people change. You must be trusted, and without that no one is going to believe that delivering better is good for them personally.

HR departments are an amplifier for what is going on. They can make bad worse and better become excellent. If they get it, so you need to get them on-side as part of your initial bedding in when you take on your next leadership role. ®

If you’re disappointed to have missed this Roundtable, you should have registered when we told you about it. But this is a series, so if you have a senior role in IT and want to learn from your peers how to do it better, register for our next roundtable here.