That isn’t possible.
If it is, it shouldn’t be. Instead, it should be about creating a work environment that gets the employees what they need while also getting the employers what they need.
If a “professional work environment” is something that one group needs, keen. But if the owners are more concerned about getting an excellent product, and the employees are more concerned about enjoying their workplace, and if the current arrangement is suiting both parties, what on earth is wrong with it?
Yes, employees shouldn’t be playing games on the clock; they also shouldn’t be gossiping on the clock or checking personal email on the clock or anything except work on the clock. But that’s not how most workplaces work; most folks have some built-in goof-off time in their workday, and most employers tolerate that as long as a good amount of work gets done. I don’t see why the particular nature of the goof-off time is relevant.
And some highly creative work environments actually encourage play as a way to increase the creativity of their creatives. I don’t know if msmith’s office falls into that category, of course; I suspect it doesn’t (or else he would’ve mentioned it).
In many of the tech cultures I’m familiar with, work can be where you spend all your time. You may be there from noon to 3am and just go home to sleep. In that atmosphere, when is “when they’re supposed to be working”? What if they get way more done between the hours of 7pm and 1am than they do between 9am and noon? Why not play games then, and work after midnight, if that makes them twice as productive than if they were working 8am-5pm?
Of course, there are answers to that. If customers are coming to visit, if you’re interacting with the outside world, if you need to be present from 8am-5pm to talk to corporate people who actually abide by corporate hours, if you’re restricted in work hours because you have a family who actually wants you home in the evenings… those are all good reasons why you maybe shouldn’t spend 16 hours a day at work and do most of your productive work after midnight, or play games at work, and why maybe you should have a less relaxed dress code, but just because you think “adults” should do things one way and not another isn’t one of them.
I wouldn’t say either. From a job perspective, I can do or at least understand most aspects of what they do.
And quite honestly I don’t really care what they do or how they dress or even letting them come and go as they please, so long as the company is ok with it and they get their work done. The problem is what do I do when one of them fails to delever what they are supposed to? I want to correct them without having them revert to flashbacks of some high school bully picking on them or something.
This might enable me to say what I mean more clearly.
There are two reasons why they might have such a flashback:
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You’re having a flashback of being a jock bullying a nerd in high school and giving off serious jock-bullying-nerd vibes. The language you use to describe these guys sounds more like the language I’d expect from a high-schooler than from an adult manager. Again, you want to tone down the “I manage dweeby children” attitude, and be very careful not to let that attitude show when you’re among your workers.
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Although you’re managing them in a professional fashion, they’re so traumatized by high school, or otherwise neurotic, that they have a totally irrational and unprofessional response to your professional management strategies. If that’s the case, then the problem isn’t you, it’s an employee who lacks the crucial professional skill of knowing how to take constructive criticism, and you’ll need to decide how to handle this deficit in an employee.
As I said before, I’m getting the impression that you view these guys as stereotypes from your high school days, dudes you hated then. You haven’t really said anything that makes them sound immature to me, however. I may be totally off-base, but I’d encourage you to ask yourself whether you’re letting your own attitudes get in the way of professional behavior. You say you don’t care about how they dress, etc., but if that were really true I doubt you’d have spent so much time talking about it.
msmith: Are these employees subject to great swings in workload? I used to manage a group of programmers who had to work 90 hour weeks several times during the year. In between, the atmosphere was much like what you describe. They were salaried employees, and didn’t get overtime during the craziness. But once another team finished developing the needs requirements, my team had to swing into gear and accomplish the work within a ridiculously short window.
They had a pool table in the kitchen, and free sodas, crazy wardrobes, etc. My rpedecessor had laid in a supply of blazers in various sizes, and many were the times that we all sat around the video-conferencing table with them wearing blazers above board and cut-offs below.
But when the crunch hit, they were beyond compare. Truly an honor to work with.
If a new manager came along during the “off” time, I could see them having much the same reaction you are. The guys were not very good at the day-to-day stuff like filling out a $&*!# time sheet. LOL!
My kudos to you for focusing on the real problem. The first thing to do is to understand the root cause.
Barry Boehm showed that there can be a ten-fold variation in programmer productivity. If this person is on the bottom of that scale, there isn’t that much you can do, especially if he is in a group at the top of that scale. If, however, he can do it and there is something blocking him, that is another matter.
Would you rather have a group which produces 100 lines of perfect code a day in Star Trek uniforms or a group which produces 20 lines of buggy code a day in “professional” attire?
I’d settle for 20 lines of perfect code. Maybe less. I can get buggy code from people wearing anything.
I think you’re projecting a lot of your own shit onto me. I played sports and was in a fraternity but I wasn’t a “jock” in the John Hughes film 80s stereotype sense of the word. And I don’t “hate nerds”. But the fact is, much of the people I work with self-identify as “nerds”. And they have a lot of interests and habits that I just don’t relate to.
Possibly I’m wrong, but it’s not my shit, it’s my impression of yours, based on your posts over the years; it’s not really a distinction I care about, and while tons of my co-workers have interests I don’t care about, I don’t really spend much time thinking about those disparate interests. But like I said, I could well be wrong; if you’ve carefully considered your attitude toward your co-workers and concluded there’s nothing there that’s problematic, then that’s that.
As I said, I don’t care about their interests. What I care about is how does one manage employees in an environment where making employees feel happy about themselves is more important than having them actually get stuff done one time?
My suggestion is if employees don’t want to be thought of as kids right out of school and thus stereotyped with school labels, they act like adults. Adults don’t play “dress up” at work. They don’t play board games or RPGs or frat house/dorm games during work hours. I know it’s common in tech companies, but a fooseball table sends a strong message of “we don’t consider you to be grown ups. We consider you to be children who happen to write software code.”
A job where you are forced to spend all your time (either explicitly or implicitly) is, by most definitions, a “shit job”.
What makes tech people so different from the rest of the working world? Accountants and hospital surgeons aren’t able to decide to just show up to work whenever it suits them.
And most normal people actually want to be home to see their families in the evening. Or at least they want to be somewhere other than work.
Ah. See, no it doesn’t. It sends no such message. Rather, your prejudices require you to see the office in such a light. Unless you can reach the bleedin’ obvious realization that adults can play games and dress however they like and still be adults, you’re a bad fit for this office.
Lots of companies rely on this mentality. I met the head of the training department at Lucasfilm, or maybe Lucasarts, one of them, and she said that the main reason that they pay for their employees to take yoga or drawing lessons, or whatever, is because they are encouraging just this ideal - that work is a place you should spend all your waking hours. I don’t agree with it, but I see the benefit, especially for a company populated with single young men, who don’t necessarily have a family to get home to in the evenings. Or a cat.
Yeah, that’s a fairly common mentality with certain types of companies. But 20-something single men don’t stay 20-something single men forever.
See I always thought management set the tone of the office, not the other way arround.
I get how that’s the way a lot of companies work. Years ago my firm sent us out to the Accenture training compound in St Charles, IL. It was basically like a college fraternity row.
No one’s forcing them (well, maybe on occasion when something is due). Just like no one’s forcing the doctors I know to spend all their time at work, or the professors I know who sneak into their office/lab to do science (there are even jokes about this), or the people who are putting together startups, or my husband who solves math problems in his spare time. Though it’s true that I consider medical residency a shit job even so.
Umm… you’re managing these people and have to ask this question? Seems unfortunate. But okay. Hospital surgeons are required to, you know, interact with other people, that being the people they are operating on. So yeah, they have to show up when the person they’re operating on is scheduled. (Which is not, of course, necessarily during normal working hours, depending on what kind of surgeon you are.)
I don’t know a huge amount about accountants, but the ones in our company, at least, need to be around during most working hours primarily because they have to be available to regularly interact with the outside world (customers’ contract people, etc.), and also so that there are known conventional times when the managers, who also have to interact with the outside world and thus have much less flexibility with regard to their working hours, can reach them when they need information. (Even so, there is one at our company I can think of who is on a slightly later schedule, though is there during most working hours.) Same with the administrative assistants at our company.
Tech people often don’t have to interact with anyone personally on an extremely regular basis (I don’t know if my job is typical, but when I do tech work I often could go a week without having to talk to anyone other than through email or web interfaces), they can often work in a vacuum, and when they do interact, it’s often with… other tech people, so it doesn’t really matter so much when they’re working as long as the work gets done.
Now, a tech person can be in technical management, say, where one has to regularly report to managers and/or customers and/or collaborators, and then it is rather more important to be on at least a semi-conventional schedule.
Your HR director is full of shit. Companies live and die by the reliability of their products, and it’s good work practice to have quality checks.
Sorry Charlie, but I do think it would make it easier if you don’t attempt to place Fortunate 500, white color standards to a bunch of nerd programmers. They’re motivated by completely different things. Corporate Warriors expect to fit in a white collar culture, expect they will have suffer abusive assholes for bosses because they are self-motivated to perform.
So babysit the problem child. Smile while you frame the discussion as one that invites his input as to solve the issues, and make it all about problems to be solved. "The weekly goal is XX, and the performance is P<XX (note “the” and not “your”), where performance is whatever is being measured, output or quality. Why is that and what can we do to correct it?
Really, nothing different than what you would do in Corporate America, except that because people aren’t great at personal relationships and aren’t that motivated into looking for advancement, then you can’t be [del]an asshole[/del} as direct.
Then if he continues to fail the targets, despite working with him, document it all and have him fired.
Damn, I hate it I post something and then immediately disagree with myself.
I may be off in left field, but were you brought in to help change the culture, which is getting out of hand? Why else would they have a Fortune 500 type as a manager of nerds?
I see this a lot in Japan, where they bring in someone from an outside culture to shake things up, because management is too chickenshit to do it themselves, and if it works great, then all if well. If the natives rebel, then they sack the outsider.
If that’s the case, then decide how long it should take to make changes, triple the time and go slow. That is, if you were being brought in to reign in the crowd.
But in any case I still think you need to realize the people are motivated differently.
To be clear, I don’t see any problem with changing the culture, if that’s what you’re brought in to do; if the games and the dress and so on are in any way not what management wants, then you’ve got the right to get that changed (at which point the employees, of course, have every right to start job-hunting, if that kind of job culture is important to them).
But if you try to change it while you’ve still got your unpleasant prejudices about what normal people do and what adults do, you’re going to see a lot more of them job-hunting.
Well, to be fair to the OP, I don’t think I could handle a group of people who dressed up in costumes to come to work. But having spent a career in Japan, I find myself judging people on what adults are supposed to or not supposed to do and just worry about the results.