Software; A People Business

Software is a people business. Sure we have lots of bits and bytes, but at the end of the day we are people building a product that is going to help another person by making their life easier.

Software is a people business.
We are building a product that is going to help another person by making their life easier.

If you want a higher quality product and happier clients then you need to have a culture of putting people first within your company. That will roll over into your clients/potential clients.

So, how do we get happier employees? It starts with upper management and I would say more important is being embraced by middle management and propagated through the company. One quick win is using peoples names.

In meetings instead of saying, "the developers are working on..." say, "Jill's team, in development, is working on it."

This has some subliminal affects that you may not be aware of, but you are passing credit and establishing responsibility for that team. Jill's team is getting recognition and that will get back to her and her team. That is a big morale boost, which will boost output of Jill's team. The words we use matters allot and it is an easy win if you can get people to recognize that. You will notice the more people that apply the technique in your company the more pleasant your company becomes.

That is because you are breaking down a psychological barrier around the business and you start considering everyone as individuals all helping drive the company forward and not cogs in the machine to get work done.

Humanizing employees will do wonders for ensuring you have proper work/life balance in your company. You go from tasking work to tasking individuals. Some managers I speak with say that by adding emotion I am making their job difficult.

That's true, being a manager is difficult. Sometimes you are aware that Jill's team has a lot on their plate. Jill has worked 10 hours a day for the last month, and her senior developer Jim has a 6 month old at home and isn't at peak performance. It's time's like those that as a manager you sit down with Jill and see how she is holding up, check in on Bob and if you find Jill stressed and Bob falling asleep at the keyboard. You are now their advocate. You might have deadlines that you need them to complete, but you need to be fighting for them. Get some of that stress off of your team. Push back on your managers, get timelines extended, and absolute worst case scenario go back to Jill and let her know that when her team is done with this one, you are orchestrating the pipeline so her team has some flex time. That will motivate Jill and her team because they know you are in their corner fighting with them.

Carry this mentality over to your clients as well, "Bob at ACME company is having trouble with the way the product does x." Humanize Bob, and listen to him he may have a legitimate issue that your other clients might not have stumbled into yet. Remember you clients using your product know their job best, they might not know how to get to the end result, but they know any regulations/roadblocks they will hit while doing their job, and they are also privy to any changes coming their way. So, they may be the preverbal, "canary in a coal-mine". They might have found something that could put you ahead of your competition, or you may find after speaking with them that they are actually doing a similar job as Sam at the XYZ company and Sam solves the issue by doing x.

Before you know it your company is innovating in their space, customers are happy, employees are happy, and things are a little less stressful. You can now tackle other challenges.