The percentage of engaged employees globally -- those who feel involved in and enthusiastic about their work -- remains at 23%, matching the record high recorded in 2022, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report. But most employees are not engaged (62%) -- those who show up, do the bare minimum and are uninspired by their work -- or actively disengaged (15%) -- those who have a bad manager and a miserable job and are actively seeking a new one.
- 3 Key Insights Into the Global Workplace - Gallup, June 2024
More Than The Metrics
Accelerate, by Forsgren, et al is famous for identifying the four key metrics…but there are so many other wonderful nuggets of wonderful information in that book that are, unfortunately, ignored. I recently re-read the final three chapters of the main section (chapters 9-11), and was reminded - once again - how important organizational health is to delivery. Three full chapters of this well-read (in reality, well-referenced) book are dedicated to team sustainability, employee satisfaction, and the role of leadership in enabling successful teams, yet the industry is infatuated with measuring lead time and deployment velocity - even at the cost of employee health. In fact, I would hypothesize that if teams put even a quarter as much effort into organizational health as they put into trying to “improve their dora metrics”, that software delivery and quality would increase dramatically.
Yet, here we are.
WTF Is a Sustainable Pace?
Many articles on software delivery talk a lot about delivering at a sustainable pace - but there are a lot of different definitions of what exactly that is. A certain tech leader insists that a 120 hour work week is sustainable - but actual studies among sane people show that diminishing returns on productivity can happen with knowledge workers after just six hours of solid work. More and more studies are showing the benefits of four-day work weeks (the data are overwhelming in favor of this last point, but remarkably, most execs insist that the studies in this area are all wrong).
I often say that the two years I spent working on XBox One were the most intense five years of my career - it was a lot of long days and weekends. It was probably the last time in my career where I wrote code almost all day every day. It was fun, but those long days were not sustainable. I was tired, unhealthy, and desparate for a break (and I took a solid month off after we shipped).
In my experience, sustainable pace is an art - a balance between productivity and cognitive fatigue. People are motivated by progress - but that progress diminishes as the hours and days build up. A leaders job is to help people and teams find flow (by reducing distractions or cognitive load) while recognizing that most humans can’t stay in a flow state for eight or more hours a day. This article on preventing burnout is from the pre-pandemic world, but still relevant and helpful in recognizing when your organization’s pace has gone from sustainable to burnout.
I Can’t Get No Satisfaction
Chapter 10 of Accelerate goes deep on employee engagement and satisfaction - something I’ve talked about in so many blog posts that I’m hesitant to reiterate what’s in those articles or link them here (but here’s one example if you’re new here).
Accelerate’s take on engagement is on the money:
In fact, our measure of job satisfaction looks at a few key things: if you are satisfied in your work, if you are given the tools and resources to do your work, and if your job makes good use of your skills and abilities. It’s important to call these out, because taken together, this is what makes job satisfaction so impactful.
And I like that Forsgren calls out the roll of DevOps / Platform Engineering / Developer Experience / etc. in improving engagement.
Looking at the measures that correlate strongly with job satisfaction, we see some commonalities. Practices like proactive monitoring and test and deployment automation all automate menial tasks and require people to make decisions based on a feedback loop. Instead of managing tasks, people get to make decisions, employing their skills, experience, and judgment.
Accelerate’s take is similar to every other author’s take on engagement. Make sure people understand why their work is important, give them feedback, and give them opportunities to grow,
The Leader’s Role
In case you’ve forgotten by now why I’m writing about some of the same things I’ve written about before, it’s because I’m dumbfounded by how much the key metrics have dominated discussions on Accelerate while the human aspects of the research are all but ignored. In our industry, the role of a leader is to help and guide teams of humans working together to solve problems efficiently.
We need leaders with vision and transparency focusing on building highly productive teams with trust and psychological safety - but in many cases we have teams focused on improving “the metrics” - ignoring any cost on the humans.
Consider this scenario. You’re on a team that is absolutely crushing the four key metrics. Lead time is measured in days, you’re deploying several times a day, failures in production are rare, and when there are failures, they are fixed quickly. Your manager brags to his peers constantly about how the team is “elite”.
But the metrics are lying, and the team is dying.
Your lead time is in days because you don’t start tracking items until they’re almost done. You’re deploying several times a day, but only minor or superficial changes, as everything else is in long-running branches. You don’t have errors in production because the team is afraid to report errors in production - instead they patch them quietly when needed. But hey - you’ve nailed the metrics.
I’d much rather work in an organization where our lead times are a little long, and we don’t deploy as often as we’d like. But - because we’re transparent, and mistakes and errors are seen as learning opportunities, we know exactly what we need to do to improve. I guess some people are ok chasing metrics for metrics sake, but I can guarantee that approach will lead to dissatisfaction and burnout.
It’s A System
My podcast partner, Brent often brings up a theory of systems that I’m finding more and more relevant. This theory says that there are a finite number of problems in the universe - and that when we solve one problem (or many problems), we inevitably create an equal amount of new problems. Chasing metrics definitely falls into this bucket…but I look forward to seeing what new problems we create when our workplaces are filled with highly productive, sustainable, and psychologically safe organizations.
-A 1:1