63 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
63 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
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---
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date: 2013-03-18
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title: What a boss owes their staff
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category: Opinions
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featured_image: /images/reputation-management-starts-with-trust.jpg
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---
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I recently had a conversation on Twitter with my friend [Rob
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Borley](https://www.robborley.com/) who runs a [mobile
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startup](https://www.dootrix.com/). He had asked what interesting perks
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he should be giving his
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[staff](https://twitter.com/bobscape/statuses/313610008535367680).
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My initial response was the standard IT answer.
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Training, certifications and a lab to play in, which they already have.
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I like to find the root cause of things, usually that means looking for
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the underlying reason something is broken. In this case I wanted to put
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a more positive spin on it. When you have a great work environment
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what is it that is at the root? The answer is simple: trust.
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By way of a silly example, if I were to put a cake in the middle of my
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son's classroom, I can guarantee that the majority of the cake will go
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into the mouths of a few, while most will probably not get any. Why?
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They are children, that is why. However, if I give it to his teacher
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then she will make sure that it gets evenly distributed to everyone.
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She, like your staff, is an adult and she behaves as such.
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The has been a lot in the news recently about
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remote-working. Chiefly because of the new Yahoo CEO [putting a
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stop](https://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the-internal-yahoo-no-work-from-home-memo-which-extends-beyond-remote-workers/)
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to it. I have to fall in line with what Tony Schwartz [wrote in
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response](https://www.businessinsider.com/want-productive-employees-treat-them-like-adults-2013-3)
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to that on Business Insider. Basically, if you cannot trust your staff
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to work when they are not in the office, you have hired the wrong
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people. You cannot be watching them all the time, nor can
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middle-management once you are past the start-up stage. Basically,
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if someone is going to sit there surfing Engadget all day, you are
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powerless to stop them. However, they will not be delivering, so
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they have to go. Likewise I have had colleagues who everytime I looked
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at their screen were surfing Ebay, or the Register. We hardly ever
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discussed computers, we mostly discussed trains and bikes. We delivered
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however, so who cares what was in our browser window and conversation? I
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myself got pulled to one side one day by my old boss to ask why I was
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playing around with an ESX server. We had no VMware servers, nor did we
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have any plans to. My response was that it would help make me better at
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my job. A year later we started rolling out a VMware infrastructrue, a
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project which I lead because I had taken the time to learn stuff. My
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boss had *trusted* me that I was not wasting my time and it paid off for
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him because we did not have to get in expensive consultants.
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Trust leads to everything else that we like about
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work. Allowing your staff to work from home whenever they want is a
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question of trust. Perhaps one of them is spending time learning how to
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program in [Go](https://golang.org/) even though you are a Dot Net
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house. Let them do so, trust them that they are going to make themselves
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a better programmer.
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This stuff may pay off directly (as in my VMware example), may be it
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won't. If you let people work from home, maybe at times you will wonder
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what they are doing. You will however have a happier employee. If that
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employee has no desire to go anywhere else, but wants to deliver the
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best they can for your company then you can only win.
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