Treat employees as if they are your partners because they are the voice of your company.
—Mario Moreira
One of the Agile values and two of the Agile principles specifically focus on the importance of employees. The Agile value states, “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.” The Agile principles state: “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project” and “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”
Extracted from these values and principles are collaboration, motivation, and trust. These are key values of an Agile culture where employees matter. When employees are engaged, they become instrumental to the success of the company. They are empowered to make decisions, they are motivated themselves and they motivate each other, they willingly contribute innovative ideas, and they are willing to go the “extra mile” to get the work done. When employees have ownership, they have more passion for their work. The question is, “Are you investing in the cultural change where you embrace employees and ensure they know they matter?”
Mechanics That Tune the Engine of Customer Value
Applying the analogy that a company is the engine of customer value, we realize that an engine needs mechanics. As illustrated in Figure 7-1, employees are the mechanics that make your customer-value-driven engine purr. A mechanic that feels ownership of the engine is motivated to work on the engine, enjoys collaborating with others on the engine, is empowered to improve the engine, and is trusted to make the changes in a safe environment. As a result of this ownership, you will find that you have an engaged and happy employee.
Figure 7-1. Employees are the mechanics that make the engine of customer value purr
An unhappy employee will be disengaged and allow the engine to sputter. When employees are disengaged, they take long lunch hours and will not stay in the office a moment longer than they have to. More importantly, they will not engage their minds to solve problems effectively. They may not contribute to and may even impede their company's success.
Happy employees continuously look for ways to improve the engine. Frederic Laloux1 writes that pluralistic-green organizations, which focus on culture and empowerment, achieve extraordinary employee motivation. The study “The Impact of Empowered Employees on Corporate Value”2 reveals that employee empowerment within the corporate culture is a “potential source for sustained superior financial performance.” Employees can be a company’s greatest assets. They can be the mechanics that keep the CVD engine purring to move the company forward.
Agile Pit Stop
A culture where employees matter can achieve extraordinary employee motivation and is the potential source for sustained superior financial performance.
Just saying, “Our employees are our most valuable assets,” is not enough and has become a standard cliché. Can you back it up? Here are areas that you can explore to gauge if your enterprise believes that employees matter.
The COMETS within Your Agile Galaxy
COMETS stands for Collaboration, Ownership, Motivation, Empowerment, Enthusiasm, Trust, and Safety—the values that an organization must embrace if they believe employees matter. These values should be nurtured and become part of an Agile culture that values its employees and understands their importance for the success of building customer value. (See Figure 7-2.)
Figure 7-2. Employee culture of COMETS builds texture to your Agile galaxy
It is important to understand that when the term employee is used, it applies to all employees, from team members to executives. As illustrated in Figure 7-2, the COMETS culture should be pervasive across your enterprise. All levels should be exhibiting collaboration, ownership, motivation, empowerment, trust, and safety (just in different ways). For example, ownership implies a bounded authority where executives have ownership of work at their level (for example, strategy) and teams have ownership at their level (for example, user stories in backlog). (See Chapter 8 for more on bounded authority.)
As you explore each value, what actions and behaviors would you expect to see? The following is a quick definition of each of the attributes of COMETS. Collaboration is the ability to work with someone to build something. Ownership is feeling that you have the right to control and enjoy an area of work or work item. Motivation is a willingness or desire to do your work. Empowerment is the belief that you have the right to set the direction of something. Trust is confidence regarding an expectation. Safety is having the belief that it is safe to learn and take risks.
Self-Organizing Teams
COMETS form the building blocks to self-organization. Key to having an Agile environment where employees are engaged and believe they matter is establishing a culture where employees have the ability to self-organize around the work. Self-organizing teams are defined as a group of people who have autonomy and a common purpose for deciding how to build something in a collaborative manner.
The Agile manifesto calls out self-organizing as one of its principles, “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” There are two mindset shifts involved in having self-organizing teams become part of the culture. The first mindset shift is for management to understand that those with the most knowledge (that is, the team) should be the ones deciding the technical evolution of the business needs. This means less dependency on management. The second shift is for the team to be aware that accountability and responsibility of completing the work falls on them. As you can see, teams gain flexibility on deciding how to build something within their bounded authority, but they also gain the discipline of accountability and responsibility for the work.
Within an Agile context, self-organization requires several key elements. The first is that there is a common purpose for the work to help guide the team (such as release goals and sprint goals). The second is that there is a bounded authority on the work the team owns and they are empowered to determine how to build the product. The third is that the team uses a build-inspect-adapt type model (applying one of the Agile processes). Inspecting requires both verification (testing) and validation (customer feedback) to help build in the direction of customer value.
Agile Pit Stop
Within an Agile context, self-organizing teams require a common purpose, bounded authority, and a build-inspect-adapt type model (an Agile process).
The primary benefit of self-organizing teams is that when employees feel they own the work, they tend to have more passion. Consequently, they are likely to invest more of their time and energy. The implication is that the company may gain the benefit of stronger employee commitment and performance, leading to potentially superior financial results. Now let’s explore the building blocks of self-organization (that is, COMETS) in more detail.
Collaboration
Collaboration from an Agile and business perspective is defined as two or more people creatively working together with a common purpose to produce a positive business outcome. Within the context of self-organizing teams, it is important for team members to collaborate. Notice I used the terms “creatively” and “positive” in my definition. Collaboration is meant to produce an outcome. It is meant to bring people and their knowledge together to create something new or different. If two people are not being creative, then it is just two people doing something operational.
Collaboration in my definition is meant to be positive. There is such a thing as “bad” collaboration when not everyone has the same common purpose. “Good” collaboration relies on an environment where people honestly align with the common purpose and willingly accept new knowledge in an open and trusting manner to create something new.
Agile Pit Stop
Collaboration is defined as two or more people creatively working together with a common purpose to produce a positive business outcome.
From the employees’ perspective, collaboration provides them with the opportunity to team up with people pursuing a common purpose and to learn from each other along the way. Effective collaboration requires employees to connect with people and with their inner selves. It teaches them to work more effectively and can lead to a high-performing team.
It is important not to confuse collaboration with communication and coordination. Collaboration is a two-way action where two or more people work together to produce a positive outcome. Communication is a one-way action of sharing information in writing, speaking, or other medium. Coordination is often a one-way action of bringing together various elements to enable an activity.
Coordination can promote a more effective collaboration outcome, and communication can be used to share the results of the collaboration. Combined with ownership and empowerment, collaboration allows employees to own and change the direction of the work. This leads to happier employees who feel their abilities are being put to good use.
Ownership
Ownership is probably the most important factor in gauging whether employees matter. Ownership is defined as having the authority and the resources necessary to do work effectively. When employees feel ownership of their work, they typically take more pride, put more effort, and bring more quality to their work. Within the context of self-organizing teams, each team understands what work it owns within its bounded authority.
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When you own a home, you will likely take better care of it. You will likely invest time and money to improve it because you feel the pride of ownership.
In which scenario will a person put more effort? Is it to maintain a rented apartment or maintain an owned home? If you don’t own something, you are likely to invest less effort. When you own a home, you will likely take better care of it and be more likely to invest time and money to improve it because you feel the pride of ownership. In fact, you are more likely to protect and defend it. If employees feel ownership of their work, they will much more likely be willing to invest extra time and bring high-quality labor to the work.
As illustrated in Figure 7-3, a change in ownership will involve a cultural shift to move the level of decisions to the lowest possible level. This may include reducing the need for numerous approvals. This can be a big change for most organizations, but it has the benefit of speeding up the flow of work. Make sure you remember that management still has a role to play. Managers need to establish an environment where employees can be most productive and provide them with a vision of where the enterprise is headed.
Figure 7-3. Empowerment model: Moving authority to the lowest level where knowledge exists
Motivation
There is a strong link between successful companies and those companies whose employees describe themselves as motivated. Motivation is a construct of internal and external factors that drive how people behave. A motivated employee may put in more effort with a greater focus on quality. Employee motivation methods have been explored for years due to the possibility of increased company success. In the context of self-organizing teams, the goal is to provide employees with reasons to be motivated.
What are the drivers of employee motivation and what does it mean to an employee? Early notions of motivation tended to focus on the extrinsic motivation methods to engage employees, while more recent research recommends exploring the intrinsic motivation methods that are better suited to engage employees.
Extrinsic Motivation
The extrinsic motivational methods focus on motivators that come from outside the employee. In the early twentieth century, extrinsic motivation techniques were characterized by the use of both rewards and punishments.
The carrot-and-the-stick method is an early example of an extrinsic motivator. It refers to a cart pulled by a donkey. A carrot is tied to a stick and dangled in front of the animal just out of its reach. As the donkey moves forward to get the carrot, it pulls the cart. If the donkey isn’t motivated by the carrot, a stick hits the donkey’s backside to move it forward.
The modern version of the carrot and stick is called the Expectancy Theory (that is, if you do something, you can expect a reward). While advanced, today’s performance systems are mostly based on tangible rewards and punishments. There are many extrinsic motivators related to tangible rewards such as money and grades as well as psychological gains such as recognition and celebrity. These types of motivation are external elements outside of the employees in an attempt to motivate them. Many employees are well aware of these obvious ploys to motivate them.
There are some benefits and risks of extrinsic motivators. The first is that they may promote employees’ doing activities needed to gain the reward, but this will often have only a short-term change because the moment the reward is gone, the activities and behaviors may stop. Instead, consider intrinsic motivators.
Intrinsic Motivators
The intrinsic motivational methods focus on those motivators that come from inside the employee. These are driven by an interest that exists within the individual. In this case, the motivation to engage in an activity or behavior arises from within the employee because it is intrinsically rewarding and not because of an external prize.
Agile Pit Stop
Intrinsic motivators come from within the employee. Extrinsic motivators come from outside the employee. Intrinsic motivators are more effective.
There are intrinsic motivators related to a sense of value, meaning, progress, and competence. These types of motivation may be driven by enjoyment, curiosity, ownership, autonomy, and pride. What are specific examples of intrinsic motivators? They may involve contributing to a team (for example, building a product), to a cause (such as increasing the number of women in leadership), or to a movement (for instance, being Agile). They may involve gaining mastery in a domain (for example, Agile and Java programming).
Intrinsic motivators are best applied when identifying an employee’s consequential purpose. The more consequential the purpose, the more self-motivated an employee becomes. In relation to an Agile culture, it may mean that you have a feeling of ownership of the work. It may mean that you have autonomy in your work, such as deciding what work you do, how you do the work, and what the pace of the work will be.
There are major benefits for intrinsic motivators. Employees are often more creative when they are intrinsically motivated. This can lead to more innovation of products. If the intrinsic motivation has to do with competence, there can be higher quality in the products being built. Intrinsic motivators lead to long-term change of mindset since the motivator is from within and doesn’t rely on an external reward, which can disappear.
Avoid mixing external motivators with internal motivators. It can be tempting to identify the intrinsic motivator and add an extrinsic reward to it. For example, when you offer a reward to something that an employee already finds fun, it often transforms the “fun” into work or obligation.
Empowerment
Everybody has heard the term empowerment in organizations—typically to hype up a new initiative so that employees will feel empowered. However, it should be a core value of an organization’s strategy and not a trend that comes and goes. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many organizations. Empowerment is defined as having the autonomy and accountability to organize and make changes to one’s own work and his or her surroundings. Within the context of self-organizing teams, team members are empowered to decide how to build their product (architecture, design, UX, development, testing, and more).
Agile Pit Stop
Employee empowerment isn’t just a warm and fuzzy benefit for the workers, and it can lead to tangible performance and financial gain for an organization.
What exactly is employee empowerment? In Figure 7-4, Jane Smith presents an employee empowerment model that includes three degrees of empowerment.3 The first level encourages employees to play a more active role in their work. The second level asks employees to become more involved with improving the way things are done. The third level enables employees to make bigger and better decisions without having to engage upper management. The third level is key for an Agile culture.
Figure 7-4. Employee empowerment model
If management is earnest about applying a model like this, managers may see improvements in the quality of their product delivery, more innovation, increased productivity, and a gain in competitive edge. Empowerment is enhanced when an adaptive framework like Agile is applied, which advocates a team-based model. If the team feels truly empowered and can self-organize, they will naturally increase their productivity because they are empowered to make decisions to guide their work lives.
Trust
One of the Agile principles states, “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” Trust is defined as having confidence in another person that something will get done. Within a self-organizing team, trust is developed among team members when they can rely on each other that work will get done or that help will be asked for.
Some people say trust is earned. I suggest that trust should be given. This is often seen as a change in mindset. Much of what you learn about trust is through negative experiences. This can teach some of us to start with a guarded view, which makes us believe that trust should be earn. It can feel safer, but this can be a less productive way of approaching trust.
You hire people who you trust can do the job. At the same time, either by your negative experiences or by the multiple levels of approvals, you build an environment where there is insufficient trust given. Have checks and safeguards been added to replace trust? If you don’t trust, the safeguards are only a process layer that bandages the problem of trust and are often impeding the speed of delivery.
A better way is to start from a trust position. In the COMETS culture surrounding your Agile galaxy, is it better to start with a positive and approachable worldview or from a negative and adverse worldview of those around you? Give your colleagues the trust and support to get the job done. Trust is a critical element for healthy relationships, teams, organizations, and communities. Employees are your partners. Giving them the right environment, tools, and culture will help them thrive and, in turn, it will help the business thrive.
Agile Pit Stop
Instead of saying trust must be earned, a better way is to start from a positive position of trust. You hired people who can trust, didn’t you?
Accept the fact that everyone is indeed human and subject to faults. Also, before assuming that anyone is at fault, verify that you provided team members with the support, impediment removal, and lean processes that would enable them to succeed. Often the reason trust is broken is because the system, processes, or cultures around a team are broken. Always look to see what you can fix for a team or employees.
Trust Relationships
Trust is developed through relationships with those around us. These relationships are at various levels and need to be developed and continually maintained. As illustrated in Figure 7-5, relationships tend to be horizontal (peer-to-peer at roughly similar levels) or hierarchical (employee-to-manager or seasoned employee to junior employee).
Figure 7-5. Trust relationships
In most work places, there is more complexity to building a trusting environment beyond your peers and manager. Relationships can include intra-team trust from team member to team member and inter-team trust from team member to a member of another team, team member to direct manager, and team member to indirect manager.
In any of these scenarios, start from a trust position. Attempt to make connections with anyone you work with beyond work tasks. This helps employees gain familiarity and empathy with each other. When it comes time to work together, emphasize listening skills to reduce misunderstanding. Building healthy relationships among employees and between employees and managers will be discussed further in Chapter 8.
Safety
There are two types of safety that factor into a healthy and productive enterprise environment. The first is physical safety. A physically safe environment is where employees are free from physical hazards and can focus on the work at hand. This type of safety should be part of the standard workplace promoted by company and government regulations.
The second safety type is psychological safety, which is core to enterprise effectiveness. According to Google research, high-performing teams always display psychological safety. This phenomenon has two aspects. The first is where there is a shared belief that the team members are safe to take interpersonal risks and be vulnerable in front of each other. The second is how this type of safety, along with increased accountability, leads to increased employee productivity and, hence, high-performing teams.
Agile Pit Stop
Psychological safety is a shared belief that the team members are safe to take risks and be vulnerable to each other. With accountability, this leads to high-performing teams.
Psychological safety helps establish an Agile environment that promotes a safe space for employees to share ideas, discuss options, take methodical risks, and become productive. An Agile mindset promotes self-organizing teams around the work, taking ownership and accountability, and creating an environment for learning what is customer value through the discovery mindset, divergent thinking, and feedback loops. Agile with psychological safety can be a powerful pairing toward high-performing teams.
However, accountability without psychological safety leads to great anxiety. This is why there is a need to move away from a negative mindset when results aren’t positive or new ideas are seen as different. If employees do not feel safe psychologically, they are less willing to share ideas and take risks. Instead, consider ways to build psychological safety paired with team ownership and accountability of the work.
Everyone has a role to play in establishing a psychologically safe enterprise. ScrumMasters and Agile coaches can educate and coach teams to apply psychological safety and accountability. Leadership can provide awareness of the importance of a safe environment, give education on this topic, and build positive patterns in the way employees respond to the results of risks taken by team members and others. Employees at all levels must be aware of the attitudes and mindsets they bring.
Understanding Employee Engagement
How do you know you have engaged employees? Organizations have used Gallup, Inc., for years to help understand their employees’ level of engagement. Gallup spent decades developing the Q12 instrument, which provides 12 well-honed questions measuring the extent to which employees are “engaged” in their work. While some will say correctly that a manager or supervisor has the greatest impact on the level of a satisfied or engaged employee, Gallup indicates that it is realistic to assume that numerous people in the workplace can influence an employee’s engagement level.
Since a number of people may influence an employee’s engagement level, you need to address the culture in which the employee works. In relation to Agile, one way to gauge employee engagement is to discuss it in relation to the Agile values and principles, which provide strong guidance at both the individual level and the organizational levels.
Another way to gauge the employee engagement level is to ask employees the Gallup’s 12 questions and gather their responses (strongly agree to strongly disagree). To gain triangulated feedback, it may be beneficial to ask them from both from the Gallup view and from the Agile view.
Agile Pit Stop
What are some ways to gauge employee engagement and find out if employees understand that they are important to the company? Just ask them. Asking them directly gets to the point.
Of course, there is the direct way. You simply ask them. Ask the employees if they feel they matter to the enterprise. Ask them if they feel they can collaborate. Ask them if they feel ownership of their work. Ask them if they are motivated. Ask them if they feel empowered to make changes to their work environment. Ask them if they trust their teammates and their managers. As them if they believe they are allowed to self-organize around their work. This approach will require someone who is trusted to lead the people through the questions or it can be done in a self-organizing way where employees lead themselves through the questions.
What Is Your Employee Culture?
When you look across your enterprise, what employee culture exists? Is the culture focused on self-organizing teams and aligned with the values of COMETS and the Agile values and principles? Do the employees feel ownership of maintaining the engine of customer value? Are they free to collaborate? Are they motivated to do their best? Are they empowered and self-organized to determine how to improve the engine and build the customer value? Are they trusted to make the decisions and do what is best? Do they feel safe to take risks? If they are, congratulations! If not, you have an opportunity to embrace a culture where employees matter.
For additional material, I suggest the following:
Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us by Dan Pink, Riverhead Books, April 5, 2011
Overview of the Gallup Organization’s Q-12 Survey by Louis R. Forbringer, Ph.D., O.E. Solutions, 2002
VFQ Motivation, Emergn Limited, Emergn Limited Publishing, 2014
VFQ Communication, Collaboration, and Coordination, Emergn Limited, Emergn Limited Publishing, 2014
Footnotes
1 Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, Nelson Parker, February 20, 2014
2 “The Impact of Empowered Employees on Corporate Value” by Darrol J. Stanley, Graziado Business Review, 2005 Volume 8, Issue 1
3 Empowering People by Jane Smith, Kogan Page, 2000