Measuring Engineering Happiness
Picture yourself as a new manager or a new leader. You don’t know your team member personally, how things get done, and how things are released and ready to use by the customer. As you navigate to the team activities and dissect each team member's personality, one thing very clear needs to be done. How you ensure the team members are happy so that they motivated in growing the company impacts through their actions.
Note: The narration below has appeared in my employer's internal notes authored by me. My effort in reposting this is to increase the audience without disclosing further the original effort that was made internally.
How this article is presented
We talk about factors that contribute to engineering happiness, company effort that already has in place to maintain the happiness feedback loop. Next, we show the potential source of engineer unhappiness and its direct impact on engineers. Eventually, we share the tools that we can utilize in order to either fix unhappiness or to prevent unhappiness from occurring in the first place. Finally, we share conclusions and important remarks on what should leaders do to identify, measure, and maintain the happiness of engineers.
This article would be beneficial for new leaders, those who just moved teams, and also any engineers that are enthusiastic about their own source of motivation and how their leaders manage them.
Factors that boost Engineering Happiness
Below are some factors that I have identified to boosts engineering happiness. There could be more of them [5].
Sense of belonging and identity
Belonging and identity could obviously fall outside the radar of what makes one happy. However, imagine the implication of having none. We can not know which are our tribe, how we identify our impact with, and also which team or mission we are in.
Concerns are addressed
Nothing beats the feeling of when our concerns get addressed, either in form of team culture or our peer's improvements in their work.
They can pursue their aspirations at work
Work is not just a place where employees do things for the company. The work itself should be a medium where employees do the things that are important for them. Either it is a hobby, a technology adoption, a practice towards other bigger challenges, etc.
Each of the points seems to get longer to describe, to cut it short, here are the other identified factors. Feel free to discuss in comments why the item below boosts our happiness.
- Opinions are heard and valued
- Transparency of other parties
- Accountability of other parties
- Being appreciated when it is due
- Being trained to be more capable in their work
- Flexibility in achieving non P0 target
- Accomplish a task that is given or assigned
Company Efforts
Most companies should have already addressed many of the factors above. There should be a Human Resource department that ensuring valid happiness concerns addressed and create sustainable building blocks to ensure its repeatability. Some of the efforts could be:
- 360 degrees Performance Review
- Festive celebration (Independence day, Eid, Christmas, etc)
- A defined company DNA to ensure the best collaborative platforms
- Office, dental, allowance, health, and other benefits
Most of the company’s effort falls in the general effort and doesn’t touch Engineering Happiness directly. The actual effort to maintain engineering happiness should have been delegated to the Engineering Verticals Leadership to ensure the Engineers are happy on all levels.
Factors that block engineer happiness and potential suggestion to improve them
There are two sources of these factors. They were sourced externally out of the engineers and sourced from the engineer internally.
External Source (Work, Career, Team, Leads, Company)
Work
- Too many work assigned
- Unclear impact of work (what values it brings to the grander scheme?)
- Scope of work is too large and complex
- Experience a bad working environment (legacy code, no tests, no guide, no design docs) [3]
Career
- Unclear path
- Lack of coaching
- Lack of opportunities to explore career
Team Culture
- The team doesn’t have a mechanism to settle a decision
- The team doesn’t show interest to conduct activity together
- The team doesn’t respect opinion on things to improve
- Lack of process that could easily cause dispute and disagreement
- Lack of trust among team members or across stakeholders lead to blaming
Leads (i.e. things for leads that need to stop doing) [4]
- Dismiss engineer point of view
- Doesn’t provide actionable guidance
- Doesn’t point out things that could help the engineer from causing an incident
- Unreachable when needed
- Rely on too much autonomy of the engineer
- Micromanage the engineer
Company/Department
- Could be specific and personal reason towards company/department in regard to engineering needs (tools, gadget for testings, transparency on policy, directions, etc)
Most external sourced unhappiness is doable to be addressed with the help of the engineer’s direct lead. Given such traits are able to be detected with adequate time spent with the team, a strategy to address them should emerge. Always discuss with the team, stakeholders, and other senior leadership on the potential resolution.
Internal Sourced
On Failure: Many new engineer apprentices could take failure wrongly instead of as a learning opportunity, if this happens all the time and nobody corrects the mindset, they will be left unhappy due to them feeling dissatisfied by their own self whenever they are failing to accomplish certain tasks or triggering an incident.
Suggestion to improve happiness: Regard failure as a learning opportunity. Know which triggers it and ensure the same will not happen again.
On having Expectation to Peers: Many engineers try to set some expectations on how their peers or their stakeholders’ should act or perform. When those colleagues seem to be not following their expectations, they could file complaints or negative feedback. If the feedback is not addressed or being taken negatively by the peers, this could lead to unhappiness or even conflict.
Suggestion to improve happiness: The mindset needs to change instead of setting up expectations for them, hear their point of view on the current conditions. If in any way it still has not caught up to your standards, help them to reach your north star by appointing to them that your expectation could be their north star too.
On Limited Opportunities: Many engineers feel that they are stuck in their current situation in terms of career, exposure to new technology, or repetitive work. The thing is they rely on external parties for new opportunities or new experiences in their career.
Suggestion to improve happiness: Opportunity can not be made out of thin air. Either create new opportunities for ourselves or involve the engineering lead about the concern of the need to explore something new. Some networking and collaborative spirit to others can also help us to create those opportunities so that we don’t get stuck with repetitive work over time.
On thinking that the conditions are fixed: Many engineers think that the conditions in the workplace were made that way and there is nothing they can do to fix it. Most of the time this mindset will make engineers not vocal on what they think can be improved. The worst effect of this mindset would be that they will not think that happiness in the workplace is their right in the first place, hence having low to none expectations about what can be improved to increase productivity.
Suggestion to improve happiness: Start having strong opinions on things that hinder productivity could be a great start to improve the mindset. Meanwhile, try to consult the leads to validate whether the concern is valid or to get ideas on how to improve the situation so that there would be concrete actionable action to address the problem.
Impact of Engineer (Un)Happiness
Below is the potential impact of engineer unhappiness [3]:
- Low Productivity
- Unable to contribute to creative thinking (mostly don’t talk in a team activity, i.e. brainstorming session or in retrospective meetings)
- Low motivation in solving work problem
- Delay in delivery
- Doesn’t communicate blockers effectively
- Low code quality
- Not effective in receiving feedback for improvement
- Disturb overall team morale
- Potential negative tone when communicating with stakeholders (i.e. PM or operational related person)
- Apathy (giving up on finding ways to improve)
- Resignation
Since the cost of unhappy engineers is great, it means investment to improve engineering happiness is imperative to achieve engineer retention and also to drive them to engage and improve the organization even more.
Tools that can help to improve engineer happiness
Mental Tools
Once we acquired this, we can proceed to use activity tools to work towards engineer concerns
Emotional Bank Account (Coined by Stephen Covey)
- Ensure we are approachable to any of our team members and stakeholders
- Establish relationships, know their interest and aspirations
- Once we have secure some “emotional deposit”, it is easier for us to talk about the hard things related to feedback, the needs for improvement, or to tell them that they can request help whenever needed
Psychological safety between team members
- Team point out disagreement without afraid of being regarded as too loud or too noisy
- Team submits and receive feedback openly and constructively
- Team submitting concerns or pointing out a blind spot without being afraid of further corrections
Activity Tools [2]
Continues learning forum, such as retrospective
- The forum is free from the judgment of past mistakes
- The forum should be pointed out what we have missed or gone wrong during some period of time
- The forum focus on what happens and what condition that makes it achieved the condition, and point out action item and formulate items that can be done better so it doesn’t happen again
Interest group, as an academic setting for engineers to pursue their interest and hear others with different levels of expertise using the interesting aspect as their daily driver.
Example:
As a web engineer, A might want to pursue technology T, meanwhile, it is rare for A to have people in the same product development or in the internal web team to also have interest in T, joining an interest group of T can be an option for A to get mastery in T, or even get insight from the existing expertise to adopt T in A’s own mission team.
Morale check session can be done using regular 1–1 session between engineer and leads.
- [1] Ask engineer not only whether they happy or not (since happiness is subjective and is fluctuate throughout the day), ask about their happiness level on items that matter in their profession instead:
- Are they happy with their work output?
- Are they happy with the retrospective result?
- Are they happy interacting with team members (internal team, cross-functional, cross mission?)
- Are they happy about the product direction shown in the roadmap?
- Are they happy about their development workflow?
2. Ask engineers what provides values to their work the most during the time.
- Was it the learning opportunity?
- Was it the level of complexity of the work that matches their capacity?
- Was it the recognition of their work?
- Was it the team bonding activity?
Supplementary Training Session
- Share material that benefits engineer in their career as a person, example item to share:
- How to do technical debate and settle the decision
- How to do incident handling
- How to conduct post mortem discussion
- Etc. based on current engineer factual needs to amplify the impact of the training materials
2. Define the audience first before choosing topics, sometimes iOS engineer will not benefit if the topic is about microservice deployment, however, iOS engineers and BE engineers could be benefitted from the topic on “How to do technical debate and settle decision”
Conclusion
- Engineer happiness is important in order for the employee to have high motivation to move and shape the company forward.
- Investment in engineer happiness is imperative to be done as it could also drive companies to improve in part that affecting engineer performance.
- Although perceived as a bad metric, engineer unhappiness could also become a source of feedback for the company and the people inside of it to reflect on what to improve and what can be done better.
- However, it is a great challenge for leaders to make a safe environment so that engineers’ unhappiness can be talked about and addressed.
- Since there is no silver bullet to achieve this, constant feedback loops and emotional investment from leads to each employee needs to be strengthened in order for any source of unhappiness to be addressed and fixed.
Closing Statements
When Engineers are happy, we can still not ensure that they will always want to be employed in the company. However, ensuring the leadership already done their best to host them in the company is never a worse option. There is a good saying that I once heard in the past:
Groom employee so they are able to leave the company anytime (because they are desired the most), however, treat them best so they chose to stay (and improve the company even more).
What are your takes on this subject? Feel free to discuss it with me in the comments section.
References
[2]https://humaninterest.com/blog/5-ways-to-evaluate-employee-happiness/
[3]Happiness and the productivity of software engineers
[4]Traveloka PMS employee to manager review
[5]https://expertprogrammanagement.com/2018/04/herzbergs-two-factor-theory/
