Category: Editorial

Building a culture that promotes teamwork, efficiency, retention, and other positive attributes can be challenging. While many organizations want accountability and responsibility, it is easy for managers to tip over into a blame-and-chastise pattern. When someone makes a mistake and a deadline is missed or a client gets upset, how do you respond?

I saw an article that gives some examples from the cybersecurity world about how to build a culture that allows mistakes and forgives them. We all make mistakes, and we should strive to correct them while working to avoid repeating the same mistake. But we will make mistakes again in the future, so how do we deal with them?

One of the challenges with building a strong culture that is productive is with management. Far too many people react poorly when things go wrong. I find this is a similar challenge to parenting, where we often struggle to let go of control and accept that mistakes will occur. We can also worry that we will be blamed for others’ mistakes and want to push our employees or children to avoid mistakes. Often our reactions are more fear-based, for ourselves or even for others’ safety. However, we can’t completely avoid things going wrong. It’s never worked for me, either at work or at home.

There are plenty of articles on creating blameless cultures (one, two, and searches), most of which give reasoning why this works better and hints on what you can do. For many of us, these might feel like a dream we cannot chase. With some managers, the idea of even broaching the topic might be too scary. In those situations, I might try discussing the ideas with peers and perhaps implementing ideas with them, rather than trying to convince management.

Ultimately culture requires support from those in charge. Management has to actually believe in a culture that tolerates and accepts mistakes, while still striving to reduce their occurrence. Everyone deserves to make mistakes and recover from them. We’d like to prevent repeat mistakes, but those will happen. My goal is to work to be better over time and expect others to do the same. While I might need to move someone to a new job or even let them go, it wouldn’t be because of making a few mistakes. It would be because of constant mistakes without making an effort to change their behavior and be better.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

In this article on flexible working plans, number four makes a good point. What work is suited for live, in-person interaction? Which aspects of your job benefit from seeing others face-to-face?

Today I’m asking data professionals to think about it. I know we can do all our jobs remotely, after all, many of us have been doing that for at least a couple of years, and some for far longer. I can’t remember the last time I actually needed to look at a physical server I wrote code for? Probably when I self-hosted SQL Server Central back in 2002-2003 and went to reboot a machine or add a disk drive. Even then, those weren’t DBA or developer jobs, but really Operations hardware tasks.

These days many companies are trying to decide how to handle office and workers. I don’t know I’ve seen anyone come up with a good plan other than leaving everyone remote and figure out how to make things work. Every day in the office doesn’t seem great, and I’m not sure I’ve seen a good company hybrid plan. I see some groups deciding to meet once a week or once a month and that works well, but I think that’s more a reason to have some social time than it is a need for productivity.

Not that allocating some amount of time specifically to bond socially is a bad idea. I am in favor of this. We used to do this when we were in offices every day, so why not schedule this periodically now?

While you can do your job remotely, I wonder if there are not some aspects of development or operations that are better done in person. Or maybe, sometimes in-person. I can see brainstorming and planning as being smoother in person. Being focused and closely collaborating always feel stilted and confusing online. I prefer being in person. Perhaps pair programming or a similar arrangement is better in person at times. I know we can share a screen and code together, but doing this in the same room periodically builds a bond that I think would make remote sessions more productive.

The only other thing that I think matters is cross-team bonding, perhaps doing some debate and discussion of how teams work together or how their work affects others is better done in person. Perhaps not every day/week/month but once a quarter or a few times a year I can see this building better relationships between people, much like in-person pair programming.

If you have other ideas or experiences, let us know. If you think there isn’t a reason to ever go in the office, that’s something worth sharing as well.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.