Brian Sharp is a game developer in San Francisco, for Electronic Arts (home of my beloved Sim City).
And, he had this to say about his company, last spring on his blog.
Of course my first thought is, “Nobody in my company better think they can get away with that kind of public slagging.” (But, that’s easily solved with a detailed external communications policy.)
But my lasting thought is, “I don’t want anyone in my company to be this unhappy.”
When he wrote this, Brian was clearly experiencing a dangerous morale level, the kind that can only come from too much pointless work and not enough support and recognition.
People don’t dislike hard work — they dislike pointless work. Is there anything more frustrating than doing something repeatedly because you didn’t have enough [support, information, money, equipment, whatever] the first time?
If so, it’s alerting a manager to a problem when it’s small enough to be solved, only to be dismissed, then forgotten when the thing has escalated into an emergency.
Or having an idea that might really improve business practices, but never getting a meaningful chance to share it.
Or maybe it’s knowing that you are forced to take advantage of the goodwill of your coworkers in order to execute your job, and feeling like you are constantly apologizing, and that people have begun avoiding you.
I’m not attempting to draw a subtle line that these are reports from my own company’s trenches. These are just standard corporate morale problems. But, I care because I know what a classic Good Employer looks like; my household has been the benefit of those best practices for almost a decade (my husband’s employer is named every year to that big “Best Companies to Work For” list).
I want my company to be a Good Employer. To recruit and retain good employees, you have to be a good employer — it’s not enough to throw money at a problem or to rely on turnover in the labor pool or to live hand-to-mouth on stopgap processes.
Soft currency has to be invested, the feel-good stuff. Much like we should treat our actual clients with as much care as we treat our prospects, we also should be treating our employees with as much care as we treat customers.
Where the challenge comes in is finding ways to do so at a company where, until she met me, the head administrator thought “internal marketing” meant offering health insurance.
