More Aspects of Culture
Continue learning what makes a constructive culture.
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Candid feedback
Compliance, diversity, and inclusion are essential measures to organizations. When interpreted inaccurately, these metrics can negatively influence how people provide and perceive candid feedback. While afraid to sound offensive or unfriendly to others, many individuals often keep quiet even when it is crucial to speak.
For example, the following is a situation that I witnessed. A remote team member showcased newly developed functionality from his large computer monitor. When streamed to a smaller screen, the picture became so tiny that we could not see every UI element. Attendees could not understand whether the feature was following the original requirement. It was only a matter of asking the presenter to adjust the screen size, but nobody dared to do so out of trying to be polite and kind. Instead, the feature was accepted as-is by stakeholders. Later, those same attendees discovered several defects in earlier demonstrated capability because it turned out different than what it sounded like during the demo. This hesitation of providing immediate feedback delayed feature deployment to a production environment and added overhead of showcasing it again after a fix was implemented. I bet the company CEO would not want that to happen again because this episode was caused by a mere misunderstanding of the company’s compliance policies.
Therefore, encourage everybody to provide candid feedback when necessary; the earlier, the better. Educate people that this input must be treated as helpful advice to improve software quality and has nothing to do with how we treat each other.
Early feedback is a powerful instrument to increase customer satisfaction and deliver better quality software. This technique is similar to asking customers ahead of time whether a planned product would be helpful and useful to them instead of working on something that was not going to be used at all and would be a waste of time and money.
Change of mind
The best solutions are designed in open-ended conversations. However, due to their job defensiveness or personality, many people approach discussions with a mindset to push forward their ideas and not accept any alternatives. When that happens, we witness a one-sided conversation where the outcome is decided upfront, shutting down the possibility of innovation and further improvements. It is in the organization’s best interest ...