Comment by Robin_Message | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Robin_Message | Hacker News Reader

(FWIW, I have no management experience, so these are just some ideas and questions from the other side. Good luck whatever happens.) If 5 out of 8 people working for me were sometimes good and sometimes bad, I'd worry I am not leading them right. Also, with so many people performing badly, is poor performance now part of your company's culture? What contact do your employees have with each other?

Before you let them go, have you analysed what makes the difference between their performance being good and bad? What have you tried to motivate them? Have you asked them if there is anything that would motivate them and if there is anything that is demotivating them?

One suggestion though: Are they being given enough direction? No-one likes a micro-manager, but having a couple of clear goals for what to get out of a day does wonders for my productivity. The thing is though, I'm not great at setting that for myself. Working with someone to set that kind of daily target is great. You say you have to nudge them constantly, but I'd argue you are probably an exceptional person (e.g. starting your own company and employing 8 people.) Setting goals and direction is what you are good at. If your employees were good at it, they wouldn't be working for you, they'd be your competition!

> Before you let them go, have you analysed what makes the difference between their performance being good and bad? What have you tried to motivate them? Have you asked them if there is anything that would motivate them and if there is anything that is demotivating them?

Yeah I worked on this for a while now, and if you ask them it's all personal problems (stuff I can't help unless I'm willing to take their mother to their aunty's). I think one of the reasons we are in this shape because I don't want to micro-manage, I don't want to make it company culture. Although we do have task tracking and everything so basically everyone knows what they supposed to do. We hold regular teleconferences every week (for all the team) and as much as required through out day between individuals.

I've listened stories of other companies such as 37signals how they mange to work telecommuting, how they don't need to nudge people to work and stuff which makes me wonder whether I'm an incompetent manager or most of my team are incompetent workers.

> If your employees were good at it, they wouldn't be working for you!

Interesting point maybe you right, but to be honest I don't want to spend half of my day to keep nudging people :) Also I had these 3 guys who works perfectly fine, so what about them? Are they just exceptionally good? Somehow much much more motivated than others?

Working remotely is different to working together in an office, of course. It requires different skills and a different type of motivation, ime. It also requires far better communication skills. Weak communication skills can kill productivity.

An observation I've made is that folk who hide their mistakes can be a serious problem. You need the complete opposite, so that when someone shouts for help, then it's all hands to the pump. Those folk they can be hugely disruptive without realising it.

Regarding nudging: Ask when something will be done (with units of work that are small enough to make this viable), and get them to commit to it. If they repeatedly don't deliver, and fail to communicate the problems, then you know you have a problem.

Nudging is usually a sign of poor (or no) communication and lack of confidence.

> Regarding nudging: Ask when something will be done (with units of work that are small enough to make this viable), and get them to commit to it. If they repeatedly don't deliver, and fail to communicate the problems, then you know you have a problem.

That's what we've been doing almost for a year now and many failed repeatedly. Secondly when you give them strict deadlines and this kind of tracking I noticed that they might not deliver the best but they'll just fix/do something quickly and in a dirty way. Stuff like programming and Q/A testing is not easy confirm. Generally this sort of stuff bit us in the ass after months and ended up clients to be unhappy.

Then, on the face of it, you have poor quality workers, or folk that are the wrong type to work remotely.

For cross-checking, CI (with code coverage), tdd, and pairing helps a lot, I find. And they're cheap to do.

Code reviews are very important... You should always have another team member review the code produced by any of your employees..

There are many automated ways to do this too. Check out Parasoft Concerto. http://www.parasoft.com/alm

There are many automated ways to do this too. Check out Parasoft Concerto. This system does it by managing by exception. Meaning that if an artifact is not where is should be the worker gets notified. http://www.parasoft.com/concerto

If personal problems are in the way, expressing priorities clearly is even more important than usual. Employees need a clear understanding of what they need to accomplish before they can stop thinking about work and start taking care of business. Make that boundary clear and when they've done what you need and are dealing with personal stuff, you ask no questions (stress about work is probably making their personal problems worse, which in turn is hurting their performance).

>>if you ask them it's all personal problems

I did a double take when I saw that. I have to ask:

Five of eight really say that personal problems influence work that much for so long?!

You do realize that is statistically unlikely?! (Unless they are in e.g. Pakistan, with natural and man made catastrophes.)

Yes... to hazard a guess, the team members may be coming up with superficial reasons. They may be correct, but not touching upon the more relevant underlying problems. Maybe there's even unnecessary self-blame occuring. If the OP's assessment is correct, that they're "talented guys", then parts of the problem may be solvable without resorting to firing.

BTW, are the coworkers talented in the context of the company's technical goals?

In this situation, I might ask what these coworkers think about working away from home. Like at a nice nearby coworking facility. (I'd offer to mandate this for X days in the week, in case they need to externalize the blame to me in front of spouses who've come to expect their presence.) Working from home is often psychologically difficult, due to whatever upbringing or natural predisposition.

Having a short daily stand-up could help. I think some of the idea behind it is that people want to have something to say in front of their peers.

http://howwework.thinkrelevance.com/stakeholder_narrative.ht...

Maybe more from that page could translate into this telecommuting situation. Teams frequently don't learn from their mistakes, beause they're not institutionally accustomed to thinking about them. (Like with retrospectives/postmortems.) Especially if they're mentally stuck in the leader/follower model, where they don't stray far from The Way Things Are.

There's another red flag: "I don't want to micro-manage". In my view, this often means, "People should independently work on their things, at least as far as I'm concerned." I suspect this frequently happens when you have an individually competent person with weaker team skills. To use corporate-speak, maybe the synergies of working in a team are under-utilized.

I think it's likely due to telecommuting because as far as I've seen telecommuting can do this to you. Unfortunately opening up an office is not something I want to do due to financial overhead and geographical limitations.

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