How we increased productivity with a fruit basket at work
philippe.bourgau.net
philippe.bourgau.net
> After a few weeks, we had slashed bug fixing time, which increased productivity by 25%. The fruit baskets at work played a key role in this productivity increase!
> In the end, it increased productivity by 25%
Or, you know, maybe it was everything else you were doing differently? Such as http://philippe.bourgau.net/how-we-used-the-improvement-kata... (which he even links to in the original post).
I'm not saying that having a fruit basket can't necessarily make people happier and therefore more productive. But these claims are just ridiculous and almost impossible to measure properly.
If anything, events like this just make me question management and think, “these people have no idea what they’re doing... they want to satisfy some ego drive to be praised as inventive leaders by making shit up instead of just choosing the boring, well-known kinds of solutions.”
This always just feels like negative-sum macho posturing to me. I'm a serious programmer and good at my job, but of course I'd rather have a fruit basket than not have a fruit basket.
This way of management to cultivate “downward looking perspectives” that intentionally belittle or undermine subordinates is a very real and pervasive thing.
A large part of the sociology book Moral Mazes is dedicated to the taxonomy and descriptive analysis of exactly this kind of corporate behavior.
It contributes to my happiness, which is ultimately what I care about - productivity is another means to the same end.
> In my experience I’d rather have the investment be prioritised towards more tangible things like additional training.
You talk about things being "prioritised" but I just don't think that matches how these decisions are made. It's not like they're taking money out of some fixed pool (again, at a practical-decision-making level); I see no reason to think that fruit baskets make training less likely. (Indeed I'd say that providing fruit baskets speaks to a willingness to offer cheap-but-effective things, and I'd rather work for somewhere that tried to offer cheap-but-effective training than somewhere that tried to offer expensive training).
I don't know you, but most developers aren't robots, so little psychological tricks can help boost productivity. Of course you work for money, the money you already agreed in your salary negotiation. But this is not really that much about monetary incentives and more about creating a little playful competition that improves the product.
I'd say people take a job for the salary, but a good salary in a bad team atmosphere won't lead to productivity.
Nobody is forcing anyone to participate, I also hate forced company culture. But if it works, enough people must be willingly doing more work to best their colleagues.
Huh? So wanting to get better at side skills in my job makes me a robot?
Most developers I’ve worked with, apart from some exceptions (usually due to youthful inexperience or immaturity) definitely do proactively take it as their responsibility to improve job skills holistically.
Any manager who thinks they need to use psychological tricks to get more from subordinates (or worse, believes they are clever for doing so) is somebody to run right on away from.
No, but assuming there's no connection between the company culture and productivity assumes that developers are completely emotionless robots that only focus on skill development because of professionalism.
Of course most developers do somehow proactively try to improve their skill set, but assuming that emotions and psychology don't matter, only salary, is very weird. Developers are often some of the most emotional people I know, they're curious, opinionated, playful etc. This is all from emotions, not from salaries, or purely self-driven. And if you use the innate playfulness and curiosity to improve the team, by creating little games like this, then you are doing one aspect of good management.
Surely it shouldn't be your only management strategy, but nobody implied that.
I don't care about fruit. Pay me. Period. That's my attitude anymore.
... “but she’s got a new hat!”
Also, it seems like the company focus shifted to reducing bugs and general code quality. That probably has something to do with the huge shift in productivity as measured by bug count.