Writing a user manual at work makes teams less anxious and more productive | Hacker News Reader

Writing a user manual at work makes teams less anxious and more productive

qz.com

52 pointsabsolute10030 comments

This sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Manager: “I appreciate straight, direct communication. Say what you are thinking, and say it without wrapping your message.”

Employee 1, taking the advice literally: “I like hats! Do you like hats? Also green, green is good. And chocolate. But everyone likes chocolate, so that doesn't count.

Manager: “You’re mad. Security!”

Employee 2, taking it honestly but not literally: “Our product is making people’s lives worse. Every study ever made of our business says so. Why don’t we spend all this money doing something worthwhile?”

Manager: “Not a team player. Security!”

The rest of the employees either keep their heads down or take this as an invitation to get chummy with the manager, offering sage advice from the last tweet they read.

I hope I never work at a place like that.

Your premise is that the manager is dishonest in his user manual, and then also incompetent and stupid.

Seems like the manual wouldn't make much of a difference if the manager is already incompetent, stupid, and has no self awareness.

I assume most user manuals would be at least somewhat dishonest. No one is going to write "I'm touchy and thin-skinned, make sure to sound at least a little complimentary when giving me feedback."

It's only dishonest in that the words in the manual are static and not changing, while our moods, attitudes, and maturity are. What you write down even during the calmest and most level-headed of times is not true 100% of the time and in every single situation -- people are more complicated than that.

I think the general idea behind the idea in the article is good (be more direct in what you're looking for in an interaction or what you're not wanting in an interaction); I immigrated from the US to another country, and the number of senseless social rules and bureaucracy that are common in the US have an immense emotional toll that I don't think is appreciated well enough and address properly as an issue. The article's intention, as I understand it, is to remove a lot of these rulesets that basically benefit absolutely no one except for management that doesn't want to deal with the emotional side of employee wellbeing (or any wellbeing really, but that's another subject)

Where the article gets it wrong I think is formalizing it into a manual, as it gives the wrong impression to me, and it's even offensive to my sensibilities. I'm not a kitchen appliance you read the manual for and once you press these buttons you get the desired feature enabled; I'm a human being, like everyone else, and have complex thoughts and feelings, and my reaction and decisions will change. What worked one day some time back is not necessarily how I'm going to feel every single day for the rest of my life.

If we're going to keep the manual analogy, sure, let's do it, but let's extend the analogy a bit:

- Humans get frequent updates: firmware, bug fixes, hot fixes, security patches, and rollups

- Each one comes with a readme and a changeset doc

- Not everyone is allowed access to the same level of details as others for each update

If you want to keep current with me, I'll gladly share my "manual" with you, but don't be surprised if a feature you relied on in an older version is deprecated or even removed in a newer version.

Humans change -- we don't have a manual, just a current status. There is some level of predictability, but everyone has the potential to change.

I've seen plenty of posters or whatnot suggesting that constructive (negative) feedback be surrounded by complements.

Yes, it makes it more likely to be heard, but it's also a policy saying everyone here is touchy and thin-skinned.

> Your premise is that the manager is dishonest in his user manual, and then also incompetent and stupid.

It doesn't take any of those to reach the well-meaning conclusion that something like this is useful. The premise is that the intent of the manager is completely lost when translating a personal, context-dependent and culture-dependent feeling into words. Only someone with a very similar background to the manager will understand what is actually meant.

Rather than putting it in writing, it's important to be the person they are trying to convey that they are, and let their employees make up their own mind whether they appreciate honest feedback.

If people feel psychologically safe at the workplace, you don't have to ask them "what they don't have patience for" or "which activities deplete their energy". They will tell you.

(Assuming you do agile - which everyone pretends to - they will tell you during the retrospective. Unsurprisingly, this is the part of agile methogology most companies decide to leave out.)

If people don't feel safe, they will wonder whether their answers will be used to accommodate them better... or to decide who gets fired.

Like a friend of mine said, where's the line between a totally honest and transparent workplace and a toxic workplace?

Someone toxic would call their behaviour "honest and transparent" to justify what they're doing, but I wouldn't go so far as to say they are intrinsically linked.

https://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html Maybe "toxic workplace" is meaningfully broader than the psychopathy described in this "sick systems". But I wouldn't jump from "totally honest and transparent" to "toxic" straightaway.

Notoriously, Bridgewater aims for "totally honest and transparent" communication.. and while it's clearly not for everyone, it seems to work for them.

For everyone else, clearly "safety to make mistakes" is a required condition before communication can properly be 'totally honest and transparent'. -- Otherwise, what I think you're getting at, is that "honest and transparent" whitewashes toxic political dynamics.

I agree with your comment, but that article you linked to it seems to have a couple of odd conclusions. It seems to be calling "keeping them emotionally involved" (using alignment of incentives) to be part of the definition of a sick system.

Keeping employees emotionally involved doesn't seem to me to be a harmful thing for a workplace, or the workers themselves. Given you spend quite a lot of your waking hours working, feeling like your hard work's going to be rewarded seems like a good thing right?

> where's the line between a totally honest and transparent workplace and a toxic workplace?

As a heuristic, honest people don't keep talking about how honest they are. So if a company reminds you regularly "this is a totally honest and transparent workplace", more likely it is the latter.

This method seems to rely on the assumption you can trust everyone. If one person shares his personality information and another doesn't, it puts the first person at a disadvantage. Manipulative coworkers are a thing. Narcissistic and psychopatic people thrive in corporate environments.

We did this and it is really great. I can understand that you don’t want to do this in a dysfunctional team or in an organization that has a broken culture (not feeling save to share personal stuff for me implies a fundamental flaw).

Of course if done right, nobody is forced to do this. But it is a great experience for the team to get more effective in working together and also reduce possible conflict.

Writing down ideas is always a very useful exercise. Having introspection is a good trait, so writing a "User's Manual" for yourself is a very good thing.

Now, having these User Manuals in a company, I don't know if they are any useful; you may get the one tidbit of information that somebody you don't interact much with says they prefer email to chat or something.

I propose an exercise: if you have people's "README's", go through them, if possible without seeing their names and test if you could match what they say they are/like/etc to who they are and what they actually are like. I simply find no correlation; everybody says they value honesty etc (including myself) and you still have no idea of how to interact with that person, or what they really value. We are really bad at judging ourselves.

yeah, no. I'm not writing down anything personal about myself for consumption at work. And I'd probably quit if this was forced on me.

You can make it as personal as you want. Just writing down that Slack is your foremost communication method, and you hate people stepping up to your desk is already helpful.

sounds like a good way to get dinged in a performance review. "I see you have documented that you hate in-person communications"

I launched ManagerReadme because I believe that sharing your "User Manual" as a manager can reduce a lot of the stress in figuring out how to work with you. Leah Fessler suggests that you'll spend time with your team and let everyone take 30 minutes to answer a few key questions to reduce "guess time" and increase the depth of your conversations.

Is there a lot of variety in the manuals? I assume that everyone writes something like what's mentioned in the article “I appreciate straight, direct communication. Say what you are thinking, and say it without wrapping your message” because the opposite would sound unprofessional.

People don't say they are Anti-Choice, they say they are Pro-Life. I suspect these manuals are the same. You don't say you are against good-thing you say your are in favor of competing-good-thing.

That wouldn't work in SF. At all.

Why do you say so? Is the default different?

SFans and urban west coast in general are known for a very friendly style of communication, even when the communication is negative. The rule of thumb is to say something positive, then say your negative thing, then say something positive again.

People who are not used to that style find it confusing, and will often miss the fact that they have been dinged.

Saying something negative directly without varnishing is considered outrageously gauche.

I've worked in SF for a few years and not really experienced the "shit sandwich" style of criticism, as I've grown to call it.

SF HR departments are actually training staff to talk that way. Of course, they call it "compliment sandwich" instead.

The really soft shit sandwich is when somebody opens with superfluously thanking you for attending a scheduled meeting, then attempts to attack you. They think they have to thank you as the first layer of their shit sandwich, before the garbage layer. Of course, it sounds ridiculous to hear somebody thank you for doing nothing except showing up.

The reason for such "training" is that there is an epidemic of staff complaints against each other. It does keep HR staff busy (fullly-employed), but it also causes attrition.

But does it really help communications, or does it just make people less anxious? When two communication styles conflict, this ‘blunt’ writer says to a less blunt coworker: “I told her I wouldn’t want her to change her communication style to match mine, and that I valued learning from her softer approach.” Is anyone really going to respond “actually, boss, yes, I would prefer you to stop waffling on. You need to change how you talk to me.” I would predict that this doesn’t change anyone’s behaviour, it just gives people less guilt/anxiety about acting as they already act.

This is a standard agile exercise called “Rules of Engagement”. Should be run with any forming team. I’m always surprised that this knowledge isn’t more commonplace.

What version of agile, though?

Team building is pretty constant across all the “flavors” of agile. Building good communication patterns and trust isn’t coupled to the “how we execute” details

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