“Feedback is important!” – We’ve all heard this before. It’s an old adage.
I guess we also agree that feedback without any following actions is not only useless but demotivating. People will learn very quickly that “giving Feedback” is obviously useless and thus will not give feedback anymore. – End of Feedback culture.
(more…)… and what you’ve never read about them:
So, one of the most important reasons (besides the buzzword stuff), for me, is that I hear my colleagues. Not just WHAT they say, but HOW they say it.
(more…)I just read an article on t3n about reasons to be in the office and reasons to stay in the HomeOffice. It’s an interesting read, just at one point I could have screamed (maybe I even did)! 🤦♂️
(more…)You can talk a lot about agility and transformation etc. – I believe there are 3 basic pillars and EVERYONE can contribute to “change”:
Those three tings alone are already a turbo for many small things that are simply super boring in the masses.
But also the other way round: if one of the three points is missing, save the energy – it won’t be successful.
The bonus is public praise for everyone involved in the project (project participants != only project managers) – but let’s start with the basics 😉
Recently, I attended a conference and sat through a particularly bad presentation. I was tempted to leave, but my colleague insisted we stay until the end. So I somehow had to make the best out of it. This gave me the opportunity to analyze what made the presentation so ineffective and “bad” for me (maybe it was interesting for other people, I just didn’t like it.
So I regarded it as a case study to probably improve my own presentations.
(more…)Recently, my colleagues and I attended the World of Data conference. (The conference is an event in the data and analytics industry, where latest trends, technologies etc are presented in workshops and talks/presentations. It’s pretty nice to be honest!)
(more…)There have been plenty of articles and comments about the (dis)advantages of home office vs in-office scenarios over the past two years. One critical aspect of home-office is definitely about creating a personal relationship with people that you never meet in person.
One situation where a personal relationship is quite important is an interview with candidates (be it internal or external). Besides the technical expertise you also want to know whether or not the candidate is a fit for the team. In the past 2+ years, we interviewed dozens of people for positions in the team. I say “we” because we usually are 2-3 internals holding different positions in the team (dev, ops, product owner, …) interviewing the new candidate. And in the past 2+ years we did all those interviews remotely via video-conferencing.
(more…)Do you know these horrible status meetings? Every week, every two weeks or – when it is critical – 2x a week? Especially with multiple members? And you never know whether it’s important to go there or not? But you need to go there because there might be a relevant information?
The myth: “If there’s nothing to say, we can quickly close the meeting after 5min”. Seriously – I’ve not seen this happen very often. It quickly drifts into a common chitchat or Q&A. Don’t get me wrong: socializing is important – but a status meeting isn’t a socializing event.
(more…)I have been repeating this sentence more often than I’d like recently. But if the COID-19 time has taught me one thing very impressively, it is:
Rule 1: Forget rules which you cannot control or enforce
(Alternatively: “Do not hope for the sanity of your colleagues / fellows / …”)
Many of the COVID measures would certainly not have been necessary if “we all” had behaved reasonably. One could discuss the term “reasonable” right away. But “reasonable” unfortunately depends on personal goals. If the personal goals diverge, the opinion about “reasonable behavior” diverges as well. And suddenly “we all” do not have a common sense of what “reasonable behaviour” is. This discrepancy is then what is called a “conflict.”
(more…)Many companies and executives thought COVID-19 and 100% HomeOffice would be a real challenge. Phew seems a lot of companies survived the Home-Office challenge! Companies have learnt that the business can continue. Employees have learnt that HomeOffice can work.
This was challenge 1: the technical challenge.
But now as companies slowly do not have to do HomeOffice anymore … now we will see what our bosses, executives and companies really think. How much they have really learned. How much trust there really is.
Now comes challenge 2: the people challenge.
The challenge might now be to keep people when a leader (or worse: a company culture) values presence (a.k.a counting sheep) over results – but employees don’t …
I’ll just stay at home and stay productive.