Standup My Friend

Recently I was asked what were some ways  to create a positive workplace culture, the organization in question had established a social club and it was not working. No one was showing up at the events and it was about to be axed.  I had a chat with my peer and told him social clubs only work when people work. Let me explain:

Organizations that are challenged with the need to develop or enhance culture will decide that one of the best ways is to organize a social club. In the ideal classless society such as New Zealand this is a seemingly great idea, grab the BBQ, butter the bread, squeeze the sauce and by virtue of wrapping a sausage around a piece of bread we are great mates. How many times at the social club BBQ do people come, eat, say hi and vanish with the sausage in a napkin back to their desk? How many times to they sit down and chat long after the sausages have slowly brunt or gone cold, the flies have landed on the bread and the salad remains untouched?

To want to socialise together you first need to work together. You come to work (noun) to work (verb). Simple. You need to complete tasks that are assigned to you. So far so good. Nobody said you needed to like your colleagues, this is assumed that it will happen. So your neighbour three desks down the row and on the same project team. What do you know about them?

Daily standups are an effective communications mechanism for projects. The team get to know what’s going on every 24 hrs. But there are also a great social mechanism. Inevitably small and occasionally candid pieces of personal information slip into conversations. Suddenly the annoying tester three desks down isn’t the jerk who seems to enjoy failing your code, but a guy with a pregnant wife who spent the weekend shopping for baby clothes. He seems more interested in his wife’s blood pressure than yours.  But that’s understandable, after all you have two small children. You were once that naive person that though antenatal classes taught you everything you needed to know about childbirth. He also seems like an okay kind of guy, so why not go and have a chat to him – offline – about his testing approach, expectations, ask for his opinion and feedback before submitting the code.

I am not suggest daily standups become a substitute social club, but they are a good start to social interaction. Communication is why humans evolve to where we are on the food chain, we can co-ordinate, retain and spread oral knowledge, entertain, empathize and so on with these skills. Otherwise we would be another struggling homo- species and cat food on the plains of Africa.

And antenatal classes, you forget everything at the first contraction.