Some governmental agencies have started to adopt No Wrong Door policies, which aim to provide help–often health or mental health services–to individuals even if they show up to the wrong agency to request help. The core insight is that the employees at those agencies are far better equipped to navigate their own bureaucracies than an individual who knows nothing about the bureaucracy’s internal function.
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Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how engineering organizations can adopt a variant of the No Wrong Doors policy to directly connect folks with problems with the right team and information. Then the first contact point becomes a support system for navigating the bureaucracy successfully.
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The most effective mechanism I’ve found for rolling out No Wrong Door is initiating three-way conversations when asked questions. If someone direct messages me a question, then I will start a thread with the question asker, myself, and the person I believe is the correct recipient for the question. This is particularly effective because it’s a viral approach: rolling out No Wrong Door just requires any one of the three participants to adopt the approach. Even the question asker can do it, although the power dynamics of the interaction do make it a bit harder for them.
I like this approach and have found myself in some jobs doing something like the last paragraph, where I include myself, the asker, and the person that I believe responsible in an...
I like this approach and have found myself in some jobs doing something like the last paragraph, where I include myself, the asker, and the person that I believe responsible in an Email/Slack/Teams/whatever chain so that we can get something resolved quickly.
This methodology requires the business (read: management) to trust that their workers are trying to be generally good employees. In my experience, people tend to not suck about this and are happy to help as long as they are not disincentivized to do so, even if there is no direct incentive. Unfortunately, helping out a different team on some random issue that doesn't affect your deliverables is often penalized.
As with almost all problems regarding employee behavior, there is a severe mismatch between the reality of running a business and the things that are able to be easily monitored, tracked, and put on dashboards for the people two levels above you. Any time working on something that doesn't have a dashboard query attached to it is considered a waste of time. The technical sector is turning into just another production center. You can't pull someone off the factory floor at random because their job is monitored by a hundred different systems making sure that throughput stays at appropriate levels, and technical work is slowly moving that direction.
From the blog post:
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I like this approach and have found myself in some jobs doing something like the last paragraph, where I include myself, the asker, and the person that I believe responsible in an Email/Slack/Teams/whatever chain so that we can get something resolved quickly.
This methodology requires the business (read: management) to trust that their workers are trying to be generally good employees. In my experience, people tend to not suck about this and are happy to help as long as they are not disincentivized to do so, even if there is no direct incentive. Unfortunately, helping out a different team on some random issue that doesn't affect your deliverables is often penalized.
As with almost all problems regarding employee behavior, there is a severe mismatch between the reality of running a business and the things that are able to be easily monitored, tracked, and put on dashboards for the people two levels above you. Any time working on something that doesn't have a dashboard query attached to it is considered a waste of time. The technical sector is turning into just another production center. You can't pull someone off the factory floor at random because their job is monitored by a hundred different systems making sure that throughput stays at appropriate levels, and technical work is slowly moving that direction.