Shouting at your feet, won't make you run faster
The same goes for designers/developers.
At Fudge, we trust everyone to do the best they can. We also trust them to tell us how long they think something will take, and how difficult it’s going to be.
Something that we try to avoid, is putting pressure on our teams to deliver more than they think is possible. It doesn’t matter how loud you shout, if something’s going to take a long time, apart from assigning more resource to the task, there isn't much you can do about it.
We also try (unless it’s life of death), to keep our working days at a reasonable length. Forcing people to work an extra three hours a day, isn’t going to result in an extra three hours of quality work.
At Fudge, the days of the “hero programmer” ended as soon as we implemented Scrum (Google it). We don’t want people to grudge coming to work because they had stay late the night before. They won’t be motivated and they won’t be productive.
Here's a description of the type of situation we used to end up in: Hero Culture.
Instead of this, we help our teams to deliver as much as possible while keeping standards high. We do this by investing in time-saving techniques, tools and technologies. We try out methods of working to see their effect. If it works, it stays, if it doesn’t we adapt and try something new.
If you want to get more out of your team, help them to work smarter, not longer.
If you trust your team to tell you the truth and deliver to the standards you require, you’ll have a happy, productive bunch of people.
