Developing the Right Context in Workspaces

Are you in healthy or unhealthy soil?

It is human nature to behave differently in different situations. Therefore, developing the right smell or context in the workspace is essential to improve individuals for the success of the business. However, it involves changing the attitude of the people.

Changing someone’s attitude is not an easy task. People do not change without any personal benefits or needs. It is the management who creates the context for their people.

Heavy traffic does not have “efficient flow with high throughput.” It is a cloggy, bad atmosphere having no flow. Therefore, it is considered energy draining and a non-effective environment. On the other hand, a forest provides a healthy atmosphere that is energy giving. It also provides room for exploration. It is an inspiring and effective environment.

How do you want to change the context to move to a healthy Environment?

Most companies lead to creating a bad context for their people due to the following traditional management practices:

• Strategy, organization, process: Lead to a number of constraints for the people that stop them from improving further.
• Planning, budgeting, and financial systems: Force people to meet the compliance and limit them to become creative and innovative.
• Management: Try to control people by imposing their way of working and slows down the production rate.
• Job, relationship, budget, transfer price: Push people to think that their job is just a contract and lower down their morale. The preceding management practices result in creating an unhealthy environment for their people and lead to the failure of the business. Therefore, a healthy environment is essential for the success of the business.

Developing a healthy environment is not about changing people. It is more about revitalizing people and enable them to feel free and safe to discover new ways and improve. Management can revitalize people by concentrating on the following aspects as opposed to traditional management practices:

• Stretch (as opposed to constraints): Allow people to do more by setting strong values, aggressive ambition, and greater purpose for them.
• Self-disciplined (as opposed to compliance): Enable people to commit whether they agree or disagree on any point.
• Support (as opposed to control): Provide the required support to the people to help them win or accomplish their tasks.
• Trust (as opposed to contract): Generate trust to make people feel that they are in safe hands.

Source: DASA DevOps Professional – Enable and Scale coursebook.