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by koliber 349 days ago
All three are company and team culture issues. If you delegate all culture responsibility to HR you'll end up with a hot mess. Culture needs to be fostered on every level.
1 comments

If you do not have backing from HR and senior management the issue will not change even if you tried.

Action without consequence causes these problems. If an employee is allowed to continually be late and rude it really does not matter in any way whatsoever if everyone shuns that employee culturally because the implicit statement is that that behaviour is acceptable but unwanted.

That is the exact situation you get into with lack of documentation, if a single employee never does correct documentation but there is no real repercussions it does not matter whether the “culture” is documentation, you have agreed by contract at that point documentation is not a requirement.

If you make it a matter of “Do the documentation correctly or we will be having talks to remove you” that clearly indicates it is not just lip service but is actually enforced culture.

Thinking the carrot will always work is part of the “documentation culture”. Make it a hard requirement or don’t do it at all.

Motivation, education, and enforcements are key.

While support from HR and senior management is helpful, I've found that most of the work happens at lower levels. In the end, it comes down to working directly with people to help them do documentation well. In engineering departments I've led, I did not need permission or enforcement to do good documentation from company execs or HR.

The "stick" that HR provides is a tool of last resort. At the same time, companies are different and what works in one might not work in another.

You don’t need permission but you need authority. Maybe you are US centric in a US state with weak employee protections so you can make those calls. In other jurisdictions it is a significant amount of paperwork and procedure to get rid of even an underperforming employee.