Unlocking Employee Engagement and Innovation | ADP’s Chuck Lafferty
Plus, reframing technical debt, an opinionated guide to today's technology landscape, and how do we know if AI is smoke and mirrors.
In the last few years, disengagement at work has become a massive issue. We learned from Dr. Andre Martin’s episode that 53% of managers are burnt out and 1 in 3 employees leave their jobs in the first 90 days.
This week, I sat down with Chuck Lafferty, VP of CRM at ADP, to discuss ADP’s approach to employee engagement and innovation. Chuck dives into building trust within teams, techniques like ‘Survey Roulette’ to incorporate user feedback into development, and the critical role of understanding and caring for individuals.
When employees feel valued, heard, and engaged in meaningful work, you see improved productivity and increased job satisfaction. The episode concludes with actionable steps to improve employee engagement through personalized interactions and empathetic leadership.
“Every day, you come to work excited to want to be there. You are doing your best work. When you're doing something you love, and you're good at it, that's called a strength.
When you're doing something that you don't like doing, but you're good at it, that's called a task. That's gonna burn you out. Think about something that you love doing, but you're not very good at. That's called a hobby.”
Episode Highlights:
01:51 How does Chuck define employee engagement?
04:06 Can you measure employee engagement?
12:05 How can managers engage individual developers?
17:16 Survey Roulette and how it helps engage engineering teams
22:31 Winning in the workplace
23:45 The importance of separating the problem from the person
25:30 How can you improve employee engagement?
The Download
The Download is engineering leadership content we’re reading, watching, and attending that we think you might find valuable.
1. How Do We Know if AI Is Smoke and Mirrors?
At this point, many of us are burnt out on the discourse around this AI hype cycle. There are only so many times you can hear someone talk about “completely revolutionizing the industry,” overnight.
Stephanie Kirmer is a machine learning engineer, and she offered her take on the current state of AI, people’s misconceptions, and why AI won’t completely change our society in the immediate future.
Read: How Do We Know if AI Is Smoke and Mirrors?
2. Reframing Technical Debt
In this week’s episode, Chuck talks about changing technical debt to “innovation ideas” to help eliminate the negative connotation that comes with the term debt.
Friend of the show
similarly wrote about this topic, and demonstrates how she communicates the benefits of projects instead of blanketing tasks as technical debt.
Starting Your Engineering Metrics Program (Sponsor)
A robust metrics program provides holistic visibility into engineering health, predictable project delivery, and a great dev experience. But it’s not always obvious how to build the right software metrics program for your business.
On May 2nd and May 7th, LinearB will be hosting a workshop where you’ll learn how to:
Decide the right engineering KPIs for your organization
Benchmark against industry standards
Gather actionable insights to identify improvement opportunities
Leverage goals to alleviate bottlenecks
Enable your team with workflow automation
3. An Opinionated Guide to Today's Technology Landscape
With 30+ years of consulting experience in tech, we’re always interested to see what Thoughtworks puts in their Technology Radar so we can get a pulse on new techniques, tools, and ideas within the industry.
One of the key themes for Vol. 30 is dragging PRs closer to proper CI. We’ve covered this topic in our episode about programmable workflows and it has been a focus for LinearB’s automation tool gitStream. Read: ThoughtWorks Radar
4. Wrong Fit, Right Fit with Andre Martin
Chuck isn’t one of the only recent episodes that deals with the topic of employee engagement. When we sat down Dr. Andre Martin last year, he brought up the current crisis of commitment in the workplace leading to increased burnout, lack of retention, and $7.8 trillion in lost productivity.
This episode is great if you need some guidance evaluating your current or next role.
Upcoming Events
Starting Your Engineering Metrics Program
May 2nd or May 7th | Online
Highlights: In this workshop, LinearB will walk you through how to drive an average 47% reduction in cycle time via your engineering metrics program and provide you with free resources and tools to get started.