How we treat people

This post (Rage Against The Assembly Line) by Chris Brogan caught my eye. His basic argument is that no matter what we do, and how poorly we may be paid, we need to treat the people we interact with as people not automatons. This is true whether we are the customer or provider. Most of the comments agreed with this general idea.

This issue relates to my last few posts on paying IT people well, how to deal with the realities of poor pay scales, and the repercussions of not getting scales in line with reality.

Whether we realize it or not, our organizational missions dictate that we treat the people we are supposed to help, properly. It's a huge mistake to think that if we are offering an important service people will flock to us, even if we treat them like so many numbers or data items in a report. How do you get your staff to treat your clients the right way? Changing the words you use to refer to them is not going to make much of a difference, in my experience.

What does work, in my experience is a mix of things. How top management treats clients is one issue. How staff are treated is at least as important. Giving people the tools they need is another thing that makes a huge difference, too. (Try to work up enthusiasm for, for instance, making half a dozen phone calls when you don't have a good phone, or making copies of 4 documents per customer when each document means a 5 minute interruption and trip to the copier, or filling out an application when each application takes 2-3 times as long as it should because your internet connection is so slow.)

So what does this have to do with IT? Well, if unreasonable pay scales are perceived as a lack of respect for the contribution or value of the staff person, you can be sure it's going to have a negative impact. If that impression is not counteracted by other ways of making your IT staff feel good about what they are doing etc. or is even strengthened by lack of support, then even a really good IT staff person is going to be less engaged and responsive. And, that has a ripple effect, because it means that IT tools are going to be less responsive to the needs of line staff. That certainly is not going to do a whole lot for how your staff interacts with program participants.

It's worth noting that this issue is not unique to IT staff. IT staff are a bit unique, though, in that although they are "back office" staff, not dealing directly with clients, they do deal directly with, and affect line staff and their interaction with clients.