How to help if your developers are unhappy

This widespread discontent manifests as churn and dissatisfaction within teams, ultimately impacting productivity and your ability to execute quickly. For teams to survive and thrive on the critical path, leaders need to understand and help address the root causes of this pervasive unhappiness, while also creating an environment conducive to achieving flow.

It is important to approach the challenges development teams face with empathy and understanding. It’s also crucial to recognise that, while it can be frustrating when deadlines are missed or work is delayed, teams are often grappling with fundamental issues that deeply impact their work and wellbeing.

One of the primary disconnects that can be observed between organisational perceptions and developer realities is the burden of excessive technical debt. Accumulated technical debt acts like quicksand, hampering productivity and making even simple tasks feel Herculean. We can’t simply villainise technical debt; it should be treated like a bank loan in that it can be useful in pursuing organisational goals but must also be managed and paid off over time.

From ‘The 2023 Project to Product State of the Industry Report’

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A product-oriented approach reflects a healthy mix of feature, defect, risk and debt work. Yet data from over 3,600 product value streams demonstrates under-investment in the foundational and often invisible work that sustains products for the long term.

Organisations need to shift their perspective on technical debt and prioritise a balanced approach to addressing it, even if it means temporarily slowing down new feature development. By making a strategic investment in technical debt reduction, leaders can improve team long-term productivity and happiness.

Ideally, technical debt is owned and managed by a team as part of the team’s daily job. This requires teams to pay down technical debt and avoid the path of least resistance. Teams must help leaders understand the impact of technical debt and make good trade-off decisions. It also requires leaders to support teams in long-term decision making and to understand the impact of high levels of debt on developer happiness, as supported by Google’s longitudinal Engineering Satisfaction Survey.

Another common issue that plagues development teams is the mismatch between an organisational desire for speed-to-market and the often-unrealistic expectations placed on developers. In the rush to meet business demands without acknowledging organisational constraints, leaders may inadvertently create an environment of constant pressure and unsustainable pace. Leaders are too often deaf to the plights of the team by not collecting metrics/feedback and taking it seriously.

From ‘The 2023 Project to Product State of the Industry Report’

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From ‘The 2023 Project to Product State of the Industry Report’

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To counter this, leaders must foster an environment where teams feel comfortable and empowered to communicate about potential obstacles, including timelines and work-in-process concerns. Open dialogue helps set more realistic expectations, reduces stress on teams and ultimately leads to more accurate delivery timelines.

To create a happier, more productive environment for development teams, leaders need to implement a multifaceted approach that not only addresses concerns, but also creates the conditions for achieving flow at the team and individual levels. Overloaded teams lead to individual team members’ context-switching between work, preventing them from staying in flow and ‘in the zone’.

Flow, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is a state where our consciousness of time disappears and we become remarkably productive. Every successful professional has experienced moments of being ‘in the zone’. The productivity impact of this state is phenomenal.

As leaders, it’s important to create the space for individuals and teams to achieve flow. Csikszentmihalyi identified nine dimensions that characterise people in a flow state and several of these are particularly important for leaders to focus on. Clear goals provide unambiguous feedback about the effectiveness of work. Maintaining the right challenge-skills balance ensures individuals don’t get stuck. Giving teams a sense of control over their work helps individuals to remain motivated and not feel overwhelmed or powerless. These elements are tightly connected to how work must be designed, decomposed and distributed across and within teams. Poor flow of work can eliminate any potential for being in the zone, while effective leadership invites it.

Inviting a flow state for individuals means protecting people from unnecessary interruptions and creating uninterrupted space and time for individuals to enter and remain in a state of flow. When people complain about being micromanaged, they're often referring to the self-consciousness that comes from being constantly inspected and interrupted.

To foster flow, leaders must take a balanced approach to technical debt reduction. Regularly allocating time and resources to addressing existing issues and preventing new ones from accumulating. Consider empowering developers to refactor or improve systems as they work, within agreed limits. This not only improves the codebase, but also gives developers a sense of progress and accomplishment.

Flow Distribution looks at the balance between feature, defect, risk and debt work. Organisations can use data to guide sustainable debt reduction investments and ensure that the investments provide benefits, such as improved quality and accelerated feature work. Taking a team and value stream approach to debt reduction also improves team happiness.

Maintaining the right challenge-skills balance can be achieved with activities like pair programming, an excellent approach for knowledge sharing when implemented thoughtfully. Pair programming is not just a training activity for junior team members, it benefits all team members, regardless of seniority by creating a more collaborative and supportive team environment.

Team flow is just as important as individuals being in a flow state. When a team is in flow, they appear almost magically in sync, working seamlessly together, anticipating and complementing each other’s actions. Their entire focus is centred on their shared goal and they can rapidly adapt to changes or challenges without losing momentum. To achieve this, leaders need to ensure the right amount of interdependence and shared ability to contribute. The problems teams tackle should be neither too easy (which leads to splintering and communication overhead), nor too big (which leads to multitasking and waiting times).

It is also important to reconsider our definition of work hours. Problem-solving doesn’t always happen between nine and five and some team members might find their productivity peaks at unconventional times. Give your developers the flexibility to work when they’re most productive, while still maintaining healthy work-life boundaries. This flexibility can lead to higher quality work and happier developers, and it can also facilitate achieving flow states. You’ll probably need consider guardrails if you introduce this type of approach. For example, earning flexibility around work hours based on maturity milestones that build sufficient trust.

Aligning team goals with organisational objectives is crucial for developer satisfaction and flow. Help teams understand how their work contributes to broader organisational goals. This alignment can provide a sense of purpose and relevance, making work feel more meaningful and impactful. It also contributes to the final element of flow – the ability for the activity to become its own reward, interesting and rewarding for its own sake, independent of any larger goal.

Addressing organisational culture is a critical step in improving developer happiness and facilitating flow. As a leader, your behaviours need to support open communication, value team input and provide opportunities for growth and autonomy. This might involve reassessing feedback mechanisms, decision-making processes and career development pathways.

Managing stakeholder expectations is another key aspect of creating a better environment for teams. Work on bridging the gap between various stakeholders (like architects and practice leads) and your development teams. Ensure that standardisation efforts don’t stifle team creativity and problem-solving approaches. This might involve facilitating more direct communication between stakeholders and development teams or implementing a system where team members can provide input on high-level decisions that affect their work.

Don’t underestimate the power of celebration. Make it a point to recognise and celebrate both big wins and small victories. This acknowledgement can significantly boost morale and motivation. It shows teams that their hard work is noticed and appreciated and it can contribute to the intrinsic reward of flow.

Offering clear paths for career progression and skill development is important for reducing churn and increasing job satisfaction. This could include training programmes, conference attendance or opportunities to work on challenging products that stretch an individual’s abilities. These opportunities can help maintain the right challenge-skills balance.

Regular team retrospectives help identify improvement opportunities early and provide a way for developers to voice their concerns, share their ideas and feel heard by leadership.

The role of technology leaders extends beyond just value delivery. Leaders are responsible for creating an environment where teams can thrive and achieve flow at the team and individual levels. Teams must be supported to own their craft. When teams own their craft, they are not overwhelmed or over capacity. Leadership doesn’t say “you'll deliver this much”, instead leaders ask, “how much can you deliver?”. The responsibility of leaders shifts from directing teams to providing the right ecosystem for high-performance to emerge.

When leaders prioritise wellbeing, job satisfaction and ability to achieve flow, it doesn’t just create a better work environment – it sets the stage for better delivery outcomes, increased innovation and, ultimately, greater organisational success. This approach not only helps teams survive on the critical path but enables individuals to thrive, delivering high-quality products while nurturing satisfaction, engagement and flow.

If you’d like some help to identify or address these challenges, then HYPR’s Floodlight and Spotlight can provide a comprehensive assessment of your delivery challenges and offer actionable recommendations for improvement. These services offer an objective view of your processes and culture, helping you identify blind spots and areas for improvement that lead to happier individuals and teams.