It is really odd to me that so many grand statements about software teams and what matters for their productivity fail to recognize that there can be competing goals and competing trade-offs.
Burnout is a classic example. We want to reduce burnout for people, of course we do. But we also want to increase employee engagement, of course we do! But employee engagement can have both a positive AND a negative relationship with burnout. How is this possible?
@grimalkina Why would we want to increase employee engagement? I don't doubt that it's correlated with things we[1] actually want, but ISTM that it's a poor proxy for them.
[1] regardless of whether "we" is "the company owners", "employees as a group" or any similar entity
@robryk I often think about measures like this as an important signal to test OTHER things. Eg "did our experience of x process seem to have a big cost to employee engagement"? It is often an important signal even when imperfectly measured
Ah, so you're thinking of it as a warning sign, in that unexplained drops (or maybe unexpected changes) suggest an undiscovered side effect of an intervention?
@robryk but these pragmatic aims are also different from the research aim I'm talking about which is to propose a general model for what drives what and why. Aka a causal model (whether or not we decide we want to "drive up" or intervene on engagement we might want to make a statement about how it relates to good outcomes). So what I'm noting is the oversimplification of some of these causal models
@robryk well, this requires a long answer but in general many people do want to feel engaged in work. Engagement in a psychological sense means many positive things, like you have interest and attention in what you're doing, it's not tedious and you don't perceive it as useless, so there are a lot of reasons that "engagement" can be a good thing to seek to understand plus an important warning sign of problems. Yet obviously understanding it is not simple