Scrum and Job Satisfaction

At the end of Stuart’s talk on Guidewire, he noted that employee turnover is quite low at Guidewire. People who come just don’t want to leave. And so he posed us one last tantalizing question: How much are the following workplace characteristics worth to an employee?

• Enough time to finish
• Using high skills
• Variety in your job
• Trust in management

My first reaction: That sounds like an Open Source project. There people work for free. So I don’t know what the individual results are, but I’ll bet the total is 100%!

And so the last slide, which gives IMD customers as well as anybody else managing software teams serious food for thought. Well-Being and Trust in the Workplace [pdf, 152KB] by John F. Helliwell and Haifang Huang, answers the question:

• Enough time to finish: 11%
• Using high skills: 19%
• Variety in your job: 21%
• Trust in management: 36%

Doing the math, we find the total is 87%. A Scrum culture has the same value as an 87% salary increase.