Balancing between Employee and Employer Needs

As an engineering manager, I often find myself between the conflicting interests of my employees and the company. It can be related to project assignment, compensation, dismissal, and processes, to name a few. Who should I represent? The employee? Or the employer? That’s rarely an easy question.

Sometimes, in simple situations, we don’t need to overthink things. Our intuition, common sense, or pure logic can guide us. However, as the well-known saying goes, things are not always black and white. In most cases, we operate in the grey area where case-by-case guidance cannot work because of the infinite number of combinations life orchestrates. I have never seen the same situation twice simply because of the differences related to professional experience, personal interest, family situation, project assignment, deadlines, technology stack, etc. To tackle this problem, we must take a step back and examine the holistic mission of engineering managers. But before doing that, I must warn you that this article will give you a very unexpected viewpoint.

In my early days of team leadership, I considered my team a family. Like an elephant mom, I wanted to protect my children. I was so biased on this that when someone resigned from my “family”, I was stunned and wondered “why” and “how” it could have happened to me.

Of course, slowly, life taught me the lessons I needed. Sometimes, employees demanded irrational project assignments or compensation, at least from the company’s perspective, or their performance dropped permanently despite all the helping hands. In other cases, the skillset didn’t match the organisation’s demand. In the end, you don’t dismiss your family members, right?

So, if the family is not a good analogy, what could it be? The professional football team is much better where I’m the coach, my team members are the football players, and my upper management are the club owners. This analogy perfectly matches what an engineering manager should aim for. I need to build and manage a championship-winning team. Sometimes, I hire new players and dismiss others, but I continuously manage, grow, coach and support my existing players to win the current and all future championships.

But this approach raises a new challenge. I must have a strategic vision and plan since most of my activities are long-term related. Employees are hired for years, ideally. Growing talents also requires years. It’s like an oil tanker. Even slight turning adjustments take a significant time, while a complete reverse takes an eternity until it starts moving backwards.

For this reason, I must clearly understand the company’s strategic goals set by upper management. I need to know what they want to achieve in the current year, then next year, after that one, etc. Then, it’s up to me to figure out what to do and how to support those goals. What team do I need to build and maintain? What skills are required, and in what ratio they should exist in the organisation? How many stars do I need who are open to new challenges, and how many solid and experienced engineers to stabilise the ongoing projects? How clearly and transparently do I communicate the organisation’s goals? How much can I get my team to sign up for those goals?

How is this all related to the original question? How do you balance between employee and employer needs? The answer is quite simple. It massively prevents the need for balancing.

Balancing in the context of the question is bad since it leaves one or both parties unsatisfied. You must choose one side against the other because you have different interests, understandings, motivations, goals, or conditions. It is like when one of your football players wants to play basketball, to give a very edge case example. All the non-straightforward balancing situations are primarily rooted in this misalignment between employees and employers, so we should work hard to eliminate it.

In theory, this sounds nice. On the other hand, organisations make sudden turns occasionally due to changing market conditions, economic situations, business objectives, or other reasons. We may need time to adapt our organisation to the new circumstances, but the direction is still correct. We must only accept that we can never reach perfect harmony despite continuously working on it.

Finally, we must consider simple situations where the balancing question is unrelated to any misalignment between the employer and employee. It could be something personal, like taking care of a newborn, losing a close relative, or taking a sabbatical. It could also be work-related, like being a victim of corporate bureaucracy or being blamed for someone else’s failure. Being empathetic and understanding towards the affected employee is essential in such situations. It’s our responsibility and duty to represent our employees in such cases. We need to provide a guardian shield for them. Or, in short, it is the time for the coach to act as a caring elephant mom.