When governments and related agencies implement this it is called no wrong door.
I like it. It doesn't have to take any effort. When you hit reply on an email sent to the wrong person, add the correct email to the field with recipients. That's it!
In something like Slack, you write the answer in the correct location for the question. That's it.
These are tiny changes that don't cost anything but can decrease friction a lot, because the nobody has to repeat themselves any time someone has gone through the wrong door.
I often try to practice something like this, but context affects how actively helpful/meta I am.
Someone who's new, or seems overwhelmed, or has shown some effort... might get more hand-holding help... than someone who seems to be, say, ignoring the single-source-of-truth-for-most-all-things wiki that was impressed upon them, and just trying to knock off a task as easily as possible, with no consideration for others' time.
A suspected former is more likely to get my best customer service, team player help. "Have you met Jane? I think she's started a new product feature for that, but there's also a related tailoring that Sales has been doing. Let me introduce you to Jane, and we can see which thing you should be you should be working with today. I'm curious myself." (Goals are to unblock this person, have everyone on the right tracks, and set the culture for team-orientedness.)
A suspected latter, I'll play it by ear, for exactly how to see whether they checked the wiki (or did whatever is the thing everyone should know from onboarding they're supposed to do first), and try to nudge them into the right meta thinking if they need it, while also not sending the cultural message to not be very helpful.
For the latter, I try to be helpful as if they were the first type. Everyone sometimes forgets shit (myself included). Basically, if I can search the docs and find the answer immediately, I will just share that with them. If they keep being "forgetful" or time-wasting I will have a 1:1 with them to discuss the behavior ("don't take my kindness for weakness" type of thing). I will also have a 1:1 with their manager who's job is to deal with that sort of thing. This usually has the intended effect -- eventually removing them from the organization, or teaching them how to use search functions to solve problems themselves.
There’s also a 3rd option. When something is a critical priority leveraging other people’s time and expertise may be considered completely appropriate by the organization. As in not getting something fixed is costing 6+ figures per hour.
Obviously the frequency of such events should be watched closely, but sometimes it’s a good idea to drop what you’re doing and get more directly involved.
Yeah there are lots of reasons to go into the warm case: in addition to genuine effort on the asker, urgency, criticality, or relationship building can all tip the balance.
> “If someone asks you a question you can’t answer, take them to someone who can answer it. If you don’t know who that is, help find someone who can.”
Isn't this just ordinary politeness?
I can believe that it's not as common as it should be but it's what I usually try to do when asked a question I can't answer. Of course the amount of effort I put in depends on how important I think the question and answer might be.
What takes it beyond ordinary politeness is the “take them”.
Putting it into physical space, if someone walked into the wrong office and you told them what the right office was and how to get there that would generally be considered polite. Just telling them they’re in the wrong office is probably impolite. The warm handoff is the equivalent of walking them down the hall and telling the people in the other office why you brought them there.
Having worked at a high-end hotel and on software teams with high support standards, this is very natural to me. It isn’t for others.
If you haven't explicitly thought about the second-order consequences, something like "I'm almost certain Jane from accounting knows best how to handle that sort of thing, and if not then she definitely knows who to talk to" would seem plenty polite. It solves the asker's problem as best you're able, and it's proactive and friendly.
When I have this problem, it's usually via a private Slack message. I'm happy to direct people to the appropriate channel, but there's really no good way to link to the original question, even if I wanted to be "warmer". Asking someone to copy-and-paste into an appropriate channel has always worked for me, and I'm not so sure that that isn't the best approach in general.
This is the biggest issue I have with Slack. Often I'll have like 5 different conversations involving different people all around the same thing, and the only way to bring them all together is to start a channel which then either sits around forever or eventually gets archived and disappears. There's no way to move messages from one channel to the other to collect a history of comments, so it's not terribly useful for advancing a concern from one group to another as it collects receipts. Instead, the old thread with the old receipt dies completely and the context has to be rebuilt for every new group of people you are talking to.
I hate DMs in Slack for this and many reasons. One thing I do try is to ask people to move to a public channel unless it's a personal issue. Copy/paste their question and cc their handle.
Depending on whether it is a single message or not, Slack now allows you to embed messages from private channels or DMs and have them shown to people who don't have access to those areas.
Would other chat systems do it better somehow? Which ones?
I'd imagine that "system supports private messages; I cannot link to them in public channels, copy-paste is the only way to share" is pretty universal. Even IRC and ICQ operated this way.
I used Zulip at a previous job some years ago and was pretty happy with it. I honestly don't remember whether it had a better strategy for DMs in particular, but the general policy of "everything is a thread" seemed to solve a lot of problems.
Sometimes a cold handoff is appropriate. If the team initially asked has nothing relevant to offer besides a guess at who owns it, having the extra person around in the discussion is just wasted effort and attention. If it's a related team, then sure do the warm handoff to get to a solution more effectively.
The responses here are definitely indicative of who has good relationships with their coworkers and who doesn't. I feel like the point of this exercise is to foster better relationships overall.
i think that's a pretty good indicator of how useful this is though - we don't need communication strategies for dealing with our helpful co-workers who are good communicators.
if you've got an office full of people who have good relationships with their co-workers, don't start adding new policies to your slack. just keep doing whatever is already working.
things like these may individually be Very Good Ideas. That said, no organization goes through all of these little practices for onboarding every single new person. And when a firm has a Policy it just sits somewhere and people don't read it.
Oral tradition would work for these things, but even then it is fragile to team turnover.
Part of the appeal of hiring people with work experience at similar companies the expectation that they have all these bits of culture. That's a real value.
I think they're more democracies since usually more than one people own all of the stock. Workplaces can't also arbitrarily do anything they want, it must be within the the agreement made previously with the employee. And that doesen't come even close to intangible asset management like perception. Bad optics can destroy a company from within even when everything should be okay on paper.
Yes, so is a family if you are a parent. But IF you are a parent, you know that ACTING like a dictator backfires on you pretty hard.
You think this policy is worth alienating your tech workers for? No. No, I don't believe you do. Certain other policies might. This is unenforceable and a bit insulting.
> You think this policy is worth alienating your tech workers for?
Why do you think this policy would be alienating your tech workers? Or rather what do you think the "policy" is which would be causing this alienation in your opinion?
As far as I see they recommend that if you see someone struggling and "knocking on the wrong door" help them reach the right door and add what context you can add to their situation. That just feels common sense to me. What do you find "insulting" about it?
> If your social policy needs to be enforced, then it didn’t succeed in the marketplace of ideas.
> If you like this, then do it. It will catch on if it catches on.
I have often met the kind of entrepreneur who thinks that just building a better product is enough and that no effort should be spent on marketing.
They are wrong. Practices often will be taken up by users at a higher rate if the policies are made "official" and at a vastly higher rate if they are "marketed" via a reminder.
Constantly reminding someone of something they wouldn't do by themselves is perceived as nagging. It gets people to do stuff at the cost of growing resentment, it's not free
I do this when it's appropriate. Where I'm not sure it applies is in the very common scenario of someone asking a question that doesn't really make a ton of sense. If I do a warm handoff, I'm implicitly endorsing their question, even if it's needlessly hostile or poorly formed or based on a misunderstanding. (I could take on the responsibility of fixing every bad question that comes to me, whether or not I'm the right person to ultimately answer it, but then I wouldn't have time to do my job.)
Hand-holding colleagues needing help is a nice sentiment. Even better: when leadership rewards that support and when coworkers quietly pay-it-forward. It's heartwarming to see it in action.
That said, I don't think the author's main rule scales:
> “If someone asks you a question you can’t answer, take them to someone who can answer it. If you don’t know who that is, help find someone who can.”
Setting an expectation of hand-holding a request across channels would be quite unpopular with most if not all, the technical support teams I've worked with. It can be quite a bit of effort when you're getting 10+ redirects a week, especially when the requestor hasn't done their due diligence. If my own team tried this, we would quickly become the "goto" for any domain adjacent problem. A real recipe for burn-out.
A lot depends not on the process he's advocating for but on the environment which he doesn't seem to analyze. IMO, there's no results, costs, mistakes, or trade-offs shared, so I'd be inclined to chalk this up as marketing.
Honestly I am not convinced. If someone comes to sysadmins channel to ask "hey I randomly get a bluescreen, what should I do?" the solution is to answer "well you can ask #officeit channel". Holding their hand and asking to office IT myself + explaining this to the person who asked the question does not add any extra value, not to mention the extra time it needs.
You’re right that there’s regularly cases where the problem really objectively is “not my job” and a cold redirect is more efficient.
However, personally I found that it is incredibly useful to use these sort of things as opportunities. The main opportunity is learning: I’ll learn something about BSOD, and about our specific IT setup, maybe some troubleshooting or windows stuff, and all this knowledge builds into strong mental models and often comes in useful even if it’s years from now.
It’s also an opportunity to build relationship (with the asker, with the IT person). It’s a tiny interaction but it makes a difference, you are now seen as “helpful” (and if you didn’t know the person at all, you got from 0 to 1 which is huge).
It’s also an opportunity to help (sometimes): as a SWE I have a breadth of knowledge, maybe I can help the IT person to have a better config to avoid BSODs, maybe I can help the asker with their specific setup that the IT person is confused about…
There’s no question that a warm handoff can be a waste, absolutely. But do it a hundred times and you get so much back
For me its a numbers problem. You help one person and they will tell everyone that you are 'the guy who does stuff'. 2 weeks later people are showing up at my desk acting offended that I did not answer the phone (i was already on the phone with a different process dodger and my line is not integrated with any queue system because I am not a CSR) demanding to talk to my supervisor about how terrible I am.
That company had a really strict 'just help anyone' policy and I'm really glad I do not work there anymore.
This is quite key. Performing a service more than once, creates a new role, and with it a new responsibility.
Doesn't matter if my intention was just "I'm just being helpful" gesture. Doing it repeatedly becomes an expectation from others that people rely on. It will be assessed in your performance, and in the bad case, it will become a standard that your team (but not others) are held to.
Nah, sorry but it's literally not my job to redirect someone's question that went to the wrong spot. "Hey, not familiar with that, I'd ask X" is fine. This sounds like extra messaging on my part that the person with the question or request is perfectly capable of handling themselves. It's unneeded chatter or noise.
However, if I do think it falls under my responsibilities but then I find out for some reason it's not after learning new information or hitting a wall, then yes, I'll absolutely fill in whomever it's supposed to go to.
Concur. Leaning into learned helplessness is not the solution to these problems. At some point, we need people to take accountability and responsibility for themselves. I'm done being developer IT.
And then on the other end of the spectrum you have Ice-cold Handoffs as practiced by Microsoft.
Good luck to any poor soul caught in the spider-web of microsofts online support as they play hot-potato with you while denying culpability, and forcing you to do all the legwork. Sending you through multiple github repos / discord / support forums where it becomes increasingly obvious these teams do not get along and want little to do with each other, let alone you.
I like it. It doesn't have to take any effort. When you hit reply on an email sent to the wrong person, add the correct email to the field with recipients. That's it!
In something like Slack, you write the answer in the correct location for the question. That's it.
These are tiny changes that don't cost anything but can decrease friction a lot, because the nobody has to repeat themselves any time someone has gone through the wrong door.