Do bribes or fines work in your work culture? When your culture changes, some of it will feel like bribes and some of it will feel like fines. It all depends on your cultural background.
I was recently in a small town in Mexico and the (new) city government was explaining to us the changes they were trying to make. At first, I was a bit baffled about why they were spending so much time explaining how things worked. They were explaining how if you damaged someone’s property, it wasn’t that you shouldn’t compensate them. It was just that you should compensate them through a fine and a process, instead of a payoff. That it should be done through the system.
And then it clicked for me. They were trying to change their town’s culture.
The town had a culture of just settling it between the two parties. And they wanted people to obey the laws, the process and the judicial system. Where I live, it just taken for granted that if you get in a car accident, you call the police and the insurance company. Then you, the police and the insurance company work out who owes who what. In their culture, that wasn’t the way it had worked. And in order to change how it worked, they were having to explain the new system and how it worked.
And it occurred to me that the same thing is happening in my work place. Mozilla has grown from 250 people when I joined to around a 1,000 people now. And we’ve added a bunch of awesome people with varied skill sets and backgrounds in order to make us stronger. And all of us have different cultures when it comes to how things get done. Some of us file a bug for everything – even a new cable that you need or an idea for an AB test on a website. Some of us create a slideshow for new ideas. Some of us expect a discussion on an open mailing list. Some of us expect a smaller team to come to an agreement before we open the discussion wider.
Some of the ways we decide as a group to do things are going to feel very natural (why would you have to tell someone to call their insurance company after an accident?) and some are going to feel a bit more like bribes or unnecessary process. (What do you mean I have to open 3 bugs and cc 4 departments?) But together we all have to come up with our new culture.
So, back in this small town in Mexico, I ate my bean and cheese stuffed poblano pepper, covered in a sauce that made my eyes water, and nodded. What do I know about turning payoffs into fines?