Stripe had a few “official” principles that I really liked along these lines: “We haven’t won yet”, “macro-optimism but micro-pessimism”.
They’re no longer official principles though, and I’m not 100% sure how much they were actually acted upon while they were (at least during my tenure).
I like the book Crucial Conversations, which tells us to avoid the "fool's choice" and be 100% honest and 100% respectful at the same time. The fool's choice is when a fool thinks something like "I can either tell the truth and be fired, or keep my mouth shut". The book teaches that with some thought you can find a way to tell the truth without being fired, etc. This is advice for an individual, but not an entire organization.
For organizations, they could at least hire a consultant / speaker to do a presentation every year on how people can effectively give negative feedback. The speaker could say "you all see bad things happening at the company, things you aren't happy about but don't want to risk speaking about, here's how you can speak about those issues without any risk". Teach people things like, studies have shown that proposing a solution along with your complaint makes it more likely to be accepted, etc. For the price of a speaker or two, you could train your company to effectively deliver and act on negative feedback. Too many people don't know how to effectively express their problems.
If someone wants to start a consultants / speaking tour you can have this idea.
Part of me is imagining ‘tell the truth and not be fired’ to involve some kind of Yes Minister strategy like the Rhodesia solution.
But more realistically, most modern tech companies are going to want to not fire people for telling the truth or more generally speaking their minds, and individuals can often have a bigger impact than they would imagine. It doesn’t really make sense for a reasonably well run company to ignore such things from employees they clearly think are valuable.
That said, there are still exceptions, e.g. labour activism in the US is probably a good way to get fired (with a nice big severance), and if you work at Boeing and write some email like ‘this plane is designed by clowns and I won’t let my family fly in it’ (or perhaps even just reasonable concerns) that is also bad (because that email will show up in court if there’s an accident and you can’t say ‘we want to have a workplace where all engineers can raise concerns about the safety of our planes’ – better to just not do it over email, which is a bit of a silly incentive)
> most modern tech companies are going to want to not fire people for telling the truth
I agree. I gave that as an extreme example of "the fool's choice". More realistic examples include "I can tell the scrum master he talks to much in retrospectives and he will dislike me, or I can be quiet about it". Truth is you can probably find a good time and way to tell him that will not hurt his opinion of you.
As for raising safety concerns at Boeing (for example), maybe that's not a "fool's choice", but simply a choice. Are you going to do the right thing or not? Sometimes the "if I speak up, bad things will happen" mindset is the unfortunate truth, but not as often as many think.
Still make the complaint, I never said it was required. In fact, I heard of a company where management said not to complain unless you had a solution and it really bothered me; sometimes you don't know the solution, but the complaint still needs to be made.
You can still do something like offer to help or proposing a meeting as the "solution", or at least the start of a solution.
also, the complaint can be perfectly valid and important without having any solutions for it. many times employees don't have the knowledge needed to know what are the possible solutions.
but individually their solution is to go where their needs are met (as much as possible of course)
This is an interesting idea, I have I feeling I know the what they’re getting at, but if you have any examples of how they put that into practice I’d love to hear it.
Adding on to the other reply, the first place I heard of this general idea was from a survivor of a POW camp in Vietnam, who said that the people who thought they’d never get out didn’t fare well, but that the people that fared the worst were the ones who thought they’d be out by Christmas. Christmas came and went and they still were in the camp, and that really demoralized them. The move was to know that you’d eventually make it out, but be very pessimistic about when that would be.
They’re no longer official principles though, and I’m not 100% sure how much they were actually acted upon while they were (at least during my tenure).