Change Where You Sit: It Can Change Your Work for the Better
In most organizations, IT personnel lack an in-depth understanding of their customers’ priorities, pressures, and challenges. It’s not that these IT personnel don’t care about their customers—they do—but rather that no one can fully appreciate other people’s realities without walking that proverbial mile in their shoes. Still, IT personnel who have shadowed customers or worked side by side with them have gained valuable insights that made them better able to serve those customers.
The value of working in close proximity with customers was something I learned back when I was an IT manager. We arranged for a group of customers to reside in my department to do their acceptance testing of our systems and system changes. Working side by side, we gained immense appreciation for each other. They stopped complaining that we didn’t take bugs seriously. We stopped venting that they were lackadaisical in their testing. We had initially planned this live-with-us strategy as a short-term program, but it proved so successful that the customer unit became a permanent part of the department.
Still, we never would have considered swapping jobs. Although two actresses may be able to swap roles with benefits to both and repercussions to neither, it’s hard to imagine how this would work in IT. When two actresses swap roles, each is intimately knowledgeable about both roles. But two CEOs who decided to swap roles based on rules they themselves established are unlikely to start a groundswell of CEOs changing places. And two IT staffers who already know each other’s roles might be able to swap with each other, but neither could readily swap places with their customers.
Of course, there may be simpler ways to gain insight that might elude you otherwise, such as swapping desks, as two company heads did. The idea was to continue to do their own work, but from a different and unfamiliar location. Seeing up close how others do their work generates ideas you might never get otherwise.
In another desk swap, eleven executives—i.e., people who had offices—swapped desks for two weeks with eleven employees who didn’t have offices. Doing this was a brainstorm by the CEO when the company was planning some workplace changes and realized (to their credit!) that they didn’t know how the changes would affect the people working for them. The executives not only learned a lot about challenges the non-office employees faced, but they also realized the importance of spending more time out of their offices and interacting with their employees.
Like visiting a foreign country, when you spend time in someone else’s role or at someone else’s desk, you can’t help but notice all the things that are different from—and sometimes better than—what you’re accustomed to.
