This is one of the main problems a company can be out of touch with the main interest it was driven before. All companies did not started their motivation out of money. Instead, they did not know if they would be successful in the first place. At that point, main interest of the company was to create a product they liked and hopefully a customer to reach and like it too (when you start, most likely you have no connection to any client at all). However, if the company becomes stable, this motivation can be drifted off and be replaced with how to generate more money.
It has been referenced in many books, although I do not have the sources to provide here now, that if an employee main interest is money and not the job he is doing, most likely his persistence on his work will not keep up (as money is not a strong motivational tool). That is the main reason a person will look for another job or change his own perception of the job. However, we can turn this theory around. What if the main interest of the job is not money for the employee, but management or the cultural norm of the organization is money in the end? If management and cultural norm has a strong influence under the organization where the employee gets distracted, out of focus, disoriented to the interest of the job out of his job and not for the money, then the effects will be the same.
In other words, blame should be set to the cultural norm and management. If the cultural norm and management cannot be changed, it should not bring a lot of influence on it. However, since management and cultural norms are where all decisions are done in the end, it is hard to see how it can stop its influence. So whose blame is it? The employee or the management/cultural environment? That can be determined in what scale the effect takes in size. If the scale is small, then it must have been only one employee or two was not interested on the job and left the company to a job he really liked. If the scale is large, then you will not only see many people who resign the job, but projects that are not to the best standard quality due to the loss of motivation of doing the best project. In addition, many people who would resign the job will not and remain to the company loyal, either because they have hopes the cultural organization or management will give up space/privileges/incentives/compensation/encouragement to the better quality of the product and service instead of just the monetization and short term pursuits of keeping the customers happy. Others will still remain to the company if they have very high confidence where the influence of management and cultural environment does not affect them. That is to do what management asks them to do which is praised while doing some other stuff that improves the product and service which management will not notice. Unfortunately, this will not work effectively well as: A. This will need more allocation of time (working overtime). B. Not all people have high confidence and a mindset like that, so it may work for said employee A, but for the rest it will most likely will not work.
Because of the two reasons mentioned bellow, most people who work there will do tasks that are related only for the short term revenue of the company without giving some time to themselves occupied to the their main interest of the work due to not having enough time (people want leisure time or business with their family) and cannot retain confidence under strong influence.
We talked about confidence. Many think confidence as only the skills you have to make the job done. That is true. However, confidence is also aligning itself with your own persistence. Persistence is the main interest of the job. If persistence falls due to the influence of management and cultural environment, then confidence, no matter how strong it is, it will fall down. Think of persistence and confidence to go along together as pair and if one falls the other falls too (like a domino effect).
So in conclusion:
Money, sales, customers are very important! However, if the direction is only that, then there is no different than working on jobs with high turn over rate like supermarket stores. Looking at how the size of the effect is (is it big?) and its distinguished effects (is there a higher than the average rate where people work there even with low persistence?), you can tell if the blame is the management or the employee itself. You can ask these questions itself (if answered yes, it means there is low priority on the quality of the company's assets)
- Do most of the time on your organization, employees or management attitude is to have no time to talk the structure and the elements of the project due they have allocated all of their time on rendering services or implementing projects as they are as fast they can to the customer?
- Do most of the time on your organization, employees or management talk more about any topic related to the sales and revenue to the company instead of trying to find out how the project structure and behaviour should be by taking notes and documenting it somewhere in the end for a point of reference?
- When an issue arises, do focus comes more on how to handle the tasks and who was responsible for it with the only focus of fixing the problem (this may be okay if it only happens one time) instead of finding a "plan of action" how to prevent this issue by either a better method of code review and revising or a redesign of the structure of code.
There are more than those 3 points of course, but those are the essential ones I could think of.
Basically, point 1 should be a skill management has and should be communicated to technical people as much as it can. When there is initiative of technical people in asking questions regarding to the project, it shows a great persistence of the person itself, regardless if his confidence is low or high on whether it can implement the project or not. This is the right mindset and time should be allocated on understanding the structure of the project. If management does not know the structure of the project, it shows the focus and habits of the organization where more focused to the short term pursuits of fast customer service and monetization. This is bad in the long term and it is very hard to fix once those lines of communication with the client have been established that way. The client's expectations will want the service rendered the same way as before, rendering pain if it is not consistent. Those we call them as habits. And the only way to break habits is to endure pain for a long time until the habit gets destroyed. If you ever stopped smoking, you know how hard and how painful and how long it takes to break the habit. Customers having to endure pain for so long in actual life will not tolerate and immediately leave to buy the same product or service from another company. In these cases, the company has to make a dramatic change to its organizational culture. Otherwise, it is not management that does not want to really help others. It is the intolerance of clients if management does not render its services fast, they will leave to another company to get the same service. However, the source or the cause of how it all started may have been from the cultural organization itself by pleasing customers too much. On the other hand, the intolerance of customers can become so much, that even management itself will not have enough time to even understand how the structure of the project is. What can management provide to others if management itself does not have a full comprehension of it?
Point 2 can come because of the humiliation or shame of point 1. It can be to the point that the project has become so complex, nobody wants to talk about it as they will lose confidence if what they express is completely wrong. To counter that, discussion will be done on stuff that are easy to be confident to express. The lack of point 2 is very essential. There should be somewhere where everything is documented and written so not a lot of "Point 1" happens. Most of the stuff will be in the documentation and that documentation should be updated for every discussion being made so there is no need to have a lot of "Point 1". Those "Point 1" can be discussed also to be placed in documentation as well. Basically, fixing point 1 and 2 improves the persistence of the employee. Main interest becomes the product or service in all the cultural organization and management.
Point 3 is the last point. It is the confidence of the technical people. This is the stage where the technical people have to do their part to the management people. They have to tell all the technical details of how the project is implemented. They will also have to find better practices on making the software of better quality. If the employee who works there really works there for the love of the job, then this will not be an issue, and his technical skill will improve over time. However, this technical skill will become stagnant if persistence is frozen. If Point 1 and Point 2 is not met, then the persistence of people will become frozen. Ergo, their confidence will crumble from a domino effect. No matter how skilful the people are, mistakes and poor quality code and practices will exist due to the low interest of the project. It will look like the people there work like they want really another job, but in reality they hope the cultural organization will realize for giving too much restrictions on the ability to access and comprehend the full structure of the project. In addition, they will go to that "emergency mode". Because existing projects do not have any solid structure or management disinterest to provide a better and informative solid structure to implement, employees will try to persuade management for new projects which will force management to give some solid structure and employee's hope to make a better practice with the management to make it "right this time". Unfortunately, this is is wishful thinking for the satisfaction of the short term and it will not work unless the management and cultural organization change the perception of setting better priorities and accommodations to the project. Otherwise, in the long term, it will turn out like the rest of the projects, and there will be more projects with the same issues.
The end of the story is?
Persistence is a very important thing and it comes first. Persistence out of money is a pursuit that will not satisfy the ego human itself and will turn in a mid life crisis. That is why employees change jobs if they don't like the current job if that current job they worked was out of money. They can get the same amount of money if they worked on another job or they could always get a low pay and get the same income as their last job as they improve their skills. Skills improve dramatically with high persistence where skills become stagnant with no persistence. Persistence can withdraw out of management and cultural organization. For example, an employee that "really likes" the job can retain in that organizational position with poor results in either performance or quality due to the cause of the organization creating an environment that withdraws persistence out of employees. Employee has less motivation to that result to improve the skills to the maximum extent. And without good skills, confidence of the employee will become low due to the future expectations of the employee knows his skills will not improve dramatically and its current skills are not the greatest of assets to the company's organization.
There are people with very strong confidence that can get away from this problem. One way is due to the cultural norm of the country, such as the united states and other developed nations, enforce people to embrace confidence. However, the real personality of the individual strongest asset may not be its confidence, yet still holds confidence because the culture learned him to embrace it , either from family backgrounds and the working environment. However, that shrinks the individuality of the person itself, to embrace a culture over his own identity. Some people where their culture do not match their identity seek other continents to move where their culture matches and so on. On the other hand, some already attain confidence from their own personality. They embrace so much confidence, that persistence will be driven without the influence of others. Either way, there is a problem if the only people who work in an organization only embrace confidence. There is a lack of diversity and that lack will limit the growth of the organization to new opportunities as they will not attain the whole big picture of their surroundings.
We also saw 3 points that can make a cultural organization diminish the persistence of employees to work the maximum extent possible to what they love to do. Point 1 is the critical one where the relationship with the client is so strong, so big, that it is too late to change the influence of the cultural organization to a different path even if the current path looks detrimental. We explained that client expectations are of consistent results. It always hurt for anyone to see something is not consistent, it is out of the expectations. Even if that path is wrong, if it is consistent, it does not hurt the client , cause it is consistent (Think consistency as an addiction to an expected result). The right path will definitely hurt the client. It is very good to have consistency on stuff that are not detrimental, but not good for stuff that are detrimental. Of those, they will require a transition, a "strategy change". But such strategy change is of drastic measures and it is not a task that can be solved within a day or week, but months to years depending of the strong relationships and expectations of the clients.
Those 3 points in effect, unless the employee has high confidence and can make some sacrifices, will make the employee feel as he does not like the job, when in fact he really does but is not endorsed or channelled through correctly.