Along with millions of other people in this world, I am an avid Facebook user.  I enjoy posting, sharing, commenting, and even the occasional Facebook stalk, just as much as the next person.  However, as an educated and employed adult, parent, and friend (to over 464 people, apparently!), there are some rules that guide me as I use Facebook.

It seems to me that my guidelines are mostly common sense.  But judging by more than a handful of my “friends,” and many “friends of friends,” these guidelines are NOT common sense, and need to be spelled out.  So here goes:

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At the height of “the bubble,” a decade defined by a burning hot economy and the founding of many Internet companies, lots of firms were losing their top performers to dot.com upstarts.  Almost overnight, they found themselves scrambling to find ways to retain their people.  Start-ups were offering large signing bonuses to lure people away from big companies who, in turn, found themselves with hundreds of vacancies and an unemployment rate at the lowest level in over 30 years.  For a short time, retention bonuses were all the rage, but it was quickly clear that using money to retain people created many more problems than it solved.

As companies turned to retention surveys and benchmarking for insights, they revealed that money was not the deciding factor in why most top performers stayed.  People stayed because they felt they worked at a “great place.”  So what were the best companies doing to create workplaces that people consider ”great”?

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When a company is struggling because their software products get stuck in testing and redesign, and are slow to shoot out the end of the development cycle, the problem is most likely poor requirements. Getting product requirements right early in the development process is critical to creating software products efficiently.

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