The most important reason why employees take their work seriously is because traditional organizations do not allow people to have fun in the workplace. Traditional supervisors strongly believe that a serious working atmosphere can guarantee employees to be more productive. Managers act like police officers. They always tell their employees work at the job, play at your home and catch the employees who make jokes in the workplace. In these companies, employees are expected to go to work on time, be serious and put all their energy into their jobs to help companies make more money.
They should leave their humorous side for breaks and after-hour activities (Newstrom, 2002). In the opinion of Baughman (2001), another main reason why employees can not use humor in the workplace is because our traditional education suppresses our humor side. Firstly, as both humor and play can make people laugh, it is understandable that humor be seen as play. Employees have been taught by their teachers that they should not play while they are studying. When they join in the workforce, they still can not break away from this view that play is play; work is work.
They believe that work and humor should not go together. Secondly, schools also destroy people’s ability to see things from different perspectives. Humor needs people to see things in a different way. Without this ability, people can not be humorous. Oech (cited in Baughman, 2001) gives a vivid example to prove that humorous side of employees has been destroyed. When his teacher put a half-inch dot on the blackboard and asked them what that was, most high-school students kept silent. Finally, one student answered that it was just a dot.
Then, his teacher explained that the same exercise had been done in a kindergarten one day before. He got 50 interesting answers which were a cigar butt, an owl’s eye, a star, and so on. Employees take themselves very seriously in the offices is not because they do not want to have fun; is because the humorous side of employees is suppressed by the organization and education. Therefore, humor is very easy to be injected in the workplace by managers. Managers can educate their employees that humor and work can go together, and encourage their employees to use humor in the workplace.
If humor can be encouraged in the workplace, employees will be very happy to accept it. In conclusion, humor should not be prohibited in the workplace; conversely, it should be instilled in there. People take themselves too seriously in the workplace, because their humorous side has been suppressed. As infusing humor in the workplace can bring both employees and organizations a lot of benefits, managers should encourage employees to express their humor in the workplace.
Chartered Engineers are inclined to be people with the background knowledge experience and professionalism the computing community would expect of a software engineer. However is not just software engineers that are involved in developing a safety-related system; there is a wide breadth of people concerned. The suggestion that all involved should be Chartered Engineers is an unreasonable notion as it would mean that in some cases achieving status becomes a more important priority than developing safe software.
The first reason for this is that the time required to update the examinations does not match the rapid rate of technology change in safety-related software engineering. The examination would most likely be out of date most of the time unless the examination update cycle time could be reduced. Furthermore, Chartered Engineer status is valid for life. This raises the issue of whether a software engineer who received a chartered status in 1970 and has not updated his or her knowledge and skills since then is still qualified to create safety-related software.
Making it compulsory for all those involved with the development software for safety-related applications to be Chartered Engineers is not the ultimate solution. If this part of the directive was enforced, there would be a detrimental effect on the development of the safety-related software industry. Less safety-related software would be produced and it is arguable as to whether it will be of a higher standard. Use of Standards Standards tend to have the effect of freezing the technology at a particular point in time.
This has the unfortunate implication innovative design methods, which may arise from improvements in technology, may not comply with the standard. Relatively little scientific evaluation of software engineering techniques has been done and it will be difficult to get consensus on what should be included and what should be excluded. In the current rapidly evolving environment of software we are not yet ready to clasp hold of one specific standard and say this is the way forward.
Although design standards are easier to implement and enforce there is a lot to be said of performance standards such as the ISO9000. ISO 9000 is a generic management system standard that concerns processes not products. The way in which a safety-related software house manages its processes is obviously going to affect its final product. It is going to affect whether or not everything has been done to ensure that their product meets the customer’s requirements.
But standards need to evolve with the industry and this is part of the reason why we agree that attendance at regular professional updates on techniques and standards is a worthwhile directive. Working closely with UKAS, the United Kingdom Accreditation Service is likely to be an important factor. If standards are not adhered to, it will be the responsibility of the software engineer to stand up in court, explain the departure from the standard, and demonstrate that what was done achieved an equivalent or higher standard. Standards are expected to both enhance safety and have economic advantages
