Employees tie their self-esteem to the quality, not quantity, of the work they produce and threatening this base instinct can result in emotional flare ups.

Managers threaten the quality of the product by setting unrealistic deadlines and insisting on meeting them.

Experienced workers, without the option of more people or a reduced scope, will know that the only thing they can do is reduce the quality of the work they produce. In pushing problems under the rug and delivering shoddy user experiences, the employees find themselves doing work they hate because they have no other choice.

Managers, on the other hand, correctly realize that the market doesn’t care that much quality and that it will be more than happy to accept a quick-and-dirty version of an application in the short term. There will always be a natural conflict between what measure of quality the customers want and the measure of quality the people building the software want.

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Allowing the standard of quality to be set by the buyer, rather than the builder, is what we call the flight from excellence. A market-derived quality standard seems to make good sense only as long as you ignore the effect on the builder’s attitude and effectiveness.

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Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity.

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The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.

Allowing workers to set a satisfying quality standard of their own will result in a productivity gain sufficient to offset the cost of improved quality. However, you have to be willing to pay for it — if you only budget for quality when time permits for it, then you will always end up with lower productivity.

Consider giving the project team the ability to veto the delivery of an end-product if their own quality standards are not met.

Source: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Edition, Chapter 4