Motivating Employees

Motivating employees is one of the most important characteristics of good management.

Here are some things I have found useful to keep motivation high.

  • Create a culture that embraces a strong bond between employees and the organization
    • Employees prefer working in an organization that they can bond with
      • Where they can make friends and thus feel happy about their work. Teams can enable that by creating activities where employees can come together in team building events. I used to work at Citadel’s London office fifteen years ago where teams across departments used to play soccer or squash on Fridays. Playing a sport together created an excellent bond in that firm. Even after fifteen years, some of my best professional friendships are with folks who I met at Citadel’s London office at that time. Goldman Sachs also did this very well; my group at Goldman used to celebrate team member’s major family events such as child birth with a nice celebration in office. I recollect in early 2000s, leadership at Goldman’s asset unit (GSAM Global Alpha and Equity Funds) used to get invited to the senior partner’s ski mansion resort where they stayed and skied together for a week as a team bonding event.
    • Explain impact of the work
      • People feel increased passion for their work when they understand the impact their change can make. For example, one of my engineers had been working on modifying caching in a service to reduce the memory consumption. It was a complex project that spanned several iterations over half a year and after a few months the developer was losing motivation. However, I was able to reignite the developer’s motivation in this case by explaining the impact that decrease memory consumption will have in enabling us to scale out the service.
  • Encourage Collaboration
    • Pair employees to work together
      • I do this daily at the end of the scrum where the team collaborates to solve any major technical problem together. Everyone in the team who is interested in the topic is welcome to join.
      • Pair developers to work on tasks as a team. Pairing helps create collaboration and sharing of knowledge which enables a stronger bond in the team.
  • Push people to go beyond their comfort level but don’t throw them beyond their limits
    • This is especially true with junior and mid-level engineers. As a manager you want to stretch your team’s capabilities but need to understand where to stop.
    • Prevent burnouts
      • We execute sprints but the truth is we are running a marathon
      • A manager can prevent burnouts by establishing a relationship with stakeholders to sketch out milestones and keep provision for learning and unexpected scenarios in the schedule so that the team isn’t constantly spending nights and weekends to get time back.
    • Embrace failure
      • When a system fails, rather than blaming the developers who worked on that component it is best to understand the cause in detail and make appropriate changes in the process to prevent repeats. In addition, ownership of failure should be taken by the combined team.
  • Embrace fairness
    • Reward meritocracy
      • This is a basic concept but in life we tend to establish friendships and then lean towards rewarding people based on ties and tenure rather than meritocracy. Need to be reminded to avoid doing this.
    • Embrace fair, trustworthy and transparent processes
      • Unfortunately, in some organization’s promotion process is considered a secretive black box.  Its best to create transparent and fair processes so that employees understand that they are being rewarded fairly.
  • Create a healthy relationship with your employees
    • A bad relation with the manager or lack of respect for the manager are huge motivation drains.
    • An engineering manager should consistently endeavor to stay on top of technical innovations so that the manager can connect with the team on the technical work that the team is performing.
    • A manager needs to work on creating high morale in the team and earn respect from the employees. Employees who do not have a good relationship with their manager feel drained and do not put in their best and can possibly leave the firm.
    • Understand the employees
      • Take time to understand the employees.
      • During one-on-one meetings have a good listening ear to understand where they want to take their career and be on the outlook for such opportunities.
      • Raise their ambition – discuss what is standing in their way.
  • Genuinely Care for the employee
    • Carve time for learning and growth
      • Talented employees who feel trapped due to lack of learning and growth leave the firm in search of new opportunities. As a manager, you want to prevent that from happening.
      • Manager can carve out work which provide good learning opportunity for the employees
        • Currently engineers have a keen interest in learning AI/ML. Traditional businesses can still benefit from AI & ML and a manager can carve out work that benefits the business while providing employees with learning opportunity in AI & ML.
      • Create a team culture that embraces learning. In my teams, I have had engineers’ own topics in computer science subjects that they will master and then explain to others in the team. We dedicate sometime during the week for this learning and then have topic sharing sessions where a person explains the topic they learned to others.
      • Employees tend to stick with firms that support their higher education. When I was at Citadel it used to pay completely for various master’s degrees. I saw many employees use this offering from Citadel and these people stayed with the firm for a long time. 
    • Respect work/life balance
      • Understand that employees have a life outside of work and respect it. I have seen firms where the average work day is fourteen hours. For most people, that is more than what they committed for when they joined that organization. Companies that demand extremely long hours from their employees tend to have a very high attrition rate. So in the best interest of keeping a happier work force that tends to have longer tenure, it is best to respect the family life of employees.
    • Defend your employees
      • If your employee is producing well but wants to work on flexible work hours stand up for their request.
      • If the employee wants to try out a new way to do something differently, stand up to enable that opportunity for your employee.
      • Your team needs to feel that you have their back.
    • Cherish successes
      • Take time out to celebrate successes.
      • Congratulate employees publicly on their victories.
    • Tech goodies
      • Engineers like fast computers, nice monitors and keyboards. I have sadly seen firms save a few thousand dollars at risk of affecting an employee’s productivity and motivation by giving them a slow machine. Engineers are building and testing complex applications which have high computation and memory dependencies. With slow machines the work creates many context switches which slows down productivity.
      • Here is a sad story from one of the companies I worked at where a team was developing an application that was working on a large data set – 16GB. I had requested the tech infrastructure to provide machines with 32GB ram for the developers, but sadly a question was raised that if Linux can run in less than 100MB of RAM why does my team need machines with 32GB of memory. As a compromise, the infrastructure team agreed to provide the team with 16GB machines and the team circumvented the data size issue by using smaller data sets for their testing. However, the developers were generally unhappy about this as their request for better machines did not get fulfilled.

References:

https://hbr.org/2008/07/employee-motivation-a-powerful-new-model

Managing the unmanageable/ Motivating Programmers (Mickey W. Mantle & Ron Lichty)