Motivation

Team motivation

Different surveys show that 2 things are most valuable for people:

1. Understanding the goal of the project\task

2. Recognition of their achievements

For different goals different solution can be performed.

Goal: to encourage and unite the team

• Kick-off stage. "Welcome letter" from Customer\AM\DM side: “Hi team! I’m glad to work with you…”

• Conveying the message about the goals personally is a very powerful way. The best option is for the customer to visit team location for the kick-off.

• Birthday celebrations in rooms or sub-teams, or starting a status call saying “Congrats!”. Usually people are happier to hear nice words in public setting rather than face-to-face communication

• Consider your local project traditions as an "island of stability" in an ever changing environment (scope, requirements, tasks). People would feel more comfortable having some stable things like traditions (e.g.: having lunches together, pizza\sushi\apple day once a month, 5 o’clock tea, etc.)

Goal: to unite the team distributed across multiple cities

• Joint trip of key team members from different locations onsite (to the customer location)

• Trip to one of team locations. The timing can be adjusted with the next phase planning or a major release date

• Christmas "Secret Santa" tradition

• Organize a teambuilding event on a "neutral" grounds

Goal: to inform and motivate team

• "All Hands" meeting/call to announce project goals, vision, plans (kick-off stage, new phase or on a regular basis)

• A “project football” game: everybody can ask any question about the project and the person who knows the answer, responds. That way the team can together collect its project's info-puzzle from different pieces of information that was given by different people.

• Sharing project news on a regular basis (tasks status and path towards the release). Make an open atmosphere, giving people a chance to ask any possible questions

• "Helping Hand" list: employee’s skills and roles description. People will know whom to address to if they have a problem or need an advice

• Involve the team into customer's demo meetings. It is important for the team members to hear the firsthand feedback, it engages and gives the right information (without distortions that could take place in a long communication chain)
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• "Morning coffee" - meeting with DM, SA, TL, Customer (where anybody can ask any questions about a project, a person, a hobby or a life story etc.)

Goal: to make people loyal to the project

• Create and line out the project career path options and announce it to the team members (in case of a long-term project). People are more loyal if they can associate with professional, personal and project plans.

• Giving each team member tasks according to employee’s PDP

• Flexible system of tasks distribution (give each developer a possibility to choose a task)

• Tech talks, trainings (about domain specifics, technology involved)

• Make the bonuses criteria clear (see separate topic within the Handbook about examples of clear bonus distribution rules)

Goal: to encourage innovation and improvements for the team's project

• Create a project place (e.g. in kb, etc.) for the team to submit ideas and prototypes, both technical and non-technical => a PM/DM/TLs can promote those ideas to the customer via planning meetings, demonstrations (at the end of sprint/release or just ad hoc) => accepted ideas land in the backlog and could be done during boring ‘bugfixing/stabilization’ phase of the project (e.g. before the end of the release). Be a filter between team and the customer, guide people to "right" ideas appropriate to customer's business, do not cut innovation thinking in rude "what a bullshit" words, explain the reasons and how it all aligns with the customer needs


• Encourage/convince the customer to provide awards for good ideas. We need incentives to motivate people to share their ideas.

Goal: to encourage self development if the project requirements are higher than the actual professional level of the team

• Talk to people on the benefits such difficult tasks can bring into their personal and professional experience, build team member’s PDPs according to project's tech requirements

• Whet the team ambitions by rotating responsibilities (for example, giving DevOps or SCRUM master tasks to a developer or tester). If you feel that people are willing to try to handle a brand new job, give them such a change and provide a mentor.

Goal: to inspire success

• A symbolic bottle of champagne (present from the customer) on the release day

• A "Thank you" letter from the customer\AM

• Organize a recognition program by the end of the project or a project phase. Do not forget to make special meeting to award people. People value being recognized and awarded in public setting.

Goal: to find new energy when your team is exhausted

• Introduce flexible working hours

Goal: to encourage people for working overtime

• Order a dinner or a pizza for the team

• A speech or a simple personal praise from DM (mistakes acceptance and request for extra effort from the team)

• Overtime bonuses for the team - make an agreement with your AM about paid overtimes and make the overtime bonus system transparent for the team members (examples: 1, 2)

• It helps a lot when the manager communicates a hard deadline for the overtimes. If the team has a feeling that it is going on forever, it frustrates, demotivates and leads to burn-out.

Goal: to energize the team when project is long-term and boring (people want new challenges)

• Encourage internal non-work competition between sub-teams (e.g.: best video about sub-team, table football\table tennis\computer games office championship)

• Any changes can shake up the bored team, even physical replacement (relocation to another room, business trip, etc.)

• Prepare and change leader. New leadership style will bring new energy. (Make sure that he/she will fit the team and take into consideration that the performance of the team may be broken at sometime)

• Rotations between team members

• Attract the SWAT team to bring new project vision

• The main goal is to keep key people engaged: motivate SA, TL, informal leaders first. Team members respect them and will follow them in a difficult situation

Maslow hierarchy

• human beings are motivated by a hierarchy of needs.

• needs are organized in a hierarchy of prepotency in which more basic needs must be more or less met (rather than all or none) prior to higher needs.

• the order of needs is not rigid but instead may be flexible based on external circumstances or individual differences.

• most behavior is multi-motivated, that is, simultaneously determined by more than one basic need.