Chak De! - Motivating your team

On Motivation and Software Engineers
From an organization perspective, motivating employees is the art of getting them to recognize what needs to be done, and then getting them to want to do it. It’s getting them to apply their skills to do well, and to want to do things willingly and with enthusiasm. Motivation speaks directly to an individual’s needs. Needs represent the gaps between what is and what a person believes should be. An individual is motivated by the things within the gaps.

Needs → Behavior → Satisfaction → Needs 

I want to reflect on motivation amongst the software engineers and practices used in the industry to keep them motivated.

Key Motivation Factors
It is useful to understand what motivates employees. As per a survey (Strategic Rewards: The New Employment Deals, Watson Wyatt as reproduced in Success in Recruiting & Retaining), Desire to keep good work reputation, Importance of the work, Appreciation of others, Interesting work, Personnel desire to please supervisor and the Expectation of financial reward are some of the factors that motivates employees.

Motivation Theories base motivation on internal factors (including Needs and Motives) and external factors (including job and work characteristics). 

Motivation and Software Engineers
Over the years the job of software engineers has undergone significant changes. The job of software development increasingly involves:
1. Globally distributed teams
2. Agile approaches
3. More demanding users

The role of the engineers too has evolved and the stereotypical ‘introverted solitary programmer’ is no longer viable. Interestingly motivation has been found to be one of the most frequently cited causes of software development project failure and having access to competent, hard working and focused staff is one of ten success criteria for software projects.

Characterizing motivation sources for Software Engineers
Motivators for software engineers come broadly from 3 different sources:
1. Organizational Context e.g. Good Management, Sense of Belonging, Job Security, Work Life Balance, Successful company, Sufficient resources
2. The specific job being undertaken (Intrinsic Motivators) e.g. Career paths, Variety of work, Autonomy, Challenging work, Making a contribution, Employee participation, Equity
3. A sub-set of intrinsic motivators which are inherent to software engineering as a profession e.g. Problem-solving, Scientific, Experimental, Team working, Development practices, Beneficial

Typical de-motivators for software engineers would include Risk, Stress, Inequity, Lack of promotion opportunities, Uncompetitive pay, Unrealistic goals, Poor working environment, and Poor cultural fit.

Also it is easy to become “duped" into spending all our time and effort on demotivators. We should do what we can to minimize the negative effect of demotivators. However, we must also focus time and resources on the motivators which can help employees reach higher levels on the pyramid of needs.

As supervisors we try to understand employee’s motivation needs by establishing ‘Aspiration Matrix’. This matrix can track a Primary and a Secondary aspiration for an individual. This is a formal approach for ensuring employee satisfaction. Employee reviews serve as the ideal goal setting exercises where pertinent, difficult but accomplishable goals can be set for focusing and directing their efforts.

Some things as supervisors that we should keep in mind to keep employees motivated are:
1. Ask for performance
2. Use lots of positive reinforcement and personalize it
3. Build relationships
4. Understand other points of view
5. Refuse to accept poor performance
6. Work and set goals