Motivating Employees

Steven Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People succinctly, explained how to manage employees. He said to treat them like volunteers. He rationalized that you can buy their hands and their back but they choose to volunteer their brains and their heart. This should make intuitive sense. In the long run people’s motivation to offer their creativity, determination and to generally put their wholehearted effort into anything has to come from something more intrinsic.

I think the things that intrinsically motivate people are feeling autonomous, being interested and challenged in the work, and feeling that the quality of the work makes a difference for themselves and others.

Here are some basics I’ve learned so far to achieve this:

Let employees have a major hand in deciding what needs to be done. People are much more motivated when they see purpose in what they’re doing and believe in the idea. Obviously this is better achieved when the idea originated from them. That’s not to say you can’t challenge employees and push back on their ideas. You can even guide them and influence their conclusions. However allowing them to meaningfully participate in decisions and allowing them to carry out some of their own visions will work wonders for motivation. Besides, often times it is the people who work in the trenches that have the most direct knowledge and can therefore best identify problems and come up with the most creative solutions.

I took over a software company and inherited a lead programmer who was completely disengaged from his job. I would routinely walk by his office and see his legs kicked up on the desk and him playing with his I-Phone. He achieved very little day after day. I sat down with him and asked him what he thought were the biggest problems in our software and which new features would be most appreciated by existing and potential customers. He had a few ideas, some of them good and some of them bad. We also didn’t have complete flexibility to let him work on whatever he wanted because there were routinely urgent fires in the form of bug fixes which only he could put out. I let him run with one of his ideas provided he didn’t let any of his other key responsibilities slide. All of a sudden he started working on evenings and weekends to make sure he had time for his own idea and to make it come to reality. He produced excellent new features and faster than expected. I started letting him work more and more on his own ideas and now had a hard working, driven employee who had found new purpose.

It is well documented  how Google allows their employees to spend 20% of their time on whatever project they choose. They claim that 50% of their output and some of their best ideas come from this time. Gmail was created during this time. Facebook incorporates this same idea with hackathons where people are asked to design something of their own choosing in 24 hours.

This principle applies outside of the tech world too. Maybe your employees have an idea of a different way to market your product. Maybe they have insight into something that frustrates your customers that can be readily fixed. In the absence of knowing an idea to be addressed ask your employees how they would like to do things differently. There is a wealth of knowledge and ideas to be leveraged and you’ll have a more motivated group in the process.

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Whenever possible let employees decide how to do the work. This is related to the last point and is on the same topic of autonomy. Employees tend be happier and find more creative ways to navigate around obstacles when you agree on an objective or outcome but let them figure out how to achieve it. Let them come to you for help if they struggle rather than prescribing to them how to do the work from the beginning.

It should be noted that not all employees want the freedom to choose their work. Some people like structure and want their work to be kept simple and straight forward. I call this type of person a worker bee. Businesses need worker bees too and they make valuable contributions. It’s important to recognize the needs and style of individual employees and manage them accordingly. You can give people the opportunity to choose how they will be managed.

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Prioritize and value achievement of objectives over hours. It’s a brutal trap of the working world to focus on hours worked rather than work produced. Tim Ferris in The 4-Hour Work Week astutely asked: What are the chances that nearly all jobs require exactly 40 hours per week to perform them effectively? Employees are often in an unfortunate position where if they work more efficiently and get their work done in less time than they are just expected to do more work with the newly available time.

My advice to managers is to let employees share in the benefit from their efficiency. This can be achieved in a number of ways. Employees who work more efficiently can be allowed more time off or greater flexibility to “work” remotely. They can be given the opportunity to work on more interesting and more autonomous work in the time they free up with their own efficiency. Lastly, they can be properly compensated for achieving more than expected. Part of what makes this so difficult is that it’s not always clear how long things should take. This is where it’s important to have good will with your employees. If employees believe that they too benefit from better, more efficient work than you can avoid the thousands of hours lost to surfing the net and generally screwing around.

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Provide lots of appreciation and be generous in praise. Study after study has shown that employees are more motivated by appreciation than money. This is such an easy one, yet so often forgotten. Just remember to acknowledge and say thank you when someone works a little harder or achieves something a little more special. It’s also a nice touch to acknowledge and thank people in front of others when they go the extra mile. My former company used to conclude our monthly team meeting by thanking an individual from each business unit. Their manager got on the microphone and described the person’s accomplishment and thanked them in front of the whole company. I can tell you I still remember being singled out for recognition when I first started with the company. It’s just words but it means a lot.

The flip side of this is to not be shy to correct someone when you’re not satisfied with their work. This of course needs to be done with tact and you should be addressing the person’s specific behavior not their character.

It’s important to be careful with this. If you routinely tell someone they’re good at something they’ll live up to it. Conversely if you routinely tell someone they’re bad at something they’ll live down to it as well. In a study with grade school students, students who were told that they did a good job of maintaining a clean classroom independent of the actual cleanliness consistently kept a cleaner classroom than students who were told that they always let the classroom get messy. This is not to suggest you should lie to your employees about poor performance. Rather, address poor performance, acknowledge and praise its correction and be careful not to harp on the same issue.

In general, feedback both positive and negative should be as regular and consistent as possible. As a rule of thumb nothing on an employee’s annual review should surprise them. People are much more motivated to do a good job when they feel their superiors have an accurate view of their performance. The alternative is very demotivating. It’s tough to care about your work if no one notices or cares one way or another about the quality of your performance.

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On the topic of feedback, provide meaningful annual reviews. You can have reviews more frequently if you like but at minimum reviews should be annual. As I see it there are four objectives of reviews: to acknowledge success and good performance, to address and correct problematic areas, to address future compensation, and to plan/set goals and expectations for the future. For the first two objectives I think it’s very useful to provide employees with concrete examples of their behavior you did and didn’t like rather than only speaking of general impressions. It’s also better to pull from examples over the course of the year rather than just the last two weeks. This is very hard to do and I personally suck at it. I recommend keeping a list for each employee where you keep a record of everything good and bad that you observe along the way. It will make the review a lot more fair and informative. It’ll also show that you pay attention and care about your employee’s performance.

Similar to the discussion above about deciding on what work needs to be done, let your employees actively participate in setting goals for the future. The annual review is an excellent opportunity to discuss an employee’s career aspirations and laying out a plan to help them get there. Also a year down the road when you evaluate how an employee performed relative to their stated goals it will be a lot more meaningful if the goals were created by and bought into by the employee.

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You should have clearly defined objectives and deadlines established regularly. It’s a bad cycle to get into where you are nagging someone to get something done. Let the employee establish and commit to a deadline for a given task. Then don’t bug them about it until the deadline hits. Leave them to do their job. Employees may push back saying they don’t know how long something will take until they do it. Don’t accept that. Put a deadline down on paper with an understanding that the employee will come to you during the project to let you know if the deadline has to be revised. The key thing is that timely completion of a task is the employee’s worry not yours. Let them manage you. You’ll both be a lot happier for it and you’ll be treating your employee like an adult.

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Avoid big brother behavior in general. Not nagging your employees about objectives you’ve agreed upon is a clear example. In general, don’t be the boss that looks over an employee’s shoulder to see if they’re surfing the net. Similarly don’t be habitually monitoring the intricate details of their work habits. Rather keep track of their ability to do a quality job completing assignments on time. If you’re employees can achieve that don’t worry if they spend some time on Facebook. If you feel like you’re being watched and controlled you work only to satisfy the supervision and it terribly undercuts intrinsic motivation. Some problem employees may need more micromanaging from time to time but give people as much freedom as they can handle. Also if an employee requires your continuous monitoring to be productive maybe the employee needs to be replaced.

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Create a place that’s fun to work. There’s no real recipe for this and I believe contrived efforts can be patronizing but here are some things that improve my mood at work. I like free, decent quality coffee. I can’t imagine why any employer wouldn’t provide their employees easy access to caffeine. I value flexible hours. If I’m feeling lousy one morning I’ll come in later and stay later. I like a culture where it’s acceptable to pick up a Nerf football and throw it into a random cubicle. I like having a pizza lunch from time to time. Free pizza is always good and I think it’s constructive to have employees socialize together. I enjoyed when we had a chili cook off. I also really enjoyed our company wide ping-pong tournament. I enjoy hearing a bell ring when we make a new sale. These are all silly, small things but the general idea is to create a place that’s enjoyable to go to. Creating a happy environment should be an end in itself but I’m guessing a happy employee is a more productive employee and you reduce turnover.

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Let your employees see that you’re human. There are different schools of thought on whether a boss could or should be his employee’s friend. The reasons against it are obvious. Also there are many different effective management styles. Maintaining a professional distance can certainly work and depending on the people involved may be necessary. I personally like to be friends with my employees and have cultivated the skill of maintaining friendship while still being able to give a shit talk from time to time. It’s a difficult balance. Whether you believe in being friends with your employees or not I’m confident it helps to let them see that you’re a human being too. Have you ever really disliked someone but then seen them at a vulnerable moment and found a new respect or at least understanding for them? I think letting your hair down from time to time and letting people see you get overly excited or see you get a little sad and generally see a bit of your personality inspires empathy.

When people can empathize with you they are more likely to help you and less likely resent you when you take actions they don’t entirely agree with. They can see that you’re trying to do a job, and have your own struggles like everybody else.

Click here for my post on how to manage employee compensation.