May 12th, 2008 by Mark Ramm
Last week, I ranted a little bit about motivational meetings. Today I’ll make the opposite case.
Why have motivational meetings?
The right way to use motivational meetings is to reaffirm the purposes of the group, and help people to connect the dots between their individual efforts and the collective goals of the group, and to connect those goals with their own individual aspirations.
Basically, motivating people is easy:
- Give them work that is meaningful to them and to the organization
- Treat them with respect
Treating people with respect includes paying them a fair wage, and not doing any of these things.
Among other things it also means not letting people who aren’t contributing to the common goals of the organization hold back the group by not doing their job.
Research has shown that one of the survey questions most highly correlated with motivation and performance is:
Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
Which is another way of saying does your boss respect you. At the same time the single highest correlation for any question was:
I get to do what I do best everyday at work.
So, it’s really important to line people’s intrisic skills and internal long-term motivational drivers with the work you ask them to do.
If you’re not doing those two things, motivational meetings are a loss. If you are doing them you can use a meeting to remind people of how their deeper motivations are connected to what they are doing now.
P.S. My info on the top questions and their correlation to performance comes from Gallop research via the very interesting book First Break All the Rules, which is one of the best, and most evidence based, books on managing for exceptional performance I’ve read.
May 5th, 2008 by Mark Ramm
It think the very idea that motivation can be “imparted” in a morning meeting, or a half day seminar is kind of demeaning.
Motivation is a complex network of hopes, dreams, fears, needs, frustrations, incentives, and personal morality. Motivating people is as much about connecting their individual aspirations to the goals of the organization as anything. If people can do what’s right, become who they want to be, and get paid to do it, that’s a far more powerful motivator than you can get from any meeting.
If those things are true, you can skip the motivational meeting. Everybody would rather sit down and get some work done. And if they aren’t true it’s not likely that another meeting will help.
April 30th, 2008 by Mark Ramm
Paying people too well can lead to all kinds of social and motivational problems. Of course, you can also run out of money, but I’m not going to talk about that problem. I’m talking about salaries that are maintainable but significantly above the market norm.
Clark Ching recently blogged about something I’ve seen a couple of times. He worked for a company that paid developers very well. You’d think that would be good for morale, but it wasn’t. Clark puts it this way:
It was horrible. Everyone who worked there agreed.
People who hated their jobs stayed just because of the money. This meant that everybody had to work with people who hated being there, and that meant that nobody wanted to be there ;)
Good pay reduces turnover, which is generally a good thing. But some turnover is good turnover, so too much pay can actually hurt you. Beyond that great pay keeps people around, but bad experiences with managers and coworkers can do more to kill morale than you can ever replace with money.
The long and short of it is that you can’t paper over morale problems with money, and you can’t fix them by instilling a sense of urgency. Paul Graham suggests one solution — do something good. If you’re doing something good for the world people want to help you. I’d extend that to say if you’re building something people can be proud of, you’re far more likely to create the kind of positive morale which lasts through hard times.
Case in point, this story of a couple of apple employees worked on the graphing calculator that was shipped with the original Macintosh computer. The interesting part is not that they were excited to work on the project, but that they kept working on it under-cover for months and months after they had been laid off.
Why would they do that?
I had long been proud of the elegance and simplicity of our design…. I had designed it for all users, even those who know little about computers and hate math.
I wanted to make mathematics as easy and enjoyable as playing a game.
They did because they were proud of what they’d done, and because they wanted to make mathematics more accessible.