As for motivations: I always prefered to be appreciated. Money will only motivate a person so much. (The movie "Office Space" has a great line about monetary motivation: "A person will only work hard enough to not get fired") Me, the best thing is when I finish a project and my boss tells me that its the best thing he's seen yet. I'm motivated by the desire to do a good job. Yeah, I want to get paid for my efforts, but I also want my efforts to warrant the pay. (And no, I'm not rich. I'm probably underpaid too. But I make enough to cover the rent so I don't complain.)

Unfortunatly you can't always get that great feeling of having finished a project as often as would be nice, and some projects never finish. That can be damaging to an engineer's morale and lead to a downward spiral of productivity. There is no easy fix for that, but one good way to improve morale is to take your employees out to lunch. It doesn't matter where, but preferably somewhere they'll like (ask them if you don't know). They'll apreciate the opportunity to talk frankly. Make it a long lunch. Since you are they're boss they won't stress about getting back to the office. They'll relax and when they do get back they'll get more done.

Don't try to improve moral in monetary ways... you should already be paying your employees a fair salary. If things get tough, ban overtime. 50 hrs max! Preferably 40! Then start sending people home.

There is a good book on the topic called "Debugging the Development Process". I don't remember who its by (same author as "Code Complete") but its from MSpress and it makes some excellent points.

Despite the fact that I think free time is great, I don't really like the idea of telling everyone to go home after lunch. I'd end up spending the rest of the day in the office being in a bad mood because I don't commute alone, so I don't have the option of leaving early. I'm willing to bet you'll find several other reasons people won't appreciate something like that. Also, I'd much rather choose for myself how to spend my free time, which is why I dislike scheduled holidays (at my last job I could work through holidays in exchange for extra vacation days). I like to take my time off in large enough chunks to go somewhere, or do something big. If it's something I can fit into half a day, I can certainly fit it into a weekend. For these reasons, I know I'd appreciate it more if my boss gave me an extra half day of holiday for me to use when I wanted. Otherwise, it's no nicer than a gift certificate for the lousy resturant down the street, or the cookbook I got as a farewell present (although I appreciated the thought, I can't say I cared for the cookbook, but since it was plastic wrapped I blame the cookbook editor, not my co-workers).

You know, I haven't worked for that many companies, but of the ones I've worked for, only one ever gave out 'motivational goodies', and I have to say that was the company I was least inspired to do hard work for. I think the best motivation for me is to enjoy what I'm doing and to have a good boss. A decent location is also nice--at that uninspiring job my desk was at the end of a corridor near the fax machine and blocked the fire exit.

Here's a link to an interesting article on freshmeat about managing technical people: Nerdherding.

For my part, I'm a big fan of good old fashioned flattery. You don't necessarily have to go to elaborate lengths to motivate people. The best boss I ever worked for never gave me any money or time off or football tickets. He simply made it a point to notice when I did something well and praise me for it.

-Matt

One fo the things I was trying to set up was a reward for "best documentation", since we were really lacking in that department from out developers. What we had was that best, as judged by peers, for the week got to leave an hour early on Friday. This added more then an hour of time, since Friday rush-hour traffic near my location is rather bad.

One hard thing is 'appropriate' rewards from both sides. Time is always appreciated, but from the PHB (pointy haired boss) side, that means that you're loosing time from your most productive people (the ones you want to reward). That's why gifts (tickets, gift certificates) and money are so often used - they are easy and don't have a negative aspect on performance. If I have one guy who can handle a problem, and he gets off, then there is no one covering, which is a problem.

One thing that can help is assigning projects. This may not work in a small shop, but in a larger one where there are lots of projects and lots of people, the "better" performers get rewarded by the more interesting projects. This takes a clueful manager (to understand what makes a project interesting), but works well in that you have people happy with what they are working on, and good people working on interesting (which can often be translated to "challenging") projects. Perhaps a choice among several good projects as a reward for finishing on well, but having that lassitude is rare.

One other thing is working environment - important performers get nicer laptops, etc. We give "management" level laptops (lots of bells and whistles) to important people. Makes 'em happy. Cubes with windows. But that is more long term and does have a definite seniority edge, as opposed to instant rewards for a well done job.

=Blue
...you might be eaten by a grue...

1. A devious side that matches mine. We were getting connection attempts from a certain clueless person, and it was his suggestion to route the attempts to chargen and see who complains about computer problems. Nice treatment, IMHO.
2. He lets me get my work done how I want to. That means if I want to use Perl, he's behind me 100% as long as it gets done.
3. He's fun to hang out with after hours. I completely understand what jcwren is saying about getting together with coworkers after work hours (yech), but anytime I can get together with a bunch of senior managers and play Magic: The Gathering, or Battletech, etc, it's a Good Thing
4. Last, but certainly not least - he respects that I have a personal life. I ran into him in the grocery store a weekend or two ago and I tried telling him what I had been working on lately. He cut me off and basically told me I shouldn't be thinking about such things on a Saturday.

• Give them responsiblity.
• Give them context (eg how what they're doing matters to the Big Picture).
• Keep them learning.
• Help them move up.
• Where possible, share the upside.
• Have a humane and friendly workplace.
• Encourage a balanced work/family perspective.
• Treat everyone decently.
• Never lie.

I think you summed it all up very well right there.
I think I am going to pass that list up the chain at my work!

Roy Alan

This year the powers that be decided to have us complete a 'team building excercise'. The structure fo the excercise was simple: each team (Unix, NT, Novell, etc) would be paired with another team, and write down their perceptions of the other team (e.g. How competent are they, etc). Then the perceptions would be given to the other team, and the two teams would meet three times to try to work things out. The upshot of all this has been nothing but bad feelings all around, and lots of people seem to be leaving for other companies. It's strange, but aparantly some things that sound excellent to management backfire.

Ivory

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