Posts Tagged ‘employee motivation’

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IT Leaders’ Secret Techniques For Motivating Staff

Friday, September 26th, 2008
Secrets IT Leaders Can Use To Motivate Their Staff

Secrets IT Leaders Can Use To Motivate Their Staff

Now that we’ve discovered that all humans, including those in in your IT department / on your IT team, respond to four basic drives, we are now faced with the really big question: how does an IT leader use this knowledge to motivate his/her staff? It turns out that there are actually a number of possible levers that you can pull…

The Drive To Acquire Is Handled By How You Handle Rewards: This is, of course, a classic staff driving lever. How well your IT department sorts out the good performers from the poor ones, how it matches the rewards that it hands out to performance delivered, and how easily it permits talented staff to advance in the organization determines how well you are meeting your employee’s drive to acquire.

The Drive To Bond Is Handled By Your Department’s Culture: Put simply, this comes down to how much camaraderie exists within the department. Does your staff work well together? Is there openness, teamwork, and genuine friendship amont the people who work for you?

The Drive To Comprehend Is Handled By How You Design Jobs: Are the IT jobs in your department both meaningful, interesting, while at the the same time challanging? These are all critical to meeting the needs of this drive.

The Drive To Defend Is Handled By Your Performance Review Process: If the annual performance review process is seen as being fair and trustworthy by all, and if resources are allocated in a transparent way then this will meet your staff’s drive to defend.

The key take-away for you regarding all of this drive stuff, is that in survey after survey, IT employees reported that when there was even a small enhancement to their ability to fulfill any one of these four drives, then their overall motivation shot up. However, (this is also a key point) all four drives have to be met – missing even one can significantly dampen an employee’s motivation.

Finally, employees have said that the statements and actions that their immediate IT managers make are just as important to their overall productivity as all of the company’s policies and rules. Now that’s food for IT leaders to spend some time thinking about…!

How many of these four drives do you try to satisfy in your employees? Do you feel that you are currently being successful? Why/why not? What is blocking you from doing a better job of meeting these basic drivers of your employees? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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4 Drivers Of Employee Motivation That All IT Leaders Must Know

Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
The Four Drivers Of IT Staff Motivation

The Four Drivers Of IT Staff Motivation

We’ve talked about the fact that sometimes employee motivation can be a lot like performing brain surgery – you’ve got to be careful or you’ll end up doing a lot of damage. If an IT manager can realize that their staff (indeed all humans) have four fundamental emotional drivers that need to be met, then they are well on their way to maximizing employee satisfaction and maximizing productivity. So what are these four drivers that we all respond to?

  • The Drive To Acquire: More! More! More! As human beings we are all programmed to go out and get scarce goods (iPhone?) that make us feel better about ourselves. I think that we can all agree that we feel “happy” when we are successful and we feel “sad” when we fail. It’s not just physical things that we desire, but also experiences and improvements in our social status. This drive is relative – we are always comparing what we have to what those around us have. Oh, and it’s insatiable – we always want more, more, more!
  • The Drive To Bond: We all know about how we bond with our parents, siblings, etc. However, the human creature is amazing because we have the additional ability to extend who we bond with to associations, organizations, and even countries. This is a big one – when we are successful in bonding, then we fell loved. When we are not successful in bonding, then we fell loneliness. For your IT workers, bonding at work is a critical part of who they are. When staff feel proud to be part of an organization (Starbucks?) this can be a big boost to their motivation. It also explains why we get so depressed when we get fired or laid off – we feel that the organization has betrayed us.
  • The Drive To Comprehend: We are creatures that really want to understand the world in which we live. We are constantly using scientific, cultural, and even religious theories to try to make sense of it all. Our reason for doing this is that we want to be able to come up with reasonable responses to things that happen in our environment and to be able to determine what actions we should take next.
  • The Drive To Defend: You knew that this one had to be on the list! When external threats show up, we humans naturally defend ourselves, our family & friends, our property and things, etc. Remember that “flight or flight” thing? Fulfilling this drive leads employees to feel secure, failing to fulfill it leads to strong emotions like fear and resentment. This drive is one reason why mergers or buyouts can be so devastating for staff.

Now that you know what the four drivers of your staff are, the big question is how can you use these drivers to make sure that they are motivated to work hard. We’ll talk about that next time…

How many of these drivers do you see driving your own behaviors? Which one do you think is strongest in you? When managing a team, have you come up with ways to make sure that these drivers are being satisfied? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking!

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Neuroscience Can Make You A Better IT Leader

Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
A Good IT Leader Needs A Healthy Brain

A Good IT Leader Needs A Healthy Brain

Dr. John Median is a developmental molecular biologist who recently sat down with the Harvard Business Review and had a talk about what we’ve recently found out about how the brain works and what this can tell us about being better IT leaders.

The key question that IT leaders want to get an answer to is to find how how relevant neuroscience discoveries are to the day-to-day job of management. Dr. Median says that he thinks that one of the reasons that we are all so fascinated by brain research these days is because it truly is the most interesting and complicated processing tool that we have ever seen. How’s this for a fascinating fact: there are as many neurons in your brain as there are stars in a typical galaxy. Despite having this level of knowledge about the brain, we still know very little that can be related to the real world.

One thing that science has learned is that stress is very, very bad for our brains. Since it hurts our brains, it also decreases our productivity. The reasoning behind this is pretty simple. Evolution has wired our brains to help us to survive. What this means in practical terms is that our brains were originally set up to deal with stress for short periods of time: 30-60 seconds. Remember “fight or flight?” However, in today’s modern IT workplace everyone is under stress almost all the time. Our brains were never set up to deal with stress all the time. This can lead to other problems with things like a lack of motivation, poor sleep and immune system issues.

So what happens when we have too much stress in our lives? Dr. Median says that stress can mess with our hormones. When this happens, the connections between brain cells that help us remember things can start to fray and weaken. Unfortuantly, the hormones associated with stress seem to like to prey on the part of the brain that is called the hippocampus - where our memories are kept. Some studies have guessed that the total cost of lost productivity due to stress is somewhere around $200 billion/year. What does this mean for IT managers? Simply put, anything that you can do to lower the stress level that is being experienced by your team will pay back rich dividends.

One very interesting point that Dr.Median makes is that our memory is NOT like a Xerox machine. Our brains and our memory were always designed to help with one thing only: our survival. We really have no idea HOW we remember things, but what we do know is that it seems to take a long time for memories to become permanent. The best way to remember something is to constantly re-expose yourself to it. Once again. for IT managers this means that if you want your team to remember the company’s mission statement, then you’re going to have to start every meeting off by reading it to the team.

The good news out of all of this is that our brains will continue to grow and change throughout our entire lives. If you want to have a better shot at having a healthy, growing brain for your entire career, then the #1 thing that you’ve got to do is to exercise. Exercise in any form and aerobic exercise in particular helps your brain. Dr. Median points out that people who exercise are 50% less likely to get Alzheimer’s disease. From an IT leader point-of-view, this goes along nicely with the idea that a healthy team is a more productive team. Anything that you can do to make it easier for your team to stay in top shape will once again help your team to perform that much better.

What are you doing today to lower the stress level of your team? What is the primary cause of their stress? Is your team able to stay healthy or are they “under the weather” all the time? Do you think stress plays a role in your team’s physical health? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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The Meaning Of (IT) Life

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Why Do We Like IT WorkBy Dr. Jim Anderson

Most IT jobs consist of doing work in a constantly reoccurring cycle: define, design, create, test, deploy, repeat. When we get our first IT job or when we jump onto a new program, this can all seem so very new and exciting. However, once we reach the fourth or fifth cycle, it all starts to see the same. We also start to ask the BIG question: why am I doing this and does anyone really care?

Ultimately this is THE BIG question. I know that I have grown bored with my IT jobs once they seemed to be repeating themselves. An interesting point to understand here is that just when I became most valuable to my employer, I was no longer interested in doing the job. If you’ve got a team working for you, this is going to be a big problem for you too.

There are two ways to deal with this type of “IT job cycle” burnout that actually work. The first is to have a manager who is a real leader. The phrase that we always used was “I’d crawl over broken glass for him.” These folks are very rare, but you’d recognize them by the fanatical loyalty that they create in their teams. The few times that I’ve had such a boss, I really felt that he “had my back” and I worked hard to make sure that “I had his back.” He was able to convey to me a real sense of purpose that was much larger than the current development cycle that I was working on. I truly felt that I was part of a team.

Alternatively, since such leaders are few and far between, if each member of your team is working on a longer term self improvement project then they will also be able to see beyond the current development cycle. This can be as simple as going back to school, getting some flavor of Cisco certification, or simply tutoring under your project’s DB Master. Because of the desire to improve our technical knowledge that is our core, the ability to have this longer term goal makes us happier living in the here an now.

In the end, I guess that once you become aware that you are working in a never ending development cycle, you will become dissatisfied. However, if you can provide yourself or your team with a goal that is longer term than your current development cycle, then you can create stability and retention within your team.

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