Motivation-Retention.md

Motivation and Retention

Motivation

• 3 Simple Secrets to Motivating Employees You Can Do Today - by Lighthouse. Takeaway: Give specific, frequent, strategic praise on something great they did; give feedback on their work (millennials want it more frequently); remind them of their impact and purpose. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: yearning to do something larger than ourselves—e.g., hospital janitor as “ambassador” or “promote healing by creating sterile places.”

• Building and Motivating Engineering Teams - by Camille Fournier. Takeaway:

  1. Money: When you don’t pay people well enough, you contribute to undermining their resilience in the face of problems at work. Think of it as the baseline of Maslow’s hierarchy.
  2. Purpose: There are always technical challenges to be found in organizations, but you’re probably not building a company with a bunch of insanely hard tech problems. This means you have to work harder to sell the learning opportunities. Let engineers into the non-technical decision-making processes.
  3. Respect: Respect that engineers are smart individuals who often have more to add to your business than just their coding talents. Teach them to respect that the other parts of the business have equally valuable skills and perspectives. Engineers don’t need to feel like the company royalty to be inspired to do good work, but they do need the opportunity to be treated like a partner.

• Grow Your Team by Focusing on Strengths Not Weaknesses - by David Lynch. Takeaway: "Getting the maximum impact from everyone on your team, and growing their potential for impact over time, is perhaps the most important thing a manager can do, but it can also be one of the hardest. Here’s a simple way you can do that." The simple way is to get your people to focus and build upon their strengths instead of their weaknesses, and to do it from a team-context perspective. Four skills areas to focus on: "leadership, expert execution, strategy and planning and cultural alignment."

• Habits vs Goals: A Look at the Benefits of a Systematic Approach to Life - by Farnham Street. Takeaway: "Habits are processes operating in the background that power our lives. Good habits help us reach our goals. Bad ones hinder us. Either way, habits powerfully influence our automatic behavior."

• How to Listen - by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman. Takeaway: Balance between being silent and asking questions that promote discovery and insight. Build the speaker’s self-esteem, make them feel supported. Challenge assumptions and disagree—but try to help, not win an argument.Make suggestions, but don’t just jump in and try to solve everyone’s problems. Clear away distractions (phone/laptop), focus attention on the speaker, make eye contact.

• Moving Motivators - by Jurgen Appelo. A fun exercise you can use with your team to understand which values and aspirations motivate them—status, freedom, power, etc.

• The Neuroscience of Trust - by Paul J. Zak. Takeaway: "[B]uilding a culture of trust is what makes a meaningful difference. Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy at work, collaborate better with their colleagues, and stay with their employers longer than people working at low-trust companies. They also suffer less chronic stress and are happier with their lives, and these factors fuel stronger performance."

• The 3 Motivational Forces of Developers - by Ben Northrop. Takeaway: Developers have three main different motivations, and each motivation can be used in different states of a project life-cycle.

  1. Business Motivated: Driven most by a desire to get things done for the customer; have a can-do attitude. In terms of code, they think more concretely, and aren't always the best at creating abstractions that support reuse or other non-functional goals. They just want to get things done and see a functional product.
  2. Technology Motivated: Love learning new things for its own sake; eager to find the newest framework, language, or methodology and will take every opportunity to try it out on their current project. Know all the trending technologies, and have probably dabbled with them over nights and weekends. On a greenfield project they thrive, but when the field turns "brown" and new code turns into legacy, they look for greener pastures, or—possibly worse—seek ways to shoehorn in technology even if it's to the detriment of the system.
  3. Problem Motivated: Hard problems excite these developers, independent of which technology is employed or even if it adds value for the business. It's all about the puzzle. Coming up with an elegant, clever, or quality solution is the victory. While their solutions are solid, sometimes the details slip.

• Why Happiness at Work Is Good for the Bottom Line - by Andy Cope. Takeaway: Being an inspiring and positive person can be learned. Very happy employees "are rare but when you find them you discover they are positive energisers who create and support the vitality of others. They have an uplifting and boosting effect that leaves others feeling lively and motivated."

Retention

• 10 Surprising Employee Retention Statistics You Need to Know - by George Dickson, Bonusly. Takeaway: surprising stats and context about retention, from "35% of employees said they'd look for a new job if they do not receive a pay raise in the next year" to "93% of millennials say they left their employer the last time they changed roles."

• “Cost of Turnover” Calculator - by Lattice HQ. Takeaway: Plug in your company size and turnover rate, along with the costs of hiring and onboarding. The results may surprise you. And that says nothing of the emotional headache and cultural drain felt from losing great people.