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• How To Motivate Your Team?
• Who Does Money Really Motivate?

Reason Number 5:
Pros: It saves energy. While you work at home you don’t waste time and effort for traveling.
Cons: It wastes energy. When you have to travel, you waste a lot more than if you worked in the same country and in the same office.

Where is the problem? Why these guys think so differently upon the same situation? My answer is very simple. The very definition of the “distributed team” they use is different.

When I ask myself the question “What does a distributed team mean?” I divide it into the following questions:

1. How distributed is the team? If the team works in the same town and they don’t work constantly in the office but instead they work at home I believe it really saves money and energy and this kind of distributed team works effectively because they don’t spend time traveling, they use their own computers and they only need a good internet connection to do their work (especially if the team doesn’t need any other special technical equipment). But if the team is disbursed through the globe then it might not be cost-effective at all. Especially if there are long time differences and there is a need to meet face-to-face frequently.

2. How often do they need to meet? It depends on the nature of the project. If the project is a more R&D-oriented then it would require more frequent meetings, which is not good if the team is dispersed. On the other hand, if the work is more routine and there aren’t much things to discuss, it wouldn’t be a problem that the team members work at different locations and meet rarely. But nobody said that the structure should be fixed all the time! If you are allowed to play creatively with the budget, you may find that the best way is to gather the team for a short time in one place, do the brainstorming and the research, make all the decisions and then split them back so everyone can work from their location for the next period. Later, you can bring them back again if necessary. You just have to make your calculations and to judge the effectiveness of the team working together and working from their homes or local offices.

3. How urgent is the project? If the project is some kind of a “Death march” it is obvious that the distributed team wouldn’t be able to handle it right. You need your team to be with you all the time so you can keep their motivation and work energy at high volumes. But if the project is well-planned and it allows people to work with a normal pace, a distributed team may be a more effective solution since it wouldn’t require a “management pressure” on the team members.

I strongly believe in the effectiveness of the distributed teams where the people are not far away from each other and the nature of their work doesn’t require them to meet too frequently or to respond urgently to user requests. It is difficult to manage such a team but if you do it smartly you can make your project more profitable. but before you decide should your team work at one place or at different locations, ask yourself these questions and judge carefully.

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• Project Management 3.0

We all know Frederick Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory. There are motivation and hygiene factors that drive our job satisfaction. Here is my simple understanding of them:

• motivation factors drive us to work more, to perform better, to be more creative
• hygiene factors are the ones that their lack demotivates us and drive us to work less, to perform worse, and to be less productive and creative

David gives 7 very good examples why money is not a motivating factor but rather hygiene one. Pawel, on the other hand seems disappointed that in reality people are most interested by money and the other forms of motivation seem not being too effective.

Reading all this stuff you may think that these are objective factors and they are valid for all people. But it’s not true. People are different and they are interested in different things. And here came my enlightenment: There are two major kind of people based on what kind of factors are more important to them. I would call them active and passive people. There are people who consider the hygiene factors as more important (passive) and there are people who are interested in motivation factors (active).

And there are also two major types of work:

• interesting, dynamic, creative, and varied, and
• routine, monotonous, and boring

There is a need of both kind of people to match the corresponding type of work and respectively, you have to motivate them differently. The active people better fit the dynamic type of work – designers, architects, project managers. They are ambitious and creative type of persons and they can be motivated using a variety of motivation factors. All of them will work.

On the other hand, for more monotonous type of work you need the passive kind of people. Even in the field of software development there are many tasks that require persistence and patience and the active people are not the right choice because they get bored very soon. You need passive people but you cannot motivate them because they are not ambitious – they are not looking for improvement – they just want to do their job peacefully and quietly. For them the hygiene factors are determining so you need to secure them.

If you mix the factors and use the opposite approach you will get nothing. If you secure the hygiene factors for the active and ambitious people they won’t be satisfied because they will always be looking for some improvement and growth that you don’t provide. And if you try to motivate with achievement, recognition and personal growth people who just want to receive their salary regularly and to have an always-working vending machine for free, you again will get only their dissatisfaction.

Having all these considerations I think every manager should follow these simple rules:

1. Analyze the different jobs in your team or organization and define which of them require active people and which of them require passive people.
2. Hire people who match the job type – active people for a dynamic job and passive people for a routine job.
3. Use the appropriate motivation mechanisms according to the person’s type and the job type – hygiene for the passive people and motivation for the active people.

There are professions or countries where there are more people of the one kind and less of the other. For example, in Bulgaria passive people are much more than the active ones. I believe this is the reason for Pawel’s skepticism – both Bulgaria and Poland have been a long time on the same side of the Iron Curtain so probably this is why the most people he has met are passive ones and they are interested mostly in the salary as a hygiene factor.

Finding the right people for a job may be a problem and may take a long time but I think it’s better to work with fewer people before you find the right one instead of hiring the wrong person. If you put a person that doesn’t match the job you will never be able to motivate them.

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• How would you reward your employees – cash or gift?
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First of all, there is no such thing like “full time salary”. Each employee’s salary is negotiated individually. At least this is the common practice in Bulgaria but I believe that the same method is applied all over the world. The times of the “developed socialism” when all the people had the same salaries are far behind in the past. Currently in the most software companies in Bulgaria the ratio between the lowest and the biggest salary for a software developer is between 2:1 and 3:1. Which means that for a full working day and for 40-hour week one person gets 500 Euro and another gets 1000 Euro (for example).

Why is that? Simply, because one person is considered more qualified and more productive than the other. We know from Steve McConnell’s books that there is a difference of 10:1 in software developers’ productivity and we accept a difference of 2:1 or 3:1 in salary (which I think is not so fair if the productivity is bigger). So why is it so impossible to accept a situation where one person’s salary is equal to another person’s salary but the working time is twice shorter? In my opinion this is quite normal if the first employee is twice (or more) more productive than the second one.

Another point that is not taken in consideration (especially by Pawel): It is not said anywhere that the person is a software developer. The original case is about an employee of unknown specialty. But even in the software development there are several roles that do not require the person to be full time at the office: sales agents, business analysts, deployment and user training specialists, etc. By definition, these people are required to spend a lot of time at customer’s site so they usually don’t stay at the office regularly and their absence will not hurt the team spirit. An employee like Albert in the given example may very well fit one of these roles and be hired on a half time if he is able to do his tasks.

I still believe that if we are flexible enough in our thinking we can achieve better results. We should not obey all the traditions just because they are traditions. We should use them selectively and to pick only those which can help us achieve our goals.

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• Full Time Pay for Half Time Work?

The author asked several managers whether they would hire Albert but all the answers were “No”. No one appreciated the fact that Albert is 100% more productive than the others. All the managers asked felt insulted by Albert’s requirement for 20-hour work and required that he worked for 40-60 hours. In fact they didn’t like the fact that he insisted on his freedom, they wanted to have a tighter control on him no matter how productive he was.

If I had to make such decision I would hire Albert if I have the guarantee that he will produce the promised results. But the answers the interviewed managers gave are frightening me. They confirmed my fears that the most middle managers nowadays don’t have the entrepreneurship spirit at all. They consider their employees not like partners (heading for the same goal) but more like property, resources, or even like slaves. The majority of managers value the most not the productivity of an employee but the ability to obey orders.

I feel we are back in the 18th-19th century…

Read the second part of this posting here.

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• Full Time Pay for Half Time Work, Part 2