How would you reward your employees - cash or gift?
This is an interesting question I’ve been thinking for a long time on but today I found a post in the Predictably Irrational blog (thanks to Bas de Baar!) and I decided to put my own thoughts on a page. I already wrote about the motivation here but this time I think it’s more a matter of culture (individual and national) than just a management problem so I published my thoughts in a post on my personal blog Stop and Think! Read it there and then share your comments!
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The Pros and Cons of Distributed Teams
I got this article recently, called 5 Reasons Distributed Teams Suck. This is an answer to another article that argues that distributed teams are great and gives us 5 reasons for that. The funny thing is that using the same arguments both authors come to different conclusions. For example:
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.
Filed Under Peopleware, Teamwork | Leave a Comment
Who Does Money Really Motivate?
I’ve been a manager for quite some time and I have always wondered how to motivate my people to work better but I have never got a good answer. Until recently, when I read Pawel Brodzinski’s post Money as a Motivator and David Carr’s 7 Reasons why Money is not the best Motivator. Pawel also referred to Rob Walling’s post Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money.
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
Filed Under Peopleware, The Role of the Project Manager | 6 Comments
Full Time Pay for Half Time Work, Part 2
Since I posted my comments on Steven M. Smith’s article Full Time Pay for Half Time Work? I received some arguable comments and also Pawel Brodzinski published his very interesting point of view on the topic at his blog. So I decided to put some more “food for thought”.
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.
Full Time Pay for Half Time Work?
Steven M. Smith in his blog posted a very interesting article called Full Time Pay for Half Time Work? where he shares the case of an employee called Albert who guarantees he can produce the same results as the other colleagues (even 105% of the quote), he is liked by the colleagues and adored by the clients but he wants to work no more than 20 hours a week and doesn’t want to waste his time.
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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