Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation
hbswk.hbs.edu
hbswk.hbs.edu
The basic tenet of ROWE is to stop doing busy-work, and start doing only what matters. Stop wasting everyone's time. All meetings are optional. You work when and where and how you like, as long as the job gets done. That's key, by the way... as long as the job gets done.
The most common objection in the corporate world seems to be "but how will we know if people are doing their job if they aren't in the office from 9 - 5?" and the answer, of course is "how do you know now?" (hint: for the most part, you don't, unless you have clear goals and are judging people solely on output rather than on face-time etc.)
In a start-up this is hardly an issue!
I think flexible work hours are great in a motivated group with clear goals but they could be costly if you have an unmotivated group doing it for the paycheck.
Right! However the employee actually has a couple of choices at this point... either they can have a lot of free time, start a startup, go snowboarding, etc, or they can go to their manager and negotiate. From what I've heard, both of these actually occur.
Another interesting trend is that employees tweak what they're doing and start working more efficiently, increasing a teams output by as much as 35% without working "more".
> [it] could be costly if you have an unmotivated group doing it for the paycheck
It would appear that lack of motivation shows up in lack of results and the unmotivated group quickly has to find another job. In one case, a company fired nearly 90% of a particular department, but the retention rate sky rocketed, so their costs went way down, even when you include the cost of having to look for and hire new people.
Every manager should be able to expressly state a strong purpose for his unit.
Out of all of these points, I'd say this is the most important. If you can't tell people why they're doing what they're doing, and convince them that it's important, then you've lost already.
It was pretty hard to motivate oneself in that environment. Even when you tell yourself that you have a purpose and try to do your best, you always know what the reality is.
For me, the realization started at my last job. We were a really small, but matured startup from the dot com boom. I joined, and stayed a single year. I left because we had no purpose, or rather I didn't know where we were going or why. The CTO made goals for me, and basically they equated to building new products and features into our existing offerings. The only problem was, no one knew what those should be. So I spent the better part of a year just building things, throwing them away, and building them again.
We went to a company meeting, a once a year affair, and I finally met our CEO. He told all of IT to stop building new things. I figured, okay, we're going to stop and do some bug fixes. I got back to the office, and absolutely nothing changed. One layoff, a few server outages, and countless prototypes being thrown out I'd had enough. So I did what I thought would be my out, I applied for a new position at a huge company. One that would have to have a forward vision to survive, and a budget to keep me up to date and well paid.
I ended up where I am now, and at first everything was clear. Our objectives were laid out in requirements, the requirements made sense (mostly), and when we met them everyone was happy. Until the customer got ahold of it. Which was fine, until the customer completely changed their mind.
Everything started to sound familiar at that point. We would promise the impossible, deliver what we could, and almost never push back. We started to develop things before they were fully spec'd even while keeping a waterfall development model. It was just... messy.
The only difference between this and my first position was that the goal was clear, but the true question of "Why are we building this?" was still not answered. I've built or helped build about 4-5 systems for the Fortune 50 company I work for over the past two years. Of those, I would never use any of them. Ever. The total audience for our usual application is maybe 50 people, and they have to use it to do their job.
So I learned that even having a purpose can mean nothing when that purpose is futile. I've been rewriting legacy applications in an already legacy framework. Of those applications, most of them could have been covered by building one standard application that handled a more generic use case. Instead we built each one, individually, on top of archaic tools and frameworks.
I'm ashamed to admit that I've gotten used to being less than optimally productive. I've learned to put things off, and to manage expectations. I used to burn through line items, and get things done, but all that seems meaningless when you have no idea where you're going or why.
So now, in an effort to fix it all, I've joined the leadership program at my division of our company. Unfortunately, I can't move on to my next assignment until June. The program promises to give me more visibility, experience and an accellerated career path. The best part, though, is that I get to change positions every 6-9 months.
Sounds like it is just what the doctor ordered, but only time will tell. For now though, I remain incredibly burnt out. They want spell check implemented for everything on their 50+ field form, using a vendor supplied input field. Meanwhile, the viewstate is hovering around 1.5mb and we still don't have a session database.
In a large company it's orders of magnitude more difficult to create a persistent vision. Certainly with the right management talent it can be done, but it's damn hard and I have no strong desire to be a part of it (though I would join a well-oiled corporate team).
I have worked at a few other companies since then (big co, small well funded team at medium co, small co) but haven't found anything quite like that experience. I guess that's why it was a successful team: people were really productive and looked forward to coming to work, truly enjoying the work environment.
EDIT: The team knew where they were going and what the priorities were. The clarity of vision and enthusiasm goes a VERY long way towards creating a winning team.
Any tips for me? Just suck it up and try to do good at my job is what I've been doing for the last 3 years, but sometimes it gets frustrating.
Now, there are several problems with this. First is that it's simply not as easy - what the others do has a real effect on your motivation. Your manager may not be also your employer, so he may not have good enough reason to appreciate you. Being too conscientious and good for a job may keep you in that job forever. Etcetera.
In the end, if you feel staying at this job prevents you from working as hard as you'd like, it's a valid reason to switch.
In a previous life, I had to ask a developer to pull up his socks and come in on time, for just the reasons you outline - I didn't want the people who were working their socks off to start feeling aggrieved (I was starting to pick up some sotto voce grumbles).
It's part of what management should do.
But yes, you are correct, it leaves those of us that do actual work feeling like things are unfair which is not a good environment.
At least one of my former employers would pat himself on the back after reading this, completely blind to the impact on moral of his constant threats to fire us. So while these things make sense when you read them, obviously some self-(awareness|respect) is necessary to understand and act on them.