Employee motivation ideas for managers and leaders | Hacker News Reader

Employee motivation ideas for managers and leaders

peoplebox.ai

26 pointsnotatechie53 comments

If you let something other than more money motivate you to work harder, you're a sucker. If you are working in the private sector, the transaction is pretty clear: they give you money, you give them labor. If, by some psychological trick, they get you to give them more labor for the same amount of money, then I think you've been had.

That’s a very depressing take. Are there any scenarios where it’s not true?

What if I’m enjoying what I’m doing? What if I like my coworkers?

My landlord enjoys me as a tenant, but he still raises rent every year. Because he charges what the market will bear.

A wise landlord would lag the market a bit. A good tenant is worth more than an average one, and vacancy is expensive.

I "think" I have a wise landlord.

Either way, I hope for a wise one next time around.

And yet, you stay in your apartment, even though there are cheaper apartments.

I.e. money is far from the only factor motivating you. You have a number of items that matter to you, money being one of them, that lead you to choose. The same is true for jobs.

What you work on matters. Who your team is matters. What your leadership does or doesn't do matters.

> And yet, you stay in your apartment, even though there are cheaper apartments.

> I.e. money is far from the only factor motivating you.

Transaction costs are still money (or equivalent). Same for risk.

> And yet, you stay in your apartment, even though there are cheaper apartments.

How long until you recover the financial costs of moving given the cheaper rent?

Let's forget the stress and emotions and logistics of moving.

Some of my coworkers brought up the story of NASA's renegade "Pirate Paradigm" that upset the status quo and busted through bureaucratic barriers before Agile was in vogue. [0] It's a true story of a group of young engineers that created a new system for mission control that would enable missions for years to come, while the thought of it was lambasted by management.

But one quote that popped out to me was:

> By taking action that challenged the established culture of their organization, the Pirates innovated new mission control capabilities for NASA, resulting in the group’s first project, Real-Time Data Systems (RTDS), which took a year’s worth of off-hours time to create.

>>>>Which took a year's worth of off-hours time to create.

So the team performed this groundbreaking work with no extra pay, on top of their other duties. This was construed to be inspirational among my coworkers who brought it up. I can see it. It is really awesome, and I bet those engineers felt like they were on top of the world.

But to me, this is almost crazy to think that - in today's world - working for a large business the size of NASA that you wouldn't be fairly compensated while doing such immensely valuable work far above your personal scope of duty - even if you have the best coworkers or love your work. Sure, in several industries this happens all the time (especially startups, where founders perform immense amounts of work with no pay with the hope of hitting gold), but in the big corporate, government, and defense contracting worlds this is not only discouraged, but often disallowed.

[0] https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-a-group-of-nasa-rene...

What a great counter example. Very inspiring, thank you for bringing it up.

I'm having a tough time elucidating and expressing my feelings on this subject. I've gone through burnout, which was largely self inflicted tbh, with silent approval of management.. I feel like the parent poster, but I don't want to. I guess I'm struggling with the notion that employee-employer relationship is zero sum. Hobbies don't typically yield direct monetary benefits, yet I still partake. I dont't think this is going anywhere, I'm just thinking out loud.

NASA isn't a private corporation. In that scenario, compensation is a practical reality, but there isn't any profound reason to not be invested in your job.

In the private sector your job is nothing more than making profit for your boss. If, for some reason, you did something on your own initiative that made the world a better place and your boss didn't profit from it, they should be mad at you for skipping a chance for them to make money.

Consequently, the only rational thing is to give them as little value for as much compensation as possible.

You can enjoy what you're doing.

You can like your coworkers.

At the same time, your boss(es) can be from hell.

What is or isn't a "depressing take" now mushrooms into a further discussion.

An interesting if cynical take, but this doesn’t really have anything to do with the article.

I’ve personally found that working as slowly or lazily as possible without getting fired makes most jobs more difficult to bear. This article isn’t at all about maximizing output, it’s mostly about ensuring happy and functional teams working on projects that utilize their skill sets (all these things happen to lead to higher output, sure).

> working as slowly or lazily as possible without getting fired makes most jobs more difficult to bear

I'm really curious about this and would love to hear more. I've long struggled to find a sustainable pace.

That's an excellent employee-centric viewpoint. What about the other side?

People are typically capable of a range of performances.

Employees, being human, don't always perform at the upper range of that performance through the duration of their employ.

Also, the only real way for an employer to 100% know this range is to observe the employee working for a while. So employing anyone is a gamble unless you make someone sign a contract and ensure they have the financial backing to pay the contract if they don't deliver. (People with such financial backing typically don't need you as an employer and your relationship will be a business one and not an employer/employee one)

Employers are of course free to terminate those that fall under a threshold of performance immediately and replace, but this is potentially inefficient due to costs associated with hiring, onboarding, etc.

So is it better for an employee to use soft skills to try to keep performance as high as possible or commit to higher overhead incurred due to turnover? Different industries have different tradeoffs here.

> employing anyone is a gamble unless you make someone sign a contract and ensure they have the financial backing to pay the contract if they don't deliver

I have NEVER heard this happening, can you cite an example? It seems utterly implausible even for consulting companies, let alone for individual contributors.

BTW, of course employing anyone is "a gamble" and it's for far more than the employee's salary/benefits. A bad hire can be far worse than just subtracting the hire's salary and getting nothing in return. There's at least an opportunity cost of not picking the good hire and losing out on a lot of productivity.

That's an opinion, but not a fact. IMO people who work less to spend time with kids, for example, are not "suckers". People who take interesting jobs with people they like for less money than a boring easy job are not suckers.

And if you spend your money on anything except more money, you're a sucker. Yes?

What is money for? I thought it was to exchange for goods and services that make me happy.

There are other forms of compensation. I get enjoyment from building things, for example. It's worth remembering that labor is a transaction, and to treat yourself as a professional and a person worthy of self-respect, but if my employer creates a good environment for me and gives me interesting projects to work on, I will accept that as one form of intangible compensation. If two employers offer the same compensation but one has shitty projects and a terrible work environment, I'm taking the more pleasant one every time. Based on your position I should just flip a coin.

EDIT: Case in point, economics has an imaginary unit of value (the util), because there are forms of value other than income.

on point! agree with you!

The upvote button is sufficient.

Then why not becoming an entrepreneur and creating the environment you desire and share it with others.

I did not choose this path and so far I have not regretted it. Additional responsibility empowered and accelerated me. For the most part, the critical limiter on my growth is what people trusted me to do. The more they trusted me with the better I became, the smarter and more capable I became. That's still happening.

I'm pretty sure that if someone gave me the ability to be CEO of Google for a year I would be a vastly more advanced person than I am today. I would take that job unpaid in any respect. I would even gladly take the job of guy-who-is-defacto-CEO-of-Google-but-no-one-knows-it-and-he-is-under-NDA-to-never-reveal. i.e. it isn't the signaling value. It is the responsibility. This is continuous-approximable all the way to a job like a janitor which you'll have to pay me in the ballpark of a million dollars a year to do and I can't see myself doing it for long. So obviously there's some intermediate-value theorem type result where one of the benefits crosses in value over the other.

Ideally, I'm operating around that space.

> For the most part, the critical limiter on my growth is what people trusted me to do.

Yep, same. I didn't get a job for a year because I'm not experienced enough (graduated 2018 near the top of my class and so on, jobless for past 18 months now). And the companies I applied to most of the time don't look at my resume because (1) I suck at writing it and (2) a lot of experiences get unfairly discounted (creating part of the trust problem). When people did trust me I:

- Taught developers to become a junior web developer and get jobs (yep ironic)

- Prevented a company for reputational damages because their whole developer team walked out and I basically coded their long awaited big update (in a team the first 6 weeks, and then 6 weeks by myself). Without the update, the clients of said company would not have been happy.

- Gave lectures to university students about player frustration and making a website within 4 hours even if you don't have any skill.

- Help people obtain their OSCP certificate.

Just some examples to list. I know that I'm bad at the interviewing game, I'm working on it. My problem is that I'm a generalist, and people don't like to hire generalists I've noticed.

I wasn't experienced at any of this, yet I made it happen. It seems not everyone is familiar with the concept of utilizing transferable skills, and putting trust in such a thing.

They should teach interviewing skills and handling your managers / gaining more trust at university though, because it's a waste of productivity that people who can handle more are not trusted to handle more.

Pretty much. All of these tricks are meant to cover for gaps in pay or toxic environments. If you want me to be “productive” spare the “motivational” bs and give me the tools i need to get the job done, pay according to my contribution and keep politics away. Everything else are stories for naive junior staff.

What is a work life balance, and is it binary between work and life? Do the two cross over? Can you mix life into work?

Work is mixed with life. Already. We live dual lives.

laughs in introductory psychology

I get were you're coming from and the sight of my bosses' BMWs M series reminded me daily that I'm making money mostly for someone else, but money doesn't last long as a motivator.

The novelty wears off pretty quickly and you're left with less motivation for the same pay.

I should know - for years annual earnings grew at a rate of over ten percent. Still, in and of itself it wasn't enough for me to stay motivated.

I have a lot of managers. Some of them give me a ton of praise and constructive feedback. I like working for those ones more and work harder for them. Turns out, social trust is a basic premise of positive human social interaction and not just for suckers.

I disagree to a certain extent. My company pays dues for my professional certifications and so on. It is still technically money, but not directly in my hand; just money I don't have to spend. There are similar items that are less tangible.

Same with me. My company made me join a course that aligned with my learning goals and also with their plans. I think this is a good way to motivate and is a win-win situation for both.

I do not want to sound too cynical, but whenever I see those articles, to me it conveys the message of 'how do we not pay people more, but still extract more work out of them'. The article is about the same. It even seems to follow the same format making me question whether it was written by a human. And I am saying that just having gone through positive psychology section in my MBA class.

Employee motivation is an important subject, but the underlying goal seems to have perverted that subject.

So motivation and productivity are interlinked I feel. If the economy is booming, and you have done a good job, it will be regarded. I had a manager who always said, don't ask for promotion, let your work promote you. I think he was right.

When I was working in academia, I had an advisor who used to tell me: "just do good work and you will find a TT position". Never found one, despite the objectively good work I published. Not even an interview. Tremendously bad advice that came from a place of laziness. As a manager, I like it when my reports ask for reasonable promotions or greater work responsibilities: it shows confidence, self-reflection, pro-activeness. All traits I value quite a bit.

I agree. I had my share of rather bad advisors. I hate to admit it, but my mom had better advice about it since it directly related to human nature. Better work won't do the trick if the right person does not know about it.

Honestly, I wonder how many people apply these articles literally and make the employee feel even more uncomfortable because clearly, the manager doesn't give shit about them. He is just following the article and if you tell them the truth, they are gonna fire you or put you on some performance hook

Well, at least 16M fewer people can apply the ideas in the article this month than last month. The timing of the article seems a little off.

i agree

I also feel like that companies that do genuinely care about you will make an effort to make the topic of motivation to both you (the employee) and them (the manager) discussable. I wouldn't be surprised if top notch companies held both people accountable to be their best selfs as much as they possibly can, and if that doesn't always jive with work, then that's fine.

This has some limit of course, but I think that such a limit will take a while to get there when you are in a good team that fits.

I think these articles will only make a difference to managers who probably are looking for ideas. these are not the ultimate ideas, but some value can be taken from here. I mean, I might js share it with my manager. My 1-on-1 with him has been great for the last 2 months since work from home started. And if he would for once check on my status, ask me how my days are going, how am I coping up etc, I would feel good. I think motivation not tangible, it is really an emotion. So if I feel motivated I would do better.I found this good because I being an employee can maybe have some take-aways, for my own self.

Here's the thing - this isn't bad advice, but it's the CS equivalent of "Hello world" in Python or Basic.

We don't need software to manage people. We need training for our managers. These tips are all things you should know before you ever get handed management responsibilities.

> These tips are all things you should know before you ever get handed management responsibilities.

In this way I think this is highly valuable. Many managers don’t get any training before being handed the keys.

>Many managers don’t get any training before being handed the keys.

This!

exactly. i think most manager are clueless as to how to really handle the team. it is sad though. managers also need handholding sometimes.

most companies have orientation sessions or something of this sort. I am doubtful if there is really a platform where managers are given full disclosure of the problems they will be facing. software is there to lighten the burden.

I've worked with a manager or three in my time. There wasn't a single one that would've performed markedly better if they just had the right software.

Ultimately, management is about people, and about empathy. There's no software that truly helps with that. If we had that foundation in place, yes, there are certainly optimizations to be had. But we lack the foundation. Management software currently mostly enables people to do a bad job more efficiently.

I have just built an app that is meant to build motivation by getting the remote teams to know each other better. aboutsnack.com

sounds like a great idea!

Here are some employee motivation ideas that I know that work:

Self-determination theory by Deci and Ryan lumps everything into three components:

- The ability to make decisions / agency over what you do (they call this autonomy)

- Feeling connected with other people (relatedness)

- Being able to get better and to start at the right level (they call this competence)

Any idea that you can think of that relates to CAR (Competence, Autonomy, Relatedness) will most likely work.

Here are a few:

- Relatedness: Say you want to learn mathematics. Find a study group for 2 hours per week! Don't like your study group? Find a study group until you like one. Can't find someone, then at least get your social media straight: find mathematicians you like on YouTube, Twitter and the like. Email them, ask them questions, who cares they're busy? Consume their content (isn't 3Blue1Brown motivating? ;-) ) and see if you can engage more with them.

- Competence: You're too long stuck at a problem and you feel demotivated. Well the theory predicts that, so you need to find a way to see your progress. Either do this by getting easier problems to solve or get better feedback mechanisms. One way to do that is to reflect after the fact (when you solved the problem) how it is possible to be stuck for so long. Then the next time you get stuck, you can include this meta-process and reflect on it again, over time you'll see yourself get better with this reflection. So now you get feedback from two things that are relating to each other!

- Autonomy: Do you feel forced to do something? Try to see if you can find a choice within the activity. I did this while studying, I chose to study "how to study as fast as possible", suddenly I found any topic fascinating. This is why managers forcing a certain work style down employees their throats are hurting their intrinsic motivation. Allowing employees to find out about their own ways of working yields higher autonomy.

I'm always noticing that when I'm unmotivated that I'm sorely lacking in one of these three aspects, and in most cases it's relatedness as I have no one to bounce my ideas around with.

So ask yourself when you're really unmotivated, are you low on competence, autonomy or relatedness? I'm curious to hear if you feel high on all three (email is in the profile). I never experienced it.

Anyways, those are my tips to motivate anyone really.

This is junk content marketing, most likely copied from past HN discussions.

Edit: I was right, this article is simply a content marketing piece.

My full analysis is below:

Let's look at their list.

1. Ask them ‘how motivated are you’ before the meeting

Only possible in organizations with amazingly high trust. If people have an inkling of a fear to lose their jobs, this won't work. Otherwise it would work because it will add some self-reflection to the both of you. I think the employee should also ask it back to the manager! The reason: being self reflective on each other's motivation allows you to understand it and influence it for being more productive in a way that you feel happy about.

2. Start with a check-in about their general well-being

This a variant of #1, this shouldn't be a different point.

3. Provide personalized feedback

This also has the "requires super non-toxic" working culture requirement. The idea works though, I think self-determination theory explains it quite will in their "competence" part.

4. Discuss the performance blockers and challenges

should be lumped together with 3, it's part of feedback or the feedback is part of this discussion.

5. Follow up on previous action items

This improves reliability. I think this works in both toxic and non-toxic cultures.

6. Discuss career growth

Anecdata: in my case I left a job because they offered me the position of backend developer after being a freelance full-stack developer for 3 months. I like full-stack and front-end if you can't figure that out after 3 months, then you haven't been paying attention and you don't care about me. In hindsight I was right.

7. Be their mentor

This is also the fastest way to demotivate someone if the mentor doesn't fit or is a bad mentor. I have both had good and bad mentors in my life. As with anything social, it's an amplifier, what the sign of that amplifier is depends on the relationship you have with those people.

8. Make them feel valued

#5 should be in this one as well.

9. Accountability matters

Yea this is called healthy collaboration (FYI: they mean the manager must be accountable). It's good to say it though! Despite it being so simple, one could forget it. A non-toxic work culture is required.

10. Recognition is important

Well yes, rewarding fairly is super important. Not only is it important for extrinsic motivation but if you're crossing the sense of justice with an employee, then you're screwing with intrinsic motivation as well! I wonder why the article didn't say that. We all know that if someone feels not being fairly judged they start to rebel either covertly or overtly. I had this a lot in high school and I'm sure it wouldn't be any different in the workplace, especially when I read all the HN comments that contain the phrase "butts on seats".

-----

In conclusion: this article is mediocre. By skimming it I pointed to some structural issues it had. Moreover, most tips require a non-toxic work environment.

This should be actively stated as such! Because I think in some cases it's simply not possible, some places are so financially tight that based on that you can simply deduce it's going to be a lot of stress to work there for anyone.

Nevertheless, I think tip #5 while basic is really valuable since it's a tip that could always be implemented to quite a high degree. Moreover, the tips themselves are important to be stated and none of the tips were wrong. In my opinion, a subtle wrong tip would be: always smile to your employee! They need to feel your positivity. <-- That's wrong because while positivity is important, so is vulnerability at times and this tip destroys it. They never erred like that.

And despite giving it perhaps such a "harsh" conclusion, I do still think the article has value. I simply don't think there's any unique value that someone like Simon Sinek wouldn't be able to give you in a more clear and coherent manner.

After reading this, I feel like I could've written a better article and I suspect this is simply a piece of content marketing for the company.

If so, then I dare the people of peoplebox.ai to hire me. I dare to put the money where my mouth is. I think I could do better. (I think a lot of people on HN could do better for that matter. But I think it'd be actually fun :P)

The title to this post caught my eye because I have always found it amusing that so many companies have a class of employees who have the job of dreaming up ways to squeeze more work out of employees. Or at least, that is how some people tend to operate in that role. I find the advice in the article to be generic, creepy, and patronizing.

Patronizing:

> As a manager, you are in charge of handling millennials’ emotions and ensuring that they are motivated to contribute their best effort to the organization.

So, millennials can't handle their own emotions or be managers themselves? Gen-Xers and Boomers promoted to management by virtue of the fact that they are not millennials? Why even make this about millennials?

Creepy:

> An employee’s happiness quotient depends upon 4 factors – supervisor, recognition, job, company. Ask them to rate these factors on a scale to 10 and if their score is less than 28, you have a disengaged and unmotivated employee.

Pro tip: Play mind games with your employees to find out if they are motivated or not and then keep a score of the results that you can use to track their motivation score behind their back.

Seriously, don't do this at all. This is terrible advice. Best case scenario is the employee is oblivious to the objective and worse case is this becomes a new metric to game. Human metrics will be gamed. It is inevitable. This type of shenanigan will make people resent you.

Generic:

> A simple question about their health and personal life will help them find a connection with you. A light-hearted banter would help them in understanding you better.

This sounds like advice you would give an alien who is about to meet a human for the first time. That is to say, this is obvious advice.

> Discuss the performance blockers and challenges

More obvious and generic advice.

> Start with a check-in about their general well-being

Extend common platitudes to your employees. Ground breaking.

This is a marketing piece meant to sell software for tracking one on one meetings. However, in case any managers are reading and think this sounds like great advice, here is some alternative advice.

I have had managers who inspired me to do my best work, managers who inspired me to walk out the door, and managers who did not inspire me at all. I have been a good leader and a bad leader. When I was a bad leader I thought human metrics mattered and that I could control outcomes by using the metrics guide my decision making. This caused friction and resentment. When I was a good leader, I was genuine with the people I was working with and the rest flowed effortlessly. The managers I appreciated the most were also genuine. Genuine is a state of being and there is no formula to create that state. If there was, it would not longer be genuine. It would be synthetic.

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