6 Comments

1. 

   Ola Ellnestam on December 17, 2010 at 8:40 am

   I have both given and recieved ‘rewards’, and yes, it feels pretty lame on both sides. Sometimes however I really really want to say thank you, in some way.

   In those cases I hope I already know the person well enough to be able to give them a sincere thank you. Otherwise I try to get to know them more, so I can thank them the next time, as a step to sort of tighten the feedback loop on an interpersonal level.

   Furthermore I believe that extrinsic motivators are more or less useless especially for knowledge workers and I seriously doubt that any extrinsic motivator in the form of a ‘thing’ has any long standing effect at all.

   Thank you for bringin this up. I constantly have to remind myself about this. It’s somewhat like bying flowers for your spouse or gifts to your kids because you’ve been neglecting them, which is really never a good idea. It’s just an ‘easy’ way out.

   To me extrinsic motivators are just a form surrogate for real feelings and real motivation.

   Cheers,
   Ola

   Reply
2. 

   John Hunter on December 17, 2010 at 12:18 pm

   I completely agree. Managers should focus on eliminating de-motivation http://management.curiouscatblog.net/2010/08/08/build-an-environment-where-intrinsic-motivation-flourishes/

   Reply
3. 

   Max on December 17, 2010 at 1:03 pm

   Hi Esther,

   Thanks for your article. So, how should managers motivate their teams? It’s obvious from your post that money is not a good motivator. Just say Thank you to the teams?

   Recently I made a survey among the team members to know how they like their job and working in our company. And many of them said that motivation is low because there are now awards/bonuses in our company for successful releases, meeting critical deadlines, etc. Their salaries are fixed and they are quite high, but anyway people say their motivation suffers. We are using Agile and our teams are self-organizing.

   I’ll be happy to hear your opinion on this matter: motivation and money rewards.

   Thanks.

   Reply
4. 

   Keith Smith on December 19, 2010 at 11:34 am

   I’m new to the world of Agile, but the items below might give you some ideas for rewards.

   There is an popular video by Daniel Pink, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc (almost 4 million views), that talks about the negative affect on increasing monetary reward for cognitive work (knowledge work).

   Rewards, therefore, must be other than monetary.

   The oft cited aspects of happiness are:
   1) Perceived control
   2) Perceived growth
   3) A sense of community
   4) Working for the greater good

   Ask the team, what would make them happier?

   More privacy.

   Be able to control the work environment, like rearranging the cubes, everyone is out on the window, the conference rooms are in the middle.

   Have a ‘work on anything you want’ day at the end of a release.

   Allow work on community projects.

   Provide conference vouchers.

   Look at the four aspects of happiness and see which categories the reward fits into.

   Henrik Kniberg’s Happier Crisp Index, http://blog.crisp.se/henrikkniberg/2010/05/08/1273272420000.html, is a very interesting read on happiness of IT workers at his firm Crisp.

   Reply
5. 

   Keith Smith on December 23, 2010 at 6:36 pm

   It appears that rewarding an individual on an agile team or an agile team itself is not a simple problem. Here’s an article that discusses this issue and has references to other articles, forums and blogs discussing the agile team reward issue. The blog by Tom Reynolds that is referenced has much to say on the topic.

   http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/12/agile-limits-financial-rewards

   Reply
6. 

   Tim Western on June 11, 2012 at 8:45 pm

   I once interviewed for a job that as part of its benefits package listed a 10% bonus annually. Sounds good right? Until I asked what criteria was used to determine whether someone was awarded the bonus or not. They couldn’t give me any. What’s worse I was supposedly the first employ of that type that company would ever have had. I’m not opposed to bonuses in general, but this company was trying to use this possible money deferred throughout the year as a chip to get me to sign on the dotted line. All I saw was 10% less pay I might never see regardless of how hard I actually worked.

   Reply

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