Bonuses, prizes, karma points–rewarding your engineers for individual success may sound like the most obvious way to motivate them, but it actually undermines collaboration and morale like nothing else I know.
Two coaching clients this week asked me about their plans to reward engineers; one with prizes for the best results at a hackathon day, and the other with end-of-quarter bonuses for those individuals who delivered a tough initiative. I told them both to knock it off–we’ve known this kind of reward for knowledge work is no good for donkey’s years (see, for example, the article Unjust Deserts by Tom and Mary Poppendieck). Among many other catastrophes it causes, an individual reward system creates competition and resentment in your most important projects–but those key areas are exactly where you need collaboration the most. The hackathon teams should be pitching ideas and finding solutions to help each other, and your testers and coders should be finding every bug they can together before the rollout of the make-or-break product. Instead of individual prizes, consider recognising the team that provided the most across-the-board value and help, or failed most informatively, or co-operated most harmoniously. And any rewards for delivering a great result should be collective–the designer who made an important observation quietly at a crucial juncture is just as deserving as the developer who stayed up late to ensure the release got out. If you want great results, provide incentives for the whole team to provide them, not just the ones with the loudest mouths.
This first appeared in my weekly Squirrel Squadron email, which goes out every Monday, and was originally posted on 10th October 2022. To get my provocative thoughts and tips direct to your inbox first, sign up here: https://squirrelsquadron.com/