Here’s an interesting article about Motivation best practices that I read and resumed. I thought it would be nice to share it and try to start a discussion to get your opinion.

How can we start to motivate employees?

• Use communication, transparence and trust
  • It requires self-awareness and get over industry paradigms
• Focus on employee engagement, interactions and happiness
• See engagement as an investment instead of an expense
• Focus on the company culture in the hiring process
• Let employees drive company culture and regularly review it
• Reach innovation and creativity through open roles and responsibilities over control and rigid processes
• Implicate and invite employees in decisions
• Bring value and quality to the clients over short term gains

What do you think?

• What would be the impacts of allocating more time and resource to continuous improvement and employee’s implication?
  • Example: Google allocate one day a week (20%) of employee’s time to innovation and it’s clearly integrated to their culture and products.
• What are the chances that self-management employees do their best for the company success versus do minimal work when not supervised?
  • Hard one since every individual is unique, although people with the same culture and values tend to act the same way.
  • Individual objectives recognition and engagement surely influence that behaviour.

In the article, I disagree with one company idea that HR department is not required. I think it’s important to have people dedicated to improve company’s best practices, cultures and employee engagement. Without time and resources allocated, these company’s attribute won’t improve alone. Although I like the idea of all employees being able to provide their input on these subjects or anything related to the company.

These best practices also align with software development agile processes: agile manifesto