Tips for Motivating IT Workers?

RexCelestis asks: "I work for a small (35 employees) tech company that provides consulting and software to law firms of all sizes. Last year, our company moved from rewards based on the fulfillment of personal goals to a more general reward, based almost strictly on sales. Outside of the sales staff, very few of us have felt motivated by this plan. As we near the annual meeting, I'd like to offer a few alternative methods to help motivate employees outside of sales. Can anyone offer any suggestions to help drive a development team, support staff, and/or consulting group towards greater success?"

Comments

My concern

[sedyn]

My biggest concern is that the current system rewards expansion, potientially at the expense of maintaining both the products and the relationships with the customer.

A happy customer can sometimes inform potiential customers about your service. Likewise, a dissatisfied customer may be more trouble than any software problem you could ever have.

Therefore, at the very least, maintaining relations should be considered on par with selling. Meaning that the support staff is just as important.

Furthermore, maintaining relations also includes those people that may never see the customers. Developers are cruicial here. If they do a bad job, everyone else is either selling shit or having to spend resources and good will to maintain it.

This is much like a waiter being the only one who gets a tip when the chef prepared the meal. Not a good way to motivate people (and may have the opposite effect of critical people feeling under appriciated).

Then again, I'm just a 21 year old CS student... What do I know about the business world?

Rewards based work is dumb

[nilbog]

I worked for a large computer company where there were countless promotions for the employees to get extra rewards. I never participated in them. They made me feel cheap. Every time there was a promotion everyone would run around like chickens trying to get their $25 gift cards, ipod nanos, or gift certificates.

My advice to you is to quit whining and do they job you agreed to do when you were hired for the amount of money you were promised.

This is what you're saying: "I'm paid a salary for my job, but really the salary is just to get me to come in every day and browse the net. If they want me to actually work, they're going to have to sweeten the deal." Blah on that.

Tawny Roberts...

[stan_freedom]

OK, I was just using sex to advertise my less-than-sexy post.

There are two ways of improving the bottom line. The most obvious is to increase sales. The second is to reduce costs. Unless you are directly involved in sales, it is difficult to influence sales, and even harder to convince management to pay you a commission for those sales. On the other hand, anyone can reduce costs through improving the operational efficiency of the company. So, how does a company reward cost reduction? Just as with sales, they pay a commission for cost reduction.

My first real job was working as a tool designer at Boeing. They had an Employee Suggestion program that allowed anyone to submit a suggestion for saving the company money. The suggestor had to include a basic ROI with the suggestion. Management evaluated the suggestion and if it could be implemented, the suggestor received 10% of the savings. I had a nice little revenue stream from submitting suggestions, many of which had to do with creating custom macros for our CAD system. In a nut shell, I got a "commission" for improving Boeing's bottom line.

One of the fringe benefits of this program was that employees were constantly analyzing every aspect of every business process, looking for opportunities to improve efficiency, even if it wasn't in their core area of expertise. One guy won big for submitting a suggestion that the company switch from standard toilet paper rolls to giant rolls. Seems kind of stupid, but when you have 100,000 people wiping their asses 250 days a year, it adds up. Estimate: 2 feet of toilet paper per employee per day = 50,000,000 million feet per year. Cost per foot for standard roll = $.010 Cost per foot for giant roll = $.008 Savings per year = .002 * 50,000,000 = $100,000. A 10% commission on $100,000 = $10,000. Obviously there would be additional costs and savings to calculate, such as cost of converting to larger carriers, savings by having to change rolls less frequently, etc.

Employee suggestion programs are generally viewed as cheap management tricks, but if they have a financial kick to them, they can be effective tools for rewarding employees. If they are pitched as commission for non-sales employees, they will have a better chance of taking off.