Professional-PM Project Management - Motivation & Goal Setting

Funky Job Title Mania

root — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 22:46:26 +0100

Just a few days ago I thought "hey, the online marketing world is a cool one, people are not crazy for funky job titles" ...

but THEN I came across Todd's post for 14 new titles and I must revise my thinking... while looking thru my business card heap from the recent conference I still need to go thru I found at least 14 other cool and funky job titles..

so as they say

CCC wrote:

If you won't get a payraise, they'll give you a cool title to boast around...

and NO, I won't take the time to type them in here TODAY :-)

or should I?

Competition and Cooperation: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together

root — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 14:59:21 +0200

Team building has become one of the biggest buzzwords in management circles with good reason. It's difficult to refute the advantages of having a well-oiled workgroup team that supplements and supports each others' skills and competencies. The prevalence of the team work concept has led management to toss out competition as a motivator on their projects – an unfortunate loss, rather like tossing out the baby with the bathwater. Let me digress a moment.

I have a young friend who works for a cooperative grocery store chain that emphasizes teamwork and cooperation among its workers. The business is built on the concept of teams – each store in the chain is its own team, and within each store there are multiple teams, each responsible for a shift, and on each shift, there are teams responsible for each aspect of the work that needs to be accomplished each day. The various teams both cooperate and compete with each other – they compete between store sites for best performance, they compete between shifts for attendance and accomplishment, they compete within teams to contribute the most – with all this competition going on, one would think that the entire team cooperation concept would be, to put it bluntly, shot to heck.

In practice, though, it works. It works to the extent that the company is one of the fastest growing supermarket chains in the country, and it works to the extent that the company has built a customer AND employee loyalty rating that is hard to beat anywhere. So why is it that an organization that should be fragmenting itself by encouraging competition among its staff is instead succeeding in creating and building a team-focused enterprise that is beating the competition?

The secret? The model of teams within teams maximizes on the concept of "cooperate internally – compete externally". Every employee of the grocery chain is a member of multiple teams at once, all of them with a common goal. At the same time, my friend is the member of the overall team, of his store team, of his shift team and of his workgroup team. While his shift team may be competing with other shifts to move the most product, they are also cooperating in the store team’s effort to post the highest profit and the overall company goal to provide the best service to all of its customers. This has the effect of discouraging sabotage of other teams and encouraging the inter-team cooperation to advance the overall goal of the larger team.

Cooperative team building can benefit from strategic implementation of competition in the same way. Keep in mind that both competition AND cooperation are natural to human beings – the trick is to manage them both so that one supports the other rather than diminishing it.

Keeping The Team Motivated During Trying Times

root — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 18:21:22 +0200

As anyone in a management position knows, it can sometimes be difficult to get the team up and moving. In today's fast paced environment, most everyone is under stress, both at work and at home.

When a project deadline is looming and your team is buckling under the stress, it is your job to keep them motivated and on track. By taking the time, and having the foresight to plan ahead, you can keep the stress to a minimum, the project on track, and make your employees feel that they are a highly valued part of the team in the process.

We all know that when someone feels appreciated, they tend to be much happier in general. If you take that thought process and bring it into the office, the results could be greater than you ever imagined. As we all know, an employee that feels appreciated is a more productive employee.

How much would your team members appreciate something as small as a fruit basket that is always stocked in the office? What about a small refrigerator that is stocked with water or sodas. Not only will these things boost team morale, they will also decrease the time that your team members spend away from their desk in search of refreshments in the employee break room or via an outside snack vendor.

These are things that are inexpensive and easy to implement. They can be done quickly while you work on other ways to let your employees know that you appreciate their efforts.

And believe me, I've been to a project where exactly this was done. A simple basket of fruits every morning for the whole team of 35 people. Costs were not noticable compared to the overall costs of the project.

When employees are asked what the biggest benefit of their job is, those that have it available, report that they most appreciate the ability to work a flexible schedule. They report that it makes them feel that they are more able to meet the needs of their family as well as be a productive employee.

While this may not be something that you are able to implement immediately, it is something that can be a major benefit in keeping your team happy for the long run.

And again - I've been to a company where extactly that was done. All that was required was a working team communication - no corporate time keeper or strange rules applied - only me, the project manager had to be able to keep in touch with the team members... and as long as I was ok with their schedule, everybody else was.

But that's something you have to fight for outside the scope your project - and even if you are responsible for your projects reasults, you may find it hard sometimes to influence it by 100% if you have to fight for hours for such external factors...

but believe me - it pays off!

More Than Just Rewards: the 5 Tips in Common Sense Employee Motivation

root — Fri, 26 May 2006 13:59:03 +0200

We hear a lot in management circles about work incentives and employee motivation.

Offer rewards for work, the articles will tell you. Make a point of giving praise, they say. They suggest bonding exercises and monetary incentives and recognition in the company newsletter – but most of them miss out on the key factors in employee motivation.

But It’s more than just rewards – it’s a function of how you manage and the atmosphere that you promote among your team. If you step back from the experts for a moment and listen to your common sense, you’ll learn more about motivating your employees than you will in a raft load of articles on how to bond your workgroup into a winning team.

1. Model the behavior that you want to see.

How many times have you heard ‘do as I say, not as I do’? If you’re a do as I say manager, your employees will rightfully mistrust what you tell them. If you expect your employees to give 110%, you have to be right up to your elbows beside them. If you expect them to respect each other and be accountable for the work that they do, you have to be accountable and treat them with respect.

2. Offer feedback, not praise.

It’s a fact of human life – we all work better when our work is noticed, but hollow praise starts to ring false very quickly. Be specific with your praise AND your criticism. Your employees will learn from both, and your compliments will carry far more weight when they know that they’re sincere.

And while you’re at it, learn the value of the offhand compliment. It’s one thing to compliment a team member in a meeting or during an evaluation – it’s expected. When you’re pouring milk into your coffee and say, “By the way, that was an impressive presentation the other day. You really nailed it.” it will be remembered and appreciated far more because of the informal setting.

3. Involve them in goal setting and planning.

Over and over, it’s been proven that people work hardest towards goals when they have a hand in deciding them. Many managers and employees see project planning meetings as an interruption and a nuisance – but they can be a powerful motivator as well as a meter for adjusting goals when necessary. When each member of your project team can see how their piece of the work fits into the whole, he has more motivation to hold himself accountable for delivering quality work on time.

4. Arrange the workspace to encourage collaboration and socialization.

There’s a fiction that socialization and productivity are natural enemies. One of the best ways to encourage collaboration is to provide comfortable spaces for it to happen. Something as simple as putting a table and chairs in the coffee room pays off in impromptu brainstorming sessions during coffee breaks.

5. And don’t forget the rewards.

When your team hits a milestone, completes a piece of the project ahead of schedule or otherwise meets or outdoes your expectations, break out the rewards. Treat everyone to lunch, take them out for a drink after work or play hooky for the afternoon as a team.

Those are the kind of rewards that cement a team, and give them more reasons to keep living up to the high standards that you expect.

What is FUN? on the psychological "Flow" Effect or State

root — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 10:53:32 +0100

On the importance of "Flow" in work environments you might ask... WHAT IS FLOW ?

The psychological state of effortlessness, where you become completely absorbs and time seems to FLY BY is flow.

Asking Google for a definition you just get crap... Google Search: define:flow

FLOW is a psychological theory from the late 80s by a guy called Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that you can or buy at Amazon or at this book store

The question he posed himself was simple: What is fun? What makes some experiences enjoyable, and other experiences not?

For a brief overview I also found a very nice essay that copes with the personal experience and influence that the book had on the author.

Google's work climate starts to suck due to envy on SEC filing

root — Mon, 10 Jan 2005 14:47:54 +0100

Due to some regulatory issues SEC had to publish not only top buyers, but a few hundreds "Normal Googler's" that purchased share Pre-IPO...

And altough Google's stock grant policies have helped to create an estimated 1,000 new millionaires on paper, these public SEC filings have struck something of a nerve inside the company by offering an unusually candid look into the wealth of co-workers. That's creating unaccustomed tensions inside a workplace that has long projected an image of collegial egalitarianism to the outside world, some people said.

A rarely invoked securities law is requiring Google to publicly report stock sales of hundreds of its employees, rather than just a handful of top shareholders.

That has struck a nerve as colleagues - working side-by-side are now worth a million - or nothing - to the Google Corporation... - and that for a workplace that has long projected an image of egalitarianism.

It looks as if the fun time is over for Google with the IPO ... and that's what had to happen...

"It's created this asymmetry where some people feel more entitled than others."

Now do you sad for the millionaires or the "poor" googler's ? I guess not everyone that pre-purchased shared without knowing about it's colleagues share buying habbits can stand the envy that is now evident...

Google work climate probably started to suck - now at the latest !

And all that caused by effects of an "employee motivation share program" !

full & via at CNET

Model Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance

root — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 16:37:57 +0200

Performance of employees and whole organziations is affected by the goals they set themselves. Altough the goal setting process is a tedious and complex one, the effort is not only worthwhile, but becoming essential in todays organizations.
Organizations introducing a goal-based management – also known as “Management by Objectives” – report performance increases of 25% or more. But there are bad examples as well.

The most important reasons for having goals are:

Goals guide and direct behaviour of individuals and groups
Goals provide challenges and indicators for assessing the invidual and whole groups
Goals define the basis for the organizational design
Goals serve an organizing funcnon.
Goals reflect what management and employees find importan

Goal setting is the process of developing, negotiating and establishing targets that challenge the individual.

Inviduals and Organizations strive to achieve their goals, thereby if goals are set up correct, their performance should increase.

Ed Locke and Gary Graham developed a sophisticated model in their “theory of goal setting and task performance”, also known as “Goal Setting Theory” – developed / published in 1968 and 1990.

The basic idea ts that a goal serves as a motivator because it allows people to compare their current performance with that required to achieve the goal. To the extend they believe they will miss the goal, they feel dissatisfied and strive to improve their performance to meet it.

They describe different components and aspects in their motivation model

The Challenge

is defined through goal difficulty, goal clarity and self-efficacy
More difficult goals – as long as they are reachable – motivate more and avoid that one get’s too lazy because the goal seems too easy to achieve. Unrealistically high goals are not accepted and have no effect on the performance of the individual.

Goals enhance performance by clarifying what type and level of performance is expected or required.

Self-Efficacy (Confidence) refers to the level of confidence that one feels about their ability to achieve their goal.

Moderators

The moderators Ability, Goal Commitment, Feedback and Task Complexity represent the factors that moderate the strength of the relationship between the goals and the performance.

Ability describes the orientation of the individual towards the goals – either it’s a learning goal where he wants to acquire new competencies and learn from it or it’s performance oriented where he avoids placing himself in situations that could lead to a negative evaluation.

Goal commitment is enhanced when goals are public and when goals are self-set.

Feedback makes the goal setting and evaluation process dynamic as it must provide timely response to the individual. It enables him to evaluate himself in respect to his goals.

Task Complexity finally effects the direct relation most. Goals for more trivial tasks (like number of phone calls per minute handled) lead to a more effective performance, whereas for more complex tasks (like stuying new methologies) goals do not lead to direct performance increases – at least we cannot measure it that way.

Mediators

The factors called “mediators” support the achievment of the individuals goals.

“Direction of attention” focusses on keeping the individual away (for the goal) irrelevant activities.

“Persistence” describes the duration the person is willing for work for the goal – the sustainability in reaching it’s goals.

The moderator “Effort” is the greater the more complex and the more difficult the goal ( in realistic boundaries) is.

Task Strategy is the way in which the individual approaches it’s tasks to approach the goal.

Performance

Performance is likely to be high when the challenging goals have been set, the moderators are present and the mediators are operating.
Rewards

Rewards are important to keep an employee at the high performance level he reached. Theory says that the rewards can be external (money etc.) or internal (like feelings of success) – which more accurately referes to the resulting extrinsic or intrinsic motivation. The latter cannot be influenced by an employer directly.

Satisfaction

The Locke-Latham model primary focusses on the employees satisfaction with his own performance.
Employees with too high goals may experience less satisfaction than others, that lower their goal. That does not mean a better performance at all.

Other factors like satisfaction with good working conditions, interesting colleagues etc are not discusses in detail, altough they seem to be the major component for many satisfactory situations for employees nowadays.

Sub-Summary for goal-setting

Goals affect people’s motivation because they have to develop plans to reach these goals and focus on goal-relevant actions mainly. It also spurts people to persist in their way, even when facing obstacles.

Limitations

Goal setting has shown to improve performance, but can fail if
a) the employee lacks the skills to perform the actions necessary to achieve the goals

b) these actions need a considerable amount of learning, which increases the time and resources considerably needed to achieve the goals

c) the goal setting system is just misused (as every system can be misused) or leads to appraising the wrong behaviour (like mis-use)

Team vs. Individual Goals

Setting goals and measuring performance against individuals is an expensive method which costs often outweighed the potential gain in productivity. Some cases even report of individuals of a company fighting private wars to reach their goals – with a totally negative effect on the overall company performance. A typical system misuse.

In such cases the development of team goals should be selected with rewards for achievement allocated among the team members on a predetermined-share basis. In general this utilizes what I call “team-dynamics” for the goals’ effect. Something that’s missed for individual goals.

My Opinion

My experience is that goal setting and reward systems are sometimes, not always, introduced – but not developed. Goal setting systems need to be developed in cooperation between the owners, management and employees to be beneficial to all of them – and yet affordable.

I have developed such a system with an ex-boss already and suffered the missing support from his management / owners as well as the lack of time for re-introducing the experiences and adjustments into the system (only 2 years - that means initial roll-out and 1 evaluation – that’s far too less…)

The theories of Locke and Latham are nice and more complex than the one’s we used – so I really fear that – just like this model – the organizatonal introduction and utilization could get another academic project “to make the emps happy” without the real benefit for the organization…
I think in relation to such soft factors – often less complicated models are more effective.

Rewards Systems

root — Tue, 28 Sep 2004 16:34:35 +0200

The 4 rewards systems Gain-Sharing, Profit Sharing, Skill based pay and Flexible Benefits have different strengths and limitations.

Gain-Sharing rewards employees who reach specified production levels but need the development of complex formulars.

Profit sharing is the generic and simple reward for organizational performance – with the trade-off that the individual’s action often has no impact on the organizational performance. (e.g. a secretary just assisting the technical department has no direct, measurable impact on the departments sales)

Skill-based pay rewards employees for acquiring new skills with the problem to measure those skills accurately and comparable.

Flexible benefits – also called Cafeteria Benefits – are a basket of possible benefits that can be tailored to the individual, but have high administrative costs and often “already are there” and without relation to one’s performance.

The rewarding practices differ widely from country to country and even more company to company within a country.

Top Motivation Theories explained and compared

root — Sat, 10 Jan 2004 20:27:36 +0100

I would like to point to the most important motivation theories, because I have not seen such a summary before in a blog and this was yet another little part of the extensive christmas present we got from our business english lecturer...

MASLOW'S THEORY OF MOTIVATION AND HUMAN NEEDS Maslow's classical theory is taught in every basic management course. Structuring the dependency of needs of human beings is a good beginning when starting to analyze humans in general.

McGregor's Factor X/Y theory theory categorizes employees in two types and explains possible behavior of their managers. Even if I know that at least these two types exists I believe it?s a too broad spectrum in human behavior to explain it with these two types.

The Hawthorne study found out that employees got more motivated as soon as they recognized that they got more attention than before. It was illustrated with the example of changing lights in the factory where only the change of light intensity was important, not if it was brighter or darker. interesting, huh?

Herzberg's Two Factor Theory extends Maslow's model very well. It?s actually obvious that people cannot be motivated without giving them a feeling of security or acceptance first. It applies very well to the situation with motivation in the workplace because it explains the needs for correct "hygiene factors" like expected salary, a good work place with proper lighting and desks for example.

The equity theory assumes that the own social comparison of employees to their peers is the most important factor for motivation. The expectancy theory suggests that people are motivated to work toward rewards, bonuses and other goodies. In my opinion only a combination of these two, with the expectancy theory following the equity theory in relevance, is a valid approach. I do not believe in only the social aspects and mind-setting of employees, although the social position and treatment is probably the required precursor before additional goodies and goals can create a vital effect on motivation.

While searching for some relevant link resources I found Scholl's page with class Notes for students in Doctoral, Masters, and Undergraduate courses in Management, Organizational Behavior, and Labor Relations and Human Resources.... pretty comprehensive page indeed... :-)

Improve morale and motivation among employees without increasing costs

root — Sat, 10 Jan 2004 19:25:53 +0100

Six measures I would suggest to improve morale and motivation among office employees without increasing costs substantially are

introduce flex-time: this leads to various beneficial points for the employee - caring for sick family members, sleeping longer when the last day was a hard one or a great party with friends, finishing homework or even x-mas shopping without being stuck in the crowd are great examples for using flex-time.
create good office space: Make sure that your employees get a great wooden desk, indirect lighting, a window that can be opened (preferable with a great view, but opening is a minimum - don't care for the air conditioner). Of course all the ugly cubicles must be replaced with cosy 3-4 person offices. And the employees should have the choice on the colleagues they want to sit with. Then let the employees know that it is their office and desk and let them place in there whatever they desire - without getting stress with the - office standards police? ? might it be a sofa or a radio-set. Your employees have a chance to accept their workplace as a piece of themselves; after all they are spending a huge percentile of their life there.
Create pleasant working conditions (part2): Make sure there is always enough water, coffee and tea available for free for your employees. Then they don?t spend time thinking about when and where to get it by themselves and can spend their break for what it's meant to be - a break.
respect holidays and breaks: employees are often giving their best and last bit of energy when they know that their holidays or breaks are accepted and that there will be no doubt that they can take it as long as their work result is OK. The obligatory reserve to confirm vacation requests months prior to their request is an absolute no-no from my point of view. If it is not possible to have the company up and running with one person being away for 2 weeks is unacceptable if you can plan for this situation for weeks or months. The alternative is probably sick leave.
have interesting work: without having interesting, risky or challenging work your best employees will leave pretty soon. Make sure that most of the work that needs to be done is the interesting one. Beware of too much administrative overhead in your organization that could kill all the pleasure in working. Huge corporations usually have the biggest problem with this point. I believe this is one of the most important points for me.
pay well: although this has a commercial factor as well - whatever you do for your employees - at last they work for earning money for living. And if their demands are not met by your payment, you have a problem. This is the most important hygiene factor in Herzberg's Two Factor Theory from my point of view.

note: this is a small part of my business english holiday homework - I hope you enjoy reading it as well.

Professional-PM Project Management - Motivation &amp; Goal Setting