Ask Slashdot: Best Incentives For IT Workers? 468
New submitter Guru Jim writes "Our company is currently looking at our incentives program and are wondering what is out there that helps motivate IT workers. We have engineers/sys admins as well as developers. With both teams, we have guns who are great and really engaged in looking after the customers, but some of the team struggle. Sometimes it is easy to say that there isn't too much work on and goof off and read Slashdot all day. This puts more pressure on some of the team. Management is being more proactive in making sure the work is shared equally, but we are wondering what can be out there that is more carrot than stick? We already have cake day, corporate massage day, bonuses for exams and profit share, but what is out there that is innovative and helps build a great workplace?" If you're reading this, the odds are good that you work in or around IT (or hope to); what would you most like to see your workplace implement?
Re:"we have guns" . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Daily reports (Score:5, Interesting)
- Administration: 2 hours
- Writing this report: 10 minutes
- Accounting for this report during the day: 10 minutes
- Bathroom and breaks: 40 minutes
- Telling others what I will be doing in the future (because they asked): 4 hours
- Doing work: 1 hour
My typical day. I explained to my manager that's what they'll likely see in the report. They called bullshit. I asked them to watch. They were horrified at the wasted time talking to other teams telling them every day what I was going to do but couldn't get to, and that they didn't just hang up (or leave my cube) and let me work when I told them "I'd have done 1 hour of work if I didn't spend 1 hour on the phone telling you I would do 1 hour of work today".
In the end, I didn't have to write up more reports, and nothing got fixed because those idiots are from other departments and nobody cares. I still spend 4 hours a day telling people what I will do and that I can't do it because I'm telling you I will do it instead of doing the work. If this company weren't imploding *and* the largest tech employer in the city (and I didn't own a house), I'd have already found another job. *sigh*
Your work is boring and unchallenging. (Score:5, Interesting)
You want to know why folks work their asses off to create shit for free and goof off at work when they're being paid for it?
1. The free shit they do is shit they find interesting. Whether the programming is interesting or challenging or they are wrting software that solves a problem that means something to them.
2. The work they are doing for your company is either unchallenging, does something meaningless in their opinion, or both.
All the high pay, pizzas, games, massages, or any other motivational tricks you got from a book (or worse from a know-nothing managment consultant) will not work - at least over the long term.
Here's what you do: start hiring entry level people to learn the system. The entry levels will find that work challenging and rewarding for a couple of years. You can pay them shit.
The current crop? Start letting some of them go. The best and brightest have already left.
That's all you can do.
Investing in IT guys (Score:4, Interesting)
Although a lot of companies would like to invest in their people, and give them incentives and so forth, one big problem in the IT arena is:
How to should you invest in your workers? I.e., send them to training. Or even let them just educate themselves about Java/Hadoop/NoSQL/whatever without working on a project for a few months. That in itself is great incentive instead of focusing on billable hours all the time.
The desire of the company is that you're investing in the future of the developer. But the problem is once they're all well and trained, they can simply jump ship, and the company isn't able to recoup their investment.
So what ends up happening is companies don't provide training, leading to the phenomenon of IT people having to read 2 hours of material every night just to keep up.
Culture Drives / Bonuses ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have been managing IT Operations teams for ~10yrs now (with a rooted background in SysAdmin), and more often than not, in my own experience, it is the organizational culture that often strongly correlates to the work output of a collective team. I have worked on companies that paid absolutely ass and were not overly generous with there employees, yet people understood the purpose, the mission, and their role, and gave 110%. I have worked at companies that were more than generous with payroll and side benefits, and folks slacked off.
Without knowing you or your background (nor the respective company), I can say that folks are often cognizant of the extremes they can get away with at work. If you (or the company as a whole) conveys an easy-going atmosphere where even the slackers are well tolerated, well, water sinks to the lowest point. This can often be detrimental to others around them, as it results in "Well if they aren't going the extra mile, why should I?" I believe just about anyone who is reading this has had that very thought cross their mind at one point or another, and it can be a valid one. Giving someone free massages, or cupcakes, or even a hooker aren't exactly motivational items - actually, they work the other way, in that encouraging folks to "take a break" from things, these same folks who even when working you are suggesting aren't putting in a sound effort.
Solution? Again, without know you or the org, do away with the massages, and most other extraordinary benefits that cost the company money, and instead convert this to regular financial bonus incentive. Make a big point on how performance relates to money, and more times than not, I find folks will go above and beyond to earn the extra incentive. You may have a few bad apples you clearly need the stick, but between the two, I'd suggest you may be on the way to success.
Best of luck!
If there's one thing I've learned... (Score:4, Interesting)
Reason being, she couldn't spend the 50 bucks on anything she wanted when she was a single mom who had to spend time with her kids every night and figure out dinner when she came home from work. When I didn't know she was a single mother, I didn't give her any incentive that she'd respond to. Knowing that she was a single mother, meant I could give her an incentive that she knew she'd be able to use and would make her life easier or better.
Until you can give your employees something that will help them out personally, they're just going to see that as a bonus, not a motivator. Give your management some leeway on what they give as an incentive, while you focus on the why . This forces your management to know their personnel somewhat personally, allows them to look good for giving the people something specifically useful to them, the company for giving management enough leeway, and the employee will want to earn incentives that (s)he knows is useful to them.
Re:Daily reports (Score:2, Interesting)
My NORMAL day...
-- Wake up at 7am when my alarm goes off
-- Turn on pager (yes, really)
-- Phone in to clock in
-- check work email
-- roll over and go back to sleep
-- wake up 5 minutes later when pager goes off, check that it's not for me (because they're shotgunned to the whole team, not directed to those who actually care)
-- roll over and go back to sleep
-- more pager-checking and sleeping
-- finally get out of bed at 10am
-- futz around doing whatever I feel like
-- go to lunch with co-workers at 11:30-ish
-- clock out for lunch via phone at 12:00
-- clock in from lunch via phone at 12:30
-- finish eating lunch with co-workers at 1:00-ish
-- futz around doing whatever I feel like
-- clock out via phone at 3:30pm
-- turn off pager
My boss knows that we all do this and he doesn't care... as long as we do get the job done when the call does actually come in. He also knows that I'll spend 22 hrs straight on-site to repair a down system, that I won't take the following day off, that I'll go in to help anyone, whether it's my system or not, regardless of time or day. And we still cost less than the vendors do.
Re:not a guaranteed solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:"we have guns" . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
If he really wants to know what incentive structure would be better for his IT staff, he should ask them to design one for him. Give them a budget limitation, as appropriate.
The point of an incentive system is to leverage the maximum amount of work for the minimum investment.
Examples would be: providing $10 worth of pizza to the guys working through lunch in place of paying them an extra $50/hr; awarding a $1,000 bonus to the guys who worked 80 hours last week and would have got an extra $2,000 at their hourly rate or $3,000 if you paid them overtime; giving out a trip to the most productive team to go carting, costing you maybe $500 but getting an average of an extra $300 worth of work out of all four teams competing.
Best case, you ask them to come up with incentives, they'll take it seriously and come up with entirely fair 1:1 compensation for their time. At that point, you may as well have just paid them better in the first place, offered them paid overtime in place of OTE or hired more, as you're not getting any increased profitability from their fair program.
Most likely though, they'll come up with a program that's easy for them to game and get more compensation than the extra effort actually merits. The guys who always come in early anyway will likely set up an early arrivers bonus, those who already hit 40 tickets a day will set a bonus threshold at 40.
If the point of an incentive system is to get extra work for less than, you know, hiring extra people to do that extra work, you are by definition asking for more for less. Asking people to set up the system for tricking extra work out of them? Probably not that successful.
To be fair though, very, very few incentive systems actually work anyway. The smart figure out how to game the system (give a bonus for clearing the most tickets and you suddenly notice some guys only take the quick and easy tickets, refusing to touch the hard ones). The lazy figure they're not going to get the bonus anyway and don't make an effort. Worse, it divides your team as those who aren't getting the incentive complain about how unfair the system is and it drives a wedge between them and those who were smart enough to figure out how to game it. Joel on Software has written a bunch of good articles on this, here's one of them [joelonsoftware.com].
Re:"we have guns" . . . (Score:5, Interesting)
If he really wants to know what incentive structure would be better for his IT staff, he should ask them to design one for him.
Actually, have each of them design it. People are individuals and what motivates one does not necessarily motivate another.
Years ago, my boss asked a similar question. I and my team had been working really hard to get a product shipped and he wondered what he could do for all of us. I suggested he do things for each of us.
For example, I like toys. Have the company buy me a nice big display and new computer and I'm happy. One of the other guys really liked time off--wanted to go spend time with his LDR. Another one liked money--a cash bonus to do with as he pleased. So if the boss had bought us all new toys, I'd've been psyched but everyone would have been "meh." Give us all an extra week off? One guy is psyched, everyone else? Meh. Same with the cash.
Ultimately, that's what he did and it worked out well.
Actual pay for overtime, and Prototype Development (Score:4, Interesting)
There are two things you can do which will matter
1) Don't disincentivize -- If an employee is willing to put in 55 hours, pay immediately for 55 hours of work. Don't make it "bounty pay" or "year end bonus" or some other form of unpaid overtime or delayed reward. This is rare and a great boon for a motivated developer.
2) Do a variant of what Google does -- allow people to work on prototypes and proofs of concept (of their own choosing, perhaps vetted by the company) either on company time or their own time. Provide a wide (and serious) audience for such demonstrations (a monthly "demo pitch" meeting for the whole company, perhaps). We would MUCH rather do something that might matter than read (or write on) Slashdot. It's the promise of achieving something larger than themselves which keeps the more interesting developers going. (The ones doing it solely for the paycheck are unlikely to be good. If they are, see #1). While the main purpose of this would be to keep your employees interested and focused on your company, you are bound to end up with several interesting and worthwhile projects in the end -- projects which you could NOT have bought with money alone.
(One of the most valuable experiences I've had in my career was such an opportunity given to us by a forward thinking company owner).
Re:Obligatory...Redux (Score:5, Interesting)
You get more with the carrot than with the stick, so unless you're employing a group of starving donkeys I suggest cold, hard cash.
While I agree with this sentiment up to a point, it goes far beyond just cold hard cash. I worked in IT for 15 years until I was black-balled by the Powers That Be for public criticism of the Bush regime post-9/11 (don't ask). Cash may be king, but it hardly begins to cover what makes for a productive, energetic IT work-force. I know, because I have been there. Let me elucidate:
Respect: Respect is a 2-way street. Bosses that treat their employees with a modicum of respect for their prior knowledge and insights to problem resolution will get more effort out of their workers.
Variety: Variety of job assignments, particularly time-sharing between multiple assignments, keep workers alert and fresh.
Mentoring: Provide employees with at least quasi-confidential mentoring by more senior staff. Every job is a learning experience to some extent, and public ridicule for minor gaffes can ruin a career.
Education: Employers that offer discounted or free courseware for continuing education will benefit both the employee and the company long-term. HR should invest the time to help employees keep their CVs up-to-date.
Flex-Time: Unless you are running a Chinese Foxconn facility, flex-time provides for accommodating the individual needs of employees who might actually have a life outside the job.
Vacations: Vacations should begin with a 2 week minimum, and increase with the time vested with the company. Not only does it help employees let off steam and recuperate away from the company, but it will also help the company to discover weaknesses in the overlap in employee skills. It will also serve to remind employees that they are not irreplaceable. No one in a corporation, from janitor to CEO is irreplaceable.
Bonuses/Awards: Bonuses should be generous and tied to specific projects and project milestones. Awards, even tacky awards, that acknowledge the efforts of workers are appreciated.
Profit-sharing: If your company isn't offering profit-sharing awarded quarterly, then you are insulating management rewards from those of your employees, which will create unnecessary divisions in team-based corporate goals.
Activities: Outside activities that bring employees and families of employees together build corporate identity and unity. Even a semi-annual catered barbeque held in the corporate parking lot would do -- reservations at a theme park would be even better.
Benefits: Companies that are not stingy with health, family health, and term life insurance will have happier, healthier employees. Companies that subscribe to quality daycare facilities for the young children of employees demonstrate an interest in the well-being of the employees families, and helps build loyalty.
401Ks: Companies must offer employees a decent selection of retirement investments, preferably with vested corporate contributions. A 401K that only invests in company stock isn't a retirement plan -- it's a scam.
Not every company can offer all of the things that I have listed above, particularly smaller companies. But those that do manage to offer many of these items will have a happy, loyal, and energetic workforce that will willingly go above and beyond to help the company when needed. Merely offering top dollar in wages to employees does not build loyalty, only a mercenary attitude that will hurt the company most when the company is vulnerable.
Anyway, that's my $00.02 worth.