Training

  • Training is one of the highest leverage activity can be provided to a team. Do it yourself, or have the best employees in each area run trainings
  • Change how people think by letting them practice different behavior over time
  • Mentor is strong reason an employee stay. A cheap, effective, but time-consuming motivator
  • No need to be formal, but need to be intentional
  • In training, spend more time on practice/repetition, and less on content

Finding interesting work for the team

  • If you want to be able to find interesting work and also work on important things, you generally have to go find the interesting important things yourself. This requires that you to talk to a lot of people and listen to their problems, and then place a bet on a solution to one of these problems that will actually both be feasible but will also be seen as important. Your manager might help identify people that you could talk to, but you must take responsibility for doing the legwork and making the final choice in problems to address.
  • A critical feature of effective complex organisations is that they make people do all the jobs.
  • Most companies design jobs and then slot people into them. Our best managers sometimes do the opposite: When they find talented people, they’re open to creating jobs around them.
  • The best go out of their way to help people do work they enjoy — even if it means rotating them out of roles where they’re excelling.
  • In the first week on the job, managers sit down with their new hires and ask them about their favorite projects they’ve done, the moments when they’ve felt most energized at work, the times when they’ve found themselves totally immersed in a state of flow, and the passions they have outside their jobs.
  • Build a searchable database of experts. The goal is to put employees’ strengths on display so that people know whom to contact.
  • Let them experiment. Let them obsess. Let them scratch that itch. If there is no project on their plate that you know is engaging them, create time for them to explore whatever they want to obsess about. I absolutely guarantee there is an investigation somehow related to their work that they are dying to tinker with.

Perks

  • Many companies have over-invested in hygiene factors. High pay, tons of perks, and over-investment in superficial aspects of “company culture” represent the wrong end of the 80-20 rule for impacting the motivation of your people.
  • Perks can be expensive, but they’re easy. Once you add a perk, it just continues to be a line item on your budget. There’s little you have to think about.
  • The next time you think about adding a perk, challenge yourself how beneficial it will really be for your company. Avoid the trap of choosing perks rather than the hard work of improving your managers
  • Talk about great managers as your company’s No. 1 benefit. Manager quality is the single best predictor of whether an employee will stay or leave. Good managers also cause their reports to have higher performance scores.
  • People refer friends because it’s a great place to work, not (primarily) for the referral bonus.

  • Non cash rewards, whether they are experiences (dinner for two, a trip) or gifts (a new phone) trigger an emotional response. When people are surveyed they say they prefer cash awards, but they report higher levels of happiness when receiving experiential awards.

  • Rather than just look at how to engage employees, it’s also helpful to look at how to lose them, and do the opposite.
  • Spread mundane, chore tasks evenly between teams
  • Stress is stress, fatigue on one task spills over into another
  • we need to be mindful that what is going on in our players’ minds, and in their personal lives away from the training ground, plays a huge part in what we get from them on a day-to-day basis