Motivating People

Found this awsome list of statements on motivating employees here.

• people don't do what you tell them to do; they do what gets them a reward
• positive reinforcement is the most effective way to motivate people [Note that in a technology company, a reinforcer might be the freedom to spend some time working on a side project or a pet feature; reinforcement is broader than money or praise; it can be anything that the employee values.]
• reinforcement works best when it is immediate, certain, and frequent (Daniels points out that kids that our public schools diagnose as having an ADD learning disability are able to concentrate for hours playing video games that provide 85 positive reinforcements per minute)
• reinforcement doesn't work if followed up with a "but, you need to improve X, Y, Z"
• monthly reinforcement only provides 12 opportunities per year to shape someone's performance; weekly is the minimum (the annual review and bonus is a joke, as far as Daniels is concerned)
• many goals should be easy to achieve, thus providing many opportunities for people to get rewarded; rewards should not be competitive (no "employee of the month")
• managers need to spend more of their time reinforcing the good performers than trying to deal with the problem employees
• if you set a goal, people stop working as soon as they reach the goal (viz. typical schools and universities; students stop pushing themselves once they've reached an "A" level of achievement)
• you need to come up with a good way of measuring achievement and make that measure available to the worker so that he or she can motivate himself (for a computer programmer in a software company, components of this measure might be "number of bugs fixed, with extra points for the severe or tricky ones" and "pages of documentation written"

Apparantly its from a book Bringing out the Best in People, by Aubrey C. Daniels