It doesn’t matter where your software development team located — engineers always want more than a good salary and benefits your firm offers. Standard benefits are not working anymore, even at Ukraine software development teams; free coffee and cookies won’t attract a developer, you need to think beyond traditional motivators. That is why you need to work out of culture to retain employees for the long haul.
Here, at Efisco we developed our own list of benefits. Here are 12 ways to motivate your software developers and engineers:
1. Start Listening
Each person is different. What motivates project manager or business analyst — will never be the same as for the software developer. Moreover, there will be differences between software engineers: one may want to dig into specific technology, for other it will be essential to grow more in general. Also, the majority of devs are introverts, and they won’t be engaging during the meetings. So you need to work out to get to learn their interests and one-to-one meetings can offer you this opportunity. During these conversations try to listen to your employee, rather than speak.
2. Encourage New Technology Usage
Maintaining old legacy code written long ago is boring. Consider the opportunities to modernize the software. Technology always changes and developers are usually proud of themselves when keeping up with the innovation.
3. Persuade Training
If you decided to upgrade technologies used, try to make sure that each staff member is trained. Support the developers will to learn and give them the opportunity or even the list of available resources on a topic. If needed buy premium access to the resources, they need.
4. Recognize Them
People love to be recognized. Whether they are doing the task no one wants to do or taking an initiative to do something; they want to be noticed. Of course, not everyone wants to have public recognition, yet you may try to develop a culture where each achievement and solution matters for the whole team. Encourage people to thank each other and freely express their positive attitudes to others work.
5. Give Opportunities to Grow
Your managers need to work with employees to find out what they want to do in future. Not all software developers would like to become managers, some of them will choose more technical paths. Make sure that each team member knows and feels that he or she has an opportunity to grow in your organization, and this will motivate them more. Loyal employees produce more quality work.
6. Support Innovation
Hackathons or similar events give your team an ability to innovate. Such activities encourage software engineers to have fun and experiment with their skills. Moreover, they turn on creativity and ingenuity of your team members.
7. Drive in Flexibility
Software engineers are different from other employees. They are in rare cases early birds, that is why to develop their loyalty you should establish flexible working hours and in some cases location. Work anytime from everywhere may help you to create a loyal team which will always think and do beyond. Of course, such a flexible system should be managed, but don’t put your workers into strict policies, try to develop flexible work conditions for them.
8. Empower
Allow your engineers to make their own decisions. Business leaders define the objectives and goals, and technical staff figures out how to code, design and process well. Yes, you need to have standards and guidelines, but they shouldn’t limit your devs from making decisions.
9. Simplify and streamline
If you are Agile, you know what we are talking about. Find the ways to streamline your processes and simplify the tools, so your team will focus on work more.
10. Hire talent
Teamwork is an essential part of any project. Try to hire people who are comfortable to work with each other, and they will undoubtedly produce quality code.
11. Gamify
Software engineers love playing games. And gamification of the working process is a cool idea since it will make work engaging. For example, you might try to give points for different activates your team has and offer them a prize at the end of the month.
12. Respect your team
No doubts, each needs respect. Respect talents and skills of your software engineers, they love to be understood and respected by others — because they are talented and smart. Otherwise, why you need your software development team?
