The basis of every successful project always is built-up of the following factors: determined goal, plan and project team, that is ready to rush the mountains in order to successfully accomplish the plan.
But there’s no team, no productive work, there are no any sprints and results without one simple yet crucial factor — team motivation. Motivation drives all the members of project team from the project start to its closure by giving power and persistence to complete all the tasks defined by a project plan.
This article was written in order to demonstrate how team motivation influences project agility and productivity, help to understand why motivation is important, teach how to track team motivation level and explain what benefits the highly motivated team can bring to the project, company and project manager. Let the journey begin…
What is team motivation
There are many definitions of the word “motivation”, but one of the most elegant is about to be considered the following formalization:
Motivation — internal and external factors that stimulate desire and energy in people to be continually interested and committed to a job, role or subject, or to make an effort to attain a goal. (businessdictionary.com)
Unfortunately in Project Management there’s no clear definition for “motivation”, because often it’s treated as an abstract non-material factor spread throughout all project activities and can be identified by its effect on overall project work, productivity and even project results.
However, Project Management and Psychology can identify two types of motivation:
- Personal motivation — motivation and motivational factors that drive a single person to achievements of its personal goal.
- Team motivation — motivation factors, that widely affect all members of the project team, driving the team to successful completion of the project goals, project milestones and project itself.
Motivation can be compared to the energy. As a Project Manager you can’t see it, feel it or analyze it, but it’s everywhere and without personal or team motivation implementation of any project would stall or wouldn’t be possible to evolve at all.
Why is team motivation important
Despite of its abstract nature, in Project Management team motivation can be named one of the key success factors of any Project. Giving the answers on the question “why is the team motivation important?” here are several good reasons why:
- Motivation has direct correlation with team productivity;
- Team motivation empowers problem solving and conflict avoidance/resolution;
- Motivation ensures constant team and project improvement, as the ;
- Highly motivated team contributes to creation of healthy work environment and development of corporate culture;
- Motivation is the lead of progress for the project, client and the company, as many innovative solutions were developed under the influence of great motivated professionals.
Both personal and team motivation is important because of one simple reason — everybody can benefit from high motivation, starting with team members that with the help of motivation can reach new career heights, and ending with a company that can profit from balanced and over-productive ‘all stars’ team.
Can team motivation be measured
The tricky question for every Project Manager is “how can I measure the motivation of my team?”. Unfortunately you can’t, at least you can’t do it precisely due to abstract context of the “motivation” term definition. But despite of this fact, it can be definitely be detected is the team motivation high or low by analyzing several factors.
When analyzing team motivation level, following factors should be considered:
- Team’s productivity and quality of work
- Team’s collaboration and communication
- Team’s health (both physical and psychological)
Making a head-to-head comparison in-between highly motivated team and low-motivated team using three crucial factors presented above will provide a following result.
High level of team motivation is a huge lead factor for project development, while poor motivated team will deliberately or not on its purpose generate lags and risk factors for the whole project.
If you are a Project Manager, Top-Manager or C-Level Executive ask yourself now, are you willing to invest some minimal time and resources to improve and maintain team motivation, or are you willing to put one or several projects at risk.
How to improve and maintain high team motivation
In order to profit at maximum from a highly-motivated team, the Project Manager should perform a certain list of Demming’s cycle (PDCA, Plan Do Check Act) in domain of team motivation:
- Plan — oversee the motivation as a non-material asset which is directly important for the project success
- Do — motivate the project team at the beginning and throughout the project execution cycle
- Check — always monitor levels of personal and team motivation
- Act — take appropriate action to raise and leverage team motivation levels in order to receive the best outcome
There are many personal and team motivation techniques available for every Project Manager. The most effective and cost-efficient approaches are listed below.
- Personal motivation: peer talk
Project Manager should not only be a subject matter expert, professional manager, good negotiator and leader, but also a good communicator, both for the clients, executive staff or project team members. One of the simplest methods to motivate certain team member is just to have a good conversation, to hear all the problems, to take them into account and to set some common goals together with the person. It is one of the most effective ways of personal motivation. - Personal motivation: context switching
Sometimes context switching from the same project routine and focusing on other assignments or projects help to motivate valuable team players and inspire them to finish the project activities with new powers and will. Context switching should be used when the decrease of person’s interest and productivity was noticed by the Project Manager. It should be applied gradually in order to find a perfect proportion of context mixing, that will empower and motivate certain project team member to achieve better results and don’t loose the focus while achieving the goal. - Personal motivation: promotion
Some persons need to be promoted in order to raise their motivation level. The types of promotion can be different, starting from promoting to a new higher-level position and finalizing with promotion via delegation of additional responsibilities as mentoring of new trainee. This motivation lever should be applied to pro-active and ambitious team members and always used with a caution in order not to demotivate other team members or not to overwhelm with the responsibilities the person which gets promoted. - Personal or team motivation: training sessions or courses
As an integrated part of Team Development domain, various qualification improvement, training sessions, courses or workshop can also be considered a strong motivational factors. Despite of their practical use for team members and company, as the team gets more qualified and gathers new knowledge, specialists always get inspired and tend to use new skills or information in process of project implementation. This kind of investment will help the PM and Organization to achieve both short-term and long-term profit along with considerable boost of motivation and productivity levels. - Team motivation: team building activities
Team building activities can be named “the classic way” to increase team motivation and improve team communication. This is the the mandatory attribute of every corporate culture that shouldn’t be forgotten. Going to a public event with the team or travelling abroad, having some fun office games or sport competitions — all of these team building activities will help to increase team motivation levels that eventually will positively affect the organization projects. - Team motivation: team bonuses and rewards
Material or non-material rewards for well-completed work can be treated as a motivational factors as well. Rewards and bonuses can be included into company’s KPI formula or OKRs list for extra-performance, or in any way it’s convenient for the company management. Any form of team rewards and bonuses for the completion of defined results with great performance and quality will increase team motivation and will stimulate all team members to work even harder together in order to gain continue the positive evolution. - Team motivation: good rest
Good vacations, occasional or planned day-offs upon project phase or milestone completion can raise the motivation, employee loyalty and productivity levels a lot. Sometimes the precondition of good work is a good rest that was given to all team members, so upon positive results delivery and great quality/productivity ration the allocation of optional holidays should be considered and analyzed as good option for improvement of team motivation.
There are many more motivational factors, from salary raises to experience exchange programs implementation. Expert Project Manager has a wide range of tools to use in order to leverage team motivation levels, but the fact that always should be considered — use only those personal or team motivation techniques, that will generate the best result and will require the less resources for their implementation.
Despite of altruistic nature of team motivation activities don’t forget about their pure pragmatic scope — improvement of employees productivity, loyalty and emotional levels.
Benefits of motivated team for PM and Company
Motivated and devoted project team can bring a range of benefits to the project, project manager and the whole company itself. Benefit factors listed below also demonstrate, how important team motivation in project and organizational context really is.
Benefits of highly-motivated team:
- Often over-productive team with smooth and predictable delivery pace
- Creation of healthy and rich communication in-between team/organization members
- Motivated team = healthy corporate values and atmosphere, that can directly affect new personnel on-boarding rate
- Controllable and less-risky medium for Project Management
- Absence of conflicts and low rate of personnel rotation
- Development of new innovative ideas for internal and commercial use
- Creation of high-professional and reliable “staffing basis” of the company, setting up of ‘key figures’ important for company development
Highly motivated teams or personas eventually become unbreakable pillars for development of every organization, so investing into team motivation can directly affect the success of the whole company.
Motivation starts from You
As a leader, team member and Project Manager always remember one golden rule — motivation starts from You!
Inspire colleagues with personal example, lead the team to new achievements and results, always strive for new goals and heights, and achieve the planned results together. The best motivation that can inspire other people is the one you’ve set for yourself and shared with others by demonstrating a positive example.
With a great power comes great responsibility... Motivation is the key factor of either career or personal achievements, so being a Project Manager means the ability to become a figure, a leader and living motivation example for your team. Always be motivated to reach new goals and the team will tend to work it out the same way.
Article recap and end notes
Motivation is a complex factor, that can directly affect both project and organizational success, so despite of its abstract nature it is very important to maintain and always improve team motivation levels.
- There are two types of motivation: personal or team motivation.
- High levels of personal or team motivation positively affect the organization, while low motivation levels can put the projects at big risk.
- Appropriate techniques for motivation leverage should be used in order to maximize the return of resources investment.
- In most cases, motivated team is the basis of project’s or organization success, so the investment into employees motivation can benefit the company on the long-term perspective.
- As a Project Manager always remember one simple rule — motivation starts from You.
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