How to Motivate IT employees?

Motivating your employees is the basis for achieving good results by your company.

Influencing either motivation or the competences of an employee, you alter their efficiency and, simultaneously the results of the company. The efficiency can thus be stimulated by raising the employee’s qualifications or applying appropriate motivators. Knowing general research on motivation and verifying individual employee preferences, you can raise our results as a manager.

Working with new technologies requires continuous learning and assimilation of new information. Therefore, managing a team of developers is a special challenge for managers. Programmers are very demanding people, with very good technical skills, who prefer coding to dealing with organisational issues. That is why it is very important to know their motivations and make the right use of that knowledge.

In the case of the IT industry, which is characterized by a high degree of specialisation, the dynamics of change, innovation and creativity, the Self Determination Theory, which talks about three types of motivators (competence, autonomy and relatedness) can be applied.

Competence refers to achieving better results in one’s field and increasing one’s e effectiveness, e.g. Granting conditions allowing to learn new things

Autonomy refers to the level of decision-making within the tasks performed, e.g. leaving the choice on the space and time when the time will be done

Relatedness relates to the sense of belonging to a given group and building interpersonal relations. e.g. Teaching employees who to ask for help to solve the problem

Another important factor, which DanPink mentions, is the purpose (the sense of meaning) e.g. Presenting the arguments behind compromises between the technology stack and market need.

Above theories are good starting point to define your own approach. But what is even more important is adjusting them to company goals and the objectives of the team.

Hard thing to do so?

Fortunately there are 3 sources you can find good tips on the topic: experts opinions, best practices of tech companies and survey. And we gathered it all in one e-book about How to Motivate employees in IT industry. Check more clicking on the link.

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