Start a StartUp / Blog

Most companies have it all wrong. They don’t have to motivate their employees. They have to stop de-motivating them. Everyone inherently wants to be motivated. Just remove all the barriers on the steps to achievement and keep great work flowing.
The book, “Maverick : The Success Story Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace“, has a neat statement we believe is at the core to getting doing great work.

3 stone cutters were asked about their jobs. The first said he was paid to cut stones. The second replied that he used special techniques in a special way, and proceeded to demonstrate his skills. The third stone cutter just smiled and said, “I build cathedrals”.

We wholeheartedly believe in this statement. A great idea has the power to bring out the best in all of us.

Keeping this principle in mind, there are three imp things we ingrained in our process. Motivation, Responsibility, Celebration.
Motivation: Team members are motivated if the problem being solved is a tough problem and we have a great idea that can solve it. Any problem is tough if we try to find new ways to solve it and be the best in the world. Great design and implementation ideas keep the team motivated and wanting to do more. Freedom to input any great idea in to the project always keeps the team members invigorated.

Responsibility with accountability: A team member has responsibility if they pick their own tasks and are evaluated on it. Freedom to design the application in his/her areas of expertise is what fuels motivation. All technical questions are replied by the product manager with a “You tell me!” In our process, the team members are free to choose any task daily from a list of pending tasks and setup their own time to do it. For example we use Basecamp, a project management web application to write the spec on a writeboard, archive daily messages in the messages tab and set broad deadlines for demos and releases in the milestones tab. Team members use the to-do tool in it to list the tasks that they promise for that day. The team member has the freedom set the granularity of the task, but the rule is to complete the tasks that day only. If the team member fails to complete the tasks he promised the team, his name will go up in a list along with the day as a defaulter. Quality of the tasks performed is maintained by raising bug reports which inturn are connected to the tasks. If a certain team member has low quality output, it is shown by the number of bugs a ticket has. In all, freedom to select our work with proper accountability does wonders to motivation and creativity.

Celebration: An internal smile always lights up when the team hears about how their decisions and execution made somebody’s day or work more pleasurable. This information is frequently gathered and shared. The celebration messages are archived with the task list and coming across a previous message is always pleasurable. Celebration provides encouragement to novice team member to crossover to the expert category.
Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments about our process. We continuously strive to improve on it.