3 tips to boost your developers’ energy at work
It’s no secret that routine at work can get monotonous and unmotivating sometimes. Everyone, at some point, needs to reconnect with their job and find the inspiration again. Nothing wrong with that – we are only human!
Did you know that, according to Gallup’s research, companies with an engaged team are 21% more profitable? Despite this, the research shows that 85% of employees are not engaged at work.
Knowing this, it sounds a bit odd that companies aren’t dedicating more resources, monetary or not, to increase their employees’ motivation and engagement at work.
Fortunately enough, there are many different initiatives that can help you turn that percentage upside down for your team!
And what about developers? Spending their days in front of the screen, fixing bugs, coding, creating new cool features, taking care of the users’ experience… Those need some attention as well!
But no worries, these tips will have you covered with your DevOps team.
Overall, the main tip for all companies out there is to start considering employees’ motivation as an ongoing objective to work on. Yes, that’s kind of broad. Luckily, there are many other, more accurate, tips to increase motivation at work – on a daily basis!
Let’s get hands-on with these 3 tips to boost your developers’ energy at work:
Promote data-driven conversations
Creating a positive work environment is the #1 step to promote a positive attitude among your employees. Makes sense, right?
But sometimes, having a nice vibe is not enough to keep a motivated and focused workforce.
You can give it a little twist, and change the “How was the weekend?” for “How was last week?”. Your employees then have the opportunity to talk about their numbers, get inspiration from their colleagues, and get better insights into their own performance.
And of course, this is also applicable to your developers! No matter the department, we all work with some kind of data.
A friendly way of getting started with this type of conversation is, for instance, establishing check-in meetings. It consists of a quick meeting – up to 15 minutes – where a department gathers and talks about the objectives for the week. Both individual and per department.
There, your developers can set the daily goals for the week, talk about last week’s results, and maybe even mention the learnings gathered.
It’s all about creating the space for your team to talk about the exciting or challenging parts of their job, and share their insights with one another.
Try it, and you’ll see!
Allow them to follow their progress
One condition to having data-driven conversations around the office – or through video calls if working remotely, is to actually allow your team to follow their own progress towards their goals.
There are many different ways of doing this, but remember that it’s all about transparency with your team.
For instance, an idea that can help you boost your developers’ motivation towards their KPIs is having one-on-ones meetings regularly. Apart from talking about their role, it’s also interesting to give it a data-driven approach by bringing real data.
This way, the employee can see first-hand how the progress has been, how far or close if the KPI from being reached, or whether there was a peak where something didn’t work.
This way, your employees become more aware of their own performance and can make better decisions about it.
Another option is to use a data visualization software, like Plecto, that can display their progress and KPIs in real-time. This allows your developers to have a full overview of their pending and already completed tasks, soon-to-be reached objectives or longer-term goals. All at one glance.
They no longer need to wait for the weekly reviews, or the monthly reports, because they have 24/7 access to their performance.
This allows you to have a more independent team, with each employee taking control over their data. Plus, being able to see their real-time progress promotes some self-competition, where your employees challenge themselves to do better at work – and visualizing it.
Celebrate your employees
Celebrating success is often the reason for achieving it in the first place! This might sound obvious, but many companies usually forget about the last step when it comes to their employees’ KPIs.
Just because your employees do what they were hired for, does not mean they can’t take credit from it. In fact, they should! That’s what keeps one willing to do it again.
What happens when you set a goal, work hard to reach it, and then, when it’s done, no one notices? You’d probably not have the same energy to do it again. And again, and again.
In fact, according to research carried out by Globoforce, almost 70% of employees agreed that they would work harder if they felt their efforts better appreciated by the manager.
This is probably what your team goes through, or would do if you don’t take the time to give them the tap on the shoulder they need – symbolically or not.
The good thing is, that there are endless ways of celebrating an employee!
For instance, you can create different initiatives for the various types of goals. Let’s say, every time your developers finish a sprint, they do 10 push-ups together. You can also keep it lower if your development team won’t handle it.
Another example is that, for every bug solved on the website, a notification pops up in the internal communication channel, or in the data visualization software. This way, all your employees – from every department – will know what’s going on around the team.
And that, indirectly, it’s also a motivating push for the rest of the team. Seeing each other working hard and achieving targets, motivates the rest to join the high-performance spirit.
Plus, who doesn’t like a little celebration after a good job?
