Team Management Q&A

Hi Nathan,

Ask them, have a conversation with them!

It will be as different and as individual as they are.

Don't fall into the trap of thinking that you can apply a blanket approach. People and their behaviour are reinforced and rewarded in different ways, at different times, in different environments.

Behaviour can be shaped, predicted, reinforced, punished and most important measured.

How often do we start a conversation with...you always...everytime....you never....

Get baseline, behaviour and then measure.

To get more of the behaviour you want or want more of, reinforce through reward (actually has to be though). If you do this well you will find the behaviours you don't want or want less of start to go diminish and go way.

The absolute correct answer to your question is right there...right there... with that employee and that employee and that employee.....

Cheers

Greg

This question covers a lot of ground, but I'll try to give you a few concrete ideas.

• Genuinely thank people for their effort - don't make this a robotic process. You don't need to thank everyone every time they do their job (that's their job after all). However, when someone makes a great effort (regardless of if it works out) recognize their effort and work. When someone does something great acknowledge it (to them individually or at a team or company level - but make sure they are comfortable with public recognition before you blurt it out to everyone - so people aren't a fan of public recognition).
• Give people a bit of margin during the workday / work week - Perhaps its a percentage of time (like Google's 20%) or several hours a week. Give them this room to read industry related articles, take online courses to further their learning or just the time and resources to work on a personal project that fosters learning and can maybe have strategic advantages for the company down the road.
• Don't make failure a threat - people that take risks can definitely help keep your business going forward (I'm not speaking of anything illegal or anything that would make the company look bad). If you can teach people to learn from mistakes and failure and turn that into a better solution or process going forward, that is still a win. Treat it as such. If failure is penalized, people will only do the bare minimum and that won't be good for your business in the long run.
• Get to know individuals & what motivates them - First you need to know your people to create a good relationship. Second you need to understand what motivates them. This helps when it is time to give an award. They may want a monetary bonus. Perhaps they'd be happier with an extra day or two of vacation. Maybe they are just looking to make a leap from a regular position into management. Get to know everyone and reward them with what motivates them individually.

This is something every workplace must do, unfortunately in our experience most of them do it poorly!!

The most important point I will make it that feedback must be a continuous conversation, whether it is for positive or negative feedback. Too often people reserve giving feedback for annual or 6 monthly performance reviews. Why is this an issue? Because you top employees who are doing a good job will feel disengaged. You know they are doing great work but they don’t, so in many instances these people will end up leaving your workplace as they feel undervalued. This is not good for you! Alternatively bad performance does not get rectified in a timely manner. The longer bad performance goes on, the harder it is to rectify. Often one of the biggest issues is that people managers lack the skills or confidence to have the hard conversations.

In regards to recognition, yes things like recognition and presentation of awards and certificates in front of the team can be valued by employees. However our experience shows that often the little things have the biggest impact. Our work has show that things like a team lunch to celebrate a project milestone can go a long way to rewarding a job well done. Or for a smaller thankyou instead of just saying job well done, take them for a coffee and explain what it was you valued about their contribution. Trust me, as managers we see these things as small, but team members really value them.

Skeeve,

Your dream is no longer a dream :) In a hosted desktop environment everything is kept separate, no company data on the BOYD and therefore no personal data on the company servers. In the Windows environment all you need to do is ALT-TAB between the to environments and this applies to the Windows mobile devices as well. In the Mac world you would move between spaces and again this applies to the Ipad and even the Google tablets. I have a Mac and when I am at work or for that matter at home working I have my personal environment open in Desktop 1 (spaces) and my work environment open in Desktop 2 (if you have a mac you will have a better understanding of this).  When I am in the hosted desktop environment I have access to all my company data and printers etc no matter where I am traveling. For example I was in NZ traveling from the South Island to the North Island on the ferry. I was able to log into my hosted desktop on my Google tablet via 3G and was able proof read a document in Word make the changes (attach a diagram from Visio) and email it off. Close down the work environment and return to sending off a picture of the scenery to my family from my personal email using the native email client. 

Hi Tim. I appreciate you taking the time to respond. I'll keep plugging at it. If I have a successful epiphany I'll let you know.