Seema Sonkiya: Maintaining & Managing Team Motivation

Article based on PMBOK 4 and agile methodology recommendation of project team management and challenges to manage & maintain motivation of team members.

A project is started to achieve stated objectives, overall success of project is identified by how successfully project objectives have been achieved, which is directly influenced by team member’s commitment towards project goal and which is honestly related to team motivation.

PMI emphasis on proactive approach and care should be taken to ensure that team members remain motivated and never or less burned out or bored.

A project manager main focus here is to create an environment to meet project objectives so he/she need to understand project team member’s needs, expectations, background, goals and objectives with the project and with the overall career. Establishing and maintaining team commitment to achieve project objectives, it is necessary that their needs should be taken care of.

As a project manager we need to differentiate between hygiene factors and motivating agents. Every team members need satisfaction for hygiene factors, these are base elements to work so do not contribute towards motivation. As these are basic essentials so absence of these factors leads to de-motivation but their presence do not add to motivation.

I seen many project managers who only work for hygiene factors and claim that they take care of project team members motivation. Some example of hygiene factors:

1.       Taking care of personal life issues

2.       Salary hike when appraisal time come

3.       Security

4.       Status

5.       Relationship at work

6.       Working conditions like good chairs, cool environment, Breakfast, Dinner arrangement.

A project manager should not impose work to team members without analysis of their interest level, expectations. Each team member depend on different element to remain motivated. For example:

1.       Some team members always seek for challenging assignments, where they can utilize their skills and also can enhance them, because they like recognition.

2.       Some team members like power and have the ability to get others to cooperate towards common goal.

3.       Some team members seek only stability regardless of work assigned, may be considered as less motivated.

4.       Some team members work best when co-operating with others.

5.       Some team members seek for achievements and growth, continuous learning, attention and appreciation.

Efforts should be made to recognize team members in one or more of above mentioned categories and develop a strategy accordingly to get them to cooperate towards a common goal.

Work should be assigned after analysis of skills, availability and to which category(s) team member belongs. There should be appropriate combination for a team for all the categories.

A reward system should be implemented and efforts should be made to develop rewarding people so that planned system of reward system’s use can take place to maintain and enhance level of motivation.

Different team members have diverse needs of rewards which if influenced by the category to which they belong. Analyze them and develop reward system accordingly, because reward is useful only when it is valued by team members.

Rewarding team members are developed using Training, team building efforts, co-location of team members whenever possible, and using other interpersonal skills like leadership, communication, influencing, and negotiation. During development of team members their category is identified and updated in stakeholder management strategy which is developed first time during project initiation.

 People who love to accept challenging assignments, they are highly motivated and their responsibility and authority should be updated accordingly. People who are socially oriented rather than personal oriented then efforts should be made during Develop Team process to refine their leadership skills. Team member who tend to work best when cooperating with others they are recognized good team members who bring other peer members towards common goal when they feel that things are going well.

So strategy should be to develop rewarding people according to analysis of their identified category, this identification is continuous process as interest level may get change with time. During requirement workshop, sprint planning meeting and during sprint execution these things are observed. When work assignment is going on for a sprint, after analysis of required skills and needed availability interest levels are asked, means team members are asked to which tasks they would like to work. After appropriate resolution of conflicts of interest levels work is assigned to team members and used as a tool to identify or update to which category team members belong.

Efforts should be made to analyze team members using predefined meetings and processes, no unplanned meeting should take place because indirectly it may demotivate team members and they will not effectively contribute in these meetings. Use of spontaneous meeting highly contributes to demotivation. Communication planning, Requirement work shop, work assignment after sprint backlog, daily stand up meetings should be used as a tool as these are all planned and structured meetings.

If project team members are assigned on maintenance project then to avoid getting them burned out or bored work rotation after cross training can be used as a tool.

 Seema Sonkiya