What motivates our teams?
We know our colleagues’ intrinsic motivators within our work teams, understanding what drives them, the reasons, and how that affects commitment and satisfaction. As the UX team leader, my main concern is to create the environment and conditions that maximize the possibility that our team is motivated and engaged.
A study by Yoon Jik Cho and James Perry showed that employees who are intrinsically motivated are three times more engaged than employees who are extrinsically motivated (like money). (Motivating people. Does Money Really Affect Motivation? A Review of the Research by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, April 10, 2013)
Part of the problems we face as a team is that some of the projects are to give continuity to a product within the day to day, few are what we can create from scratch or run an initial discovery. This negatively impacts the team, since being a creative team, spending six months only making adjustments to digital products becomes frustrating.
During the last six months, I have given myself to reconnect with the team to solve the problems that we face at their roots; however, not being clear about what motivates them deep down, I was hardly achieving a change or solution.
Moving Motivators of Management 3.0 is a dynamic that helps us reflect on work teams’ motivation and how it affects organizational change. It is based on ten intrinsic wishes and 16 basic wishes, which Jurgen derived from the works of Daniel Pink, Steven Reiss, and Edward Deci.
If you want to put it into practice, I invite you to download the resources directly from Management 3.0 Moving Motivators (CHAMPFROGS): Intrinsic Motivation Game.
According to our team's needs, the dynamics we applied had some adjustments from the original practice. For example, because we are in two different locations, we meet remotely by zoom. We transfer the pos-it to a look board; we divide ourselves into smaller groups between ten to seven people for each dynamic; the time we invested was approximately one hour to have time for everyone to participate actively. The instructions we followed were:
We order the motivators according to the importance of each one.
Each one had to explain to the others the first three and the last motivator they had ordered.
We each reflected and ordered based on how our motivators had moved in the last two weeks (positively up or negatively down). Each motivator we raised or lowered concerning our line and explained it again.
We established what actions we should do to influence the motivators positively.
At the beginning of the dynamic, the reflection was individual; however, in the end, we did it in a group way.
We looked for how we achieve significant connections between the members. Something that we discovered is that there are many more coincidences of the ones we used to believe.
To date, we have support from the other teams; this time, we invited a member of the human talent team as part of the integration efforts with the areas. We had a great moment to share and understand that they also face challenges similar to ours.
What I learned when facilitating the dynamics was that in the two teams we have confluence, in both groups that we form, everyone has high esteem, the motivator of honor. The other two relevant motivators for the team are relationships, curiosity, and goal.
There are still two teams to perform the dynamic, so next time, the first change I would make would be that they will also order the motivators that they will define as a team. And from the results, see if the pattern that now continues to establish the motivators where we coincide as a group and align our vision and mission as a team based on what motivates us to align institutional strategy.
The actions carried out were that each one established action for the lowest motivator they had, personally or regarding the team. In my particular case, it was an intersection between my personal and work life.
The results that we obtained with both teams are that they managed to see that despite our diversity, even having a very similar role in the UX world, what moves us is different. There are points of confluence, such as raising the value of honor from different perspectives, allowing for better internal communication.
I recommend doing this practice after the Personal Maps or Diversity Index since information is shared at a deeper level of just tastes or abilities. That could be a barrier when the team is recently formed or has never had direct contact. I also advise looking for a comfortable space, allowing the team to choose the time and place, to create a safe environment to share with total freedom of expression and prejudice.
A few months ago, I read the article The Poetry Of Disengagement: Seek Out Your Team’s Intrinsic Motivators by Justin Follin, where he asks:
Could you walk through your list of employees and say, assuredly, you know what motivates them, intrinsically? (The Poetry Of Disengagement: Seek Out Your Team’s Intrinsic Motivators, by Justin Follin, Forbes Coaches Council, Forbes, February 2019)
I confess that I was intrigued by how I could achieve it without being intrusive with my team members during those months.
However, with this dynamic, I can assure that as of today, I can answer this question since when I asked it, it allowed me to know the motivations that move them and in which we have confluence.
At the moment of at least two teams within our great UX team, I consider it the beginning of a great team process.
