Keeping Engineering Teams Motivated

I recently came across this Reddit thread asking for advice about keeping engineering teams motivated and thought it was filled with great ideas and suggestions for first time managers across engineering teams. So, I wanted to highlight some Redditor suggestions and share my key takeaways for keeping engineering teams motivated.

First things first…

When it comes to being a great manager, the best thing that you can do is listen to your team. Ask them what it is that motivates them and actively listen and implement what you can, because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what I say or what the thread says, it matters what your team says. After taking these next paragraphs into consideration, go ahead and share your findings with your team and see if it aligns with their needs and goals. So, without further ado, let’s take a look at some of the most mentioned topics from the Reddit thread.

Provide Feedback

One of the main themes from this thread was feedback. Engineers often get their motivation from the feedback their managers provide. Whether that be praise for something that the team did well or constructive criticism for something that could have gone better. Creating an open line of communication is essential for building a successful team and will improve job satisfaction as engineers are able to feel and see their impact on the organization as a whole.

Create Learning Opportunities

It is important to show your team that you value their individual career growth, and not just their work that’s held here and now. By creating space to learn and grow, whether that is encouraging their attendance at webinars, events and sessions or providing them with the tools to learn new skills, teams will appreciate your dedication to them and be more excited to show up and complete their more mundane, everyday tasks.

Establish Trust

Trust is a huge deal when it comes to motivation. It is hard for engineers to stay motivated when it feels like their manager is watching every step they take. Whether it's allowing for remote work, flexible hours, or even just having them take ownership on certain projects, trust goes a long way and is sure to improve team satisfaction and trust. Another way to enhance trust is through owning up to your mistakes, not only does this show your team that you take responsibility and will not blame them in times of failure but also opens up the conversation for them to be more comfortable to admit to their mistakes and ask for help in the future.

Explain the Why

When given a long list of tasks, people are not always motivated to ‘just do it’ if they don’t understand the bigger picture. Setting aside time to explain how individual tasks contribute to the larger objective can increase their comprehension of what they do and why, and enables them to feel like they are a part of something bigger than their individual duties. Being a part of a team as a whole rather than being segmented by certain tasks can be an easy way for teams to visualize their responsibilities and see them in a different light.

Be a Forward Thinker

As mentioned previously, it is important for teams to value each other's growth, and managers must be thinking ahead to help their teams achieve internal growth as well. This can include giving them new responsibilities (if they are eager and ready to take them on), recommending them for promotions to higher management, or just asking them what their goals are and cheering them on as they take steps towards their desired achievements.

Provide the Right Resources

If teams are stretched too thin, they are often demotivated and burn out much faster than they would otherwise. So, managers must make sure that they are equipping their team with all of the necessary resources whether that’s specific software solutions, extra man power, or training sessions that make them more successful. This ensures that projects can be seen as accomplishments rather than roadblocks towards the main objectives.

Define Expectations

There is nothing worse than dedicating time and energy into a project only to find out that expectations changed or you had been doing it wrong from the start. Which is why managers must regularly meet with their teams to define their expectations and provide them with a set of guidelines that will lead them to success. This is not to be confused with micromanaging – once the expectations are set, teams must be able to work autonomously and only be required to reassess in the event that expectations have changed.

Create Equitable On-Call Rotations

In engineering roles, teams are no stranger to on-call rotations. However, if not managed effectively, these shifts can be daunting and stressful. So, it is the manager's job to ensure that on-call rotations and escalation policies are fair. Many teams do this by employing an on-call management solution that empowers them to streamline their on-call workflows and improve incident response. These improvements ultimately make on-call a more enjoyable responsibility for engineers everywhere.

Reduce Alert Fatigue

With on-call duties often comes alert fatigue; the desensitization to notifications due to the excessive receipt of irrelevant and unactionable alerts. So, when employing solutions that improve incident response, don’t forget to invest in incident alerting tools with prioritized alerting and distinctive notifications. It can be easy to believe these tools won’t change much for your team, but alert fatigue is a main contributor to burnout and reduced productivity. By leveraging alert management, teams will be able to focus on critical incidents, without wasting time sifting through emails, allowing them to feel more fulfilled and be more productive.

Conclusion

Becoming a first-time manager can be intimidating if you don’t know where to begin. So, I hope that this blog will help early managers motivate and improve the success of their team, their career, and their team’s careers. And if you take anything away from this blog, let it be that the best thing you can do for your team is listen to their needs and goals while taking action to get them to where they want to go.