May 29, 2019 at 8:15 pmMotivation. Do it yourself
There is such a useful task - the development of motivation systems. For a long time I watched the unhappy HRs who created the KPI systems, material and non-material motivation, tried to raise the corporate spirit. My observations have always shown the same thing - HR is missing something in this work. It seems that the words are spoken correctly, and the philosophy underlying their calculations is correct, but the motivation systems they created do not withstand any criticism.
For some reason, indicators that are not related to each other always always result, most of which are not measured. Next, a project is launched to automate the calculation of these indicators, and by the time it is completed, the indicators become outdated, because the business understands that it wants people to have nothing to do with what these indicators lead to.
And if you remember that a business is far from always able to properly express in words what it wants from a particular position, then it becomes completely sad. And well, if it cannot be expressed, it sometimes doesn’t understand. More precisely, the specific representative of this business who orders the motivation system does not understand.
The result is almost always a “some kind of” motivation system that thinks at least something and gives at least some idea of people's work efficiency. But the main trouble - the motivation system does not benefit the business, because it evaluates people according to criteria that are not profitable for him.
Such a motivation system also does not benefit people, because makes it impossible to earn more money, benefiting the business.
As a result, I came to the conclusion that the development of motivation systems is more an engineering task than a humanitarian one (for example, sweet and kind HR will forgive me). Like it or not, the motivation system is a system of indicators. Indicators are measurement, border management, consistency of goals and capabilities, a clear relationship with the business process, proper automation. All of the above are engineering tasks.
Who in modern Russian business is the person who, by the sum of his competencies, is the best in these areas? Programmer, who else.
During my time as a programmer and someone like an IT director, I directed or participated in the development of a dozen motivation systems - for programmers, storekeepers, designers, procurement, managers. In the development of motivation systems, I participated at different levels. First - automated the calculation of indicators that someone came up with. Then he participated in the compilation of indicators, as "a representative of the IT department who understands the complexity of their calculation." When I realized that it was not a matter of calculation technique, but somewhere above, I tried to make motivation for my subordinates. When it brought people an increase in money, and the company doubled the productivity of people, I, in test mode, was sent to make a system for storekeepers. When, thanks to this system, problems with late loading / unloading / picking, etc., disappeared, they began to stick me into all motivation development projects. In my place, of course, there can be any programmer.
During this work, I made a number of observations about which principles and criteria should satisfy mutually beneficial motivation systems. I hasten to share.
First and foremost, the system must be mutually beneficial, i.e. help achieve the goals of both parties - the employee and the company. Or a little differently: the system should encourage activities that are beneficial to the business, and encourage so that it is beneficial to the employee. Well, and accordingly, should not encourage the fact that the business does not need to hell, but the employee likes it.
Start with the goal of the company, it is here that the majority of mistakes are made. You need to clearly understand what you want from the people performing the function (you - because you are in this kind of work, as it were, on the side of the business).
What you want from them should not be much. Ideally, one indicator. If there are a lot of indicators, then we will get the BSC - a balanced system of indicators that will be unbalanced very quickly.
I recommend doing so. Find one, the most important product produced by the function, and put all its important characteristics into the measurement rules of this product.
The main thing is that the product and its characteristics should be beneficial to the business. Here, alas, no one will especially help you with the formulation of the product. You just need to talk with everyone involved - first of all, with internal consumers, customers of this product. What real problems do they have, and because of which particular characteristics (quality, deadlines, timeliness, etc.).
Suppose two indicators are put into the motivation system of an internal programmer - the output in hours and the quality assessment by users. They can be replaced with one - development of tasks whose assessment of the quality of solution is higher, for example, 4 points. If you are also concerned about meeting deadlines, add the condition "... completed on time."
I solved the problem, got a score above 4 points, met the deadline - the output was counted. Did not fulfill one of the conditions - not counted (or counted at a discount). This will be the product.
In this case, the person better understands what is the product of his work. He does not need to create two products in parallel - development and evaluation.
I had an example with such parallelization. We had a director who did not like me. In general, nobody usually liked me, because He asked too many questions, rejected tasks and projects, and explained as clearly as possible why solving a problem would not benefit the business. Well, I had an idea that this is what the CIO should do.
So, with every change of director, everyone who was dissatisfied lined up to complain about me - the old director was already used to it, and, seeing the results of my work, he understood the reasons for dissatisfaction. I didn’t want to delve into the new one, and presented me with an indicator for a quarterly award - an assessment of the quality of my work by managers. It seems that there should have been at least 4.5 on average.
There are two errors: a quarterly estimate and a separate indicator. Despite the fact that I already had an assessment at the level of each task, and real haters did not hesitate to put 2. Of course, this indicator did not affect my work. He also brought nothing useful to business. Just at the end of the quarter I came to each leader, and with a wide smile on my face I asked to evaluate my work. Of course, with the promise of "giving your department more attention." The prize was received in full.
What is interesting - with this approach, unnecessary responsibilities often disappear, or at least they become visible. This is the case when you change the motivation system of an existing, established function, with a pile of accumulated inefficiency.
For example, you have chosen a product for a function, and people tell you - and we have been doing such a thing every day for two years now. You need to look very closely at such things with an unbroken look - do you really need them?
There are a lot of examples. There are vendors who maintain a large Excel file called "deficit" in the network directory. This is a stupid list of nomenclature items that are needed for production or sale, but they were missed. Unload from the system, put down the delivery time, write some comments. Spend a lot of time. All data is already in the system, in constant access. But it happened since the time of lack of automation.
We make motivation in which there is nothing about maintaining this file. Previously, there was a salary, inside of which a mass of such shit was placed, and he paid "that's all for it." And now - a deal with a guarantee salary, for a moving percentage of security. There is simply no room left for a large deficit. Not if anyone wants to - let him continue to do, only at his own expense. Somewhere in a couple of weeks, the large Excel file disappeared.
So, each duty should be subjected to the test "for hell it is needed." If not needed - fine, feel free to throw it away. If people are against - even better. You just stop paying for it.
If this is something useful related to the product - excellent, we introduce it as a characteristic.
Another option, when you can’t decide for sure, is to isolate this obligation and see what happens. For example, in the case of programmers, you can isolate technical support for users - put an individual person on this job. It is important that the performance of this duty by all could not serve as an excuse ("we did not work out, because all together helped this fool"). With isolation, there will be no influence, and you will be able to understand both the scope of this strange duty and its benefits to the business.
For example, the tech support spread over all seemed to take a lot of time. Nobody knew exactly how much and who had it, but everyone had the feeling that “they’ve been ringing all day, as they’ve been sick of it, just sit down, get into it - again the bell.” And when technical support was isolated, it turned out that it takes a maximum of 4 hours a day for one person. At the same time, he does not pull any of his colleagues, he copes with everything.
So, you have formulated the product - what do you want from the function.
Now you need to decide how much of this product you want. Fundamentally, there are two options:
There is no ceiling for the seller. For the supplier - usually there. For a design engineer, no. For the HR manager - there is.
The formula of a motivation system depends on the presence of a ceiling: piecework or for achieving / maintaining a level.
For example, it’s wrong to pay the supplier for the purchase volume; he will overfill the warehouse with any hardware that is delivered one hour after the order in any volume. Paying for maintaining the buffer in the green zone is correct, even if in the reporting period a person did nothing for this, due to the lack of buffer consumption, there is no fault in it.
Paying the seller for the volume of applications is also not always correct (except when demand is much lower than supply). It is better for the seller to pay for sales, and even better - for the arrival of money, because inside the product “sale” the necessary characteristics for the business are already laid. For example, the sale and payment that has taken place means that the product was produced, all materials were purchased, services were provided, money came to the current account. Well, this is a clear example to everyone.
There is another option for the advanced - the definition of a product through sales or profit for those who are not involved in sales and profit.
For example, to pay the supplier a percentage of the sales profit of what he bought. Or pay a design engineer a percentage of the sales of what he designed (such as copyright percentage).
This option is bad because the business process is not becoming obvious - what exactly should a person do every day in order to earn more. This is an indicator that measures the contribution to the final result, and not the execution of the process.
If the business process is of poor quality, then people will begin to sabotage its changes - they will be afraid that your changes will negatively affect the result, and accordingly their income.
But this option is also good - in that you involve people in creating / optimizing the business process that leads to the desired result, because you now have the same requirements for the result.
Whether or not to use this option depends on the situation and the people for whom you are creating a motivation system. If there is sensible, proactive, and there is a real impact of them or yours on the business process - you can try.
So, if there is no ceiling, determine how much you pay per unit of product. Usually this is a percentage of sales / profits, or a certain rate - hourly, for example. Next is a matter of technology.
If there is a ceiling, then the formula is simpler - you pay for the percentage of achievement of the ceiling. For example, for fulfilling a sales plan, or an average-sliding percentage of buffer fullness, or for completing all the tasks received. Percentage - in units of the product that you defined for the function.
In the process of developing a motivation system, I highly recommend using at least the triad of changes (there will be a separate article about the triad).
Surely it turns out that the business process does not allow you to produce, or isolate and measure the product that you called the main one. Surely the automated system that you use will not allow you to calculate motivation indicators, especially in a daily mode.
Therefore, I recommend the triad - immediately change the motivation system, and the business process, and automation.
This is especially true if you will be launching a new motivation system in test mode, in parallel with the current one, for a certain period. By the way, I always do this - and people will look at the alternative in terms of income, and the system can be run in, the shortcomings can be eliminated.
Also, the test period is important for collecting statistics, especially if you are measuring a product that you have not previously measured. You need to determine the price for it, and for this you must understand how many units of a product a person produces per month.
In this case, the price is approximately equal to the ratio of a person’s income to the volume of the produced product. Perhaps with a slight decrease, so that there is an incentive to do more.
That's all - automate, test, run, track and adjust.
Let's look at the result from the employee. The main thing that gives the employee such a motivation system is certainty. He clearly understands what money is being paid for and what is not. And how much they pay. And what needs to be done to earn more.
Of course, there are workers for whom such a system would not be profitable - those who are used to hiding in the general mass, when the personal result is not measurable. Also, those who came just to sit. These are great guys, but the article is not about them and not for them.
For some reason, indicators that are not related to each other always always result, most of which are not measured. Next, a project is launched to automate the calculation of these indicators, and by the time it is completed, the indicators become outdated, because the business understands that it wants people to have nothing to do with what these indicators lead to.
And if you remember that a business is far from always able to properly express in words what it wants from a particular position, then it becomes completely sad. And well, if it cannot be expressed, it sometimes doesn’t understand. More precisely, the specific representative of this business who orders the motivation system does not understand.
The result is almost always a “some kind of” motivation system that thinks at least something and gives at least some idea of people's work efficiency. But the main trouble - the motivation system does not benefit the business, because it evaluates people according to criteria that are not profitable for him.
Such a motivation system also does not benefit people, because makes it impossible to earn more money, benefiting the business.
As a result, I came to the conclusion that the development of motivation systems is more an engineering task than a humanitarian one (for example, sweet and kind HR will forgive me). Like it or not, the motivation system is a system of indicators. Indicators are measurement, border management, consistency of goals and capabilities, a clear relationship with the business process, proper automation. All of the above are engineering tasks.
Who in modern Russian business is the person who, by the sum of his competencies, is the best in these areas? Programmer, who else.
During my time as a programmer and someone like an IT director, I directed or participated in the development of a dozen motivation systems - for programmers, storekeepers, designers, procurement, managers. In the development of motivation systems, I participated at different levels. First - automated the calculation of indicators that someone came up with. Then he participated in the compilation of indicators, as "a representative of the IT department who understands the complexity of their calculation." When I realized that it was not a matter of calculation technique, but somewhere above, I tried to make motivation for my subordinates. When it brought people an increase in money, and the company doubled the productivity of people, I, in test mode, was sent to make a system for storekeepers. When, thanks to this system, problems with late loading / unloading / picking, etc., disappeared, they began to stick me into all motivation development projects. In my place, of course, there can be any programmer.
During this work, I made a number of observations about which principles and criteria should satisfy mutually beneficial motivation systems. I hasten to share.
First and foremost, the system must be mutually beneficial, i.e. help achieve the goals of both parties - the employee and the company. Or a little differently: the system should encourage activities that are beneficial to the business, and encourage so that it is beneficial to the employee. Well, and accordingly, should not encourage the fact that the business does not need to hell, but the employee likes it.
Start with the goal of the company, it is here that the majority of mistakes are made. You need to clearly understand what you want from the people performing the function (you - because you are in this kind of work, as it were, on the side of the business).
What you want from them should not be much. Ideally, one indicator. If there are a lot of indicators, then we will get the BSC - a balanced system of indicators that will be unbalanced very quickly.
I recommend doing so. Find one, the most important product produced by the function, and put all its important characteristics into the measurement rules of this product.
The main thing is that the product and its characteristics should be beneficial to the business. Here, alas, no one will especially help you with the formulation of the product. You just need to talk with everyone involved - first of all, with internal consumers, customers of this product. What real problems do they have, and because of which particular characteristics (quality, deadlines, timeliness, etc.).
Suppose two indicators are put into the motivation system of an internal programmer - the output in hours and the quality assessment by users. They can be replaced with one - development of tasks whose assessment of the quality of solution is higher, for example, 4 points. If you are also concerned about meeting deadlines, add the condition "... completed on time."
I solved the problem, got a score above 4 points, met the deadline - the output was counted. Did not fulfill one of the conditions - not counted (or counted at a discount). This will be the product.
In this case, the person better understands what is the product of his work. He does not need to create two products in parallel - development and evaluation.
I had an example with such parallelization. We had a director who did not like me. In general, nobody usually liked me, because He asked too many questions, rejected tasks and projects, and explained as clearly as possible why solving a problem would not benefit the business. Well, I had an idea that this is what the CIO should do.
So, with every change of director, everyone who was dissatisfied lined up to complain about me - the old director was already used to it, and, seeing the results of my work, he understood the reasons for dissatisfaction. I didn’t want to delve into the new one, and presented me with an indicator for a quarterly award - an assessment of the quality of my work by managers. It seems that there should have been at least 4.5 on average.
There are two errors: a quarterly estimate and a separate indicator. Despite the fact that I already had an assessment at the level of each task, and real haters did not hesitate to put 2. Of course, this indicator did not affect my work. He also brought nothing useful to business. Just at the end of the quarter I came to each leader, and with a wide smile on my face I asked to evaluate my work. Of course, with the promise of "giving your department more attention." The prize was received in full.
What is interesting - with this approach, unnecessary responsibilities often disappear, or at least they become visible. This is the case when you change the motivation system of an existing, established function, with a pile of accumulated inefficiency.
For example, you have chosen a product for a function, and people tell you - and we have been doing such a thing every day for two years now. You need to look very closely at such things with an unbroken look - do you really need them?
There are a lot of examples. There are vendors who maintain a large Excel file called "deficit" in the network directory. This is a stupid list of nomenclature items that are needed for production or sale, but they were missed. Unload from the system, put down the delivery time, write some comments. Spend a lot of time. All data is already in the system, in constant access. But it happened since the time of lack of automation.
We make motivation in which there is nothing about maintaining this file. Previously, there was a salary, inside of which a mass of such shit was placed, and he paid "that's all for it." And now - a deal with a guarantee salary, for a moving percentage of security. There is simply no room left for a large deficit. Not if anyone wants to - let him continue to do, only at his own expense. Somewhere in a couple of weeks, the large Excel file disappeared.
So, each duty should be subjected to the test "for hell it is needed." If not needed - fine, feel free to throw it away. If people are against - even better. You just stop paying for it.
If this is something useful related to the product - excellent, we introduce it as a characteristic.
Another option, when you can’t decide for sure, is to isolate this obligation and see what happens. For example, in the case of programmers, you can isolate technical support for users - put an individual person on this job. It is important that the performance of this duty by all could not serve as an excuse ("we did not work out, because all together helped this fool"). With isolation, there will be no influence, and you will be able to understand both the scope of this strange duty and its benefits to the business.
For example, the tech support spread over all seemed to take a lot of time. Nobody knew exactly how much and who had it, but everyone had the feeling that “they’ve been ringing all day, as they’ve been sick of it, just sit down, get into it - again the bell.” And when technical support was isolated, it turned out that it takes a maximum of 4 hours a day for one person. At the same time, he does not pull any of his colleagues, he copes with everything.
So, you have formulated the product - what do you want from the function.
Now you need to decide how much of this product you want. Fundamentally, there are two options:
- As much as possible (no ceiling)
- Not more than necessary (there is a ceiling).
There is no ceiling for the seller. For the supplier - usually there. For a design engineer, no. For the HR manager - there is.
The formula of a motivation system depends on the presence of a ceiling: piecework or for achieving / maintaining a level.
For example, it’s wrong to pay the supplier for the purchase volume; he will overfill the warehouse with any hardware that is delivered one hour after the order in any volume. Paying for maintaining the buffer in the green zone is correct, even if in the reporting period a person did nothing for this, due to the lack of buffer consumption, there is no fault in it.
Paying the seller for the volume of applications is also not always correct (except when demand is much lower than supply). It is better for the seller to pay for sales, and even better - for the arrival of money, because inside the product “sale” the necessary characteristics for the business are already laid. For example, the sale and payment that has taken place means that the product was produced, all materials were purchased, services were provided, money came to the current account. Well, this is a clear example to everyone.
There is another option for the advanced - the definition of a product through sales or profit for those who are not involved in sales and profit.
For example, to pay the supplier a percentage of the sales profit of what he bought. Or pay a design engineer a percentage of the sales of what he designed (such as copyright percentage).
This option is bad because the business process is not becoming obvious - what exactly should a person do every day in order to earn more. This is an indicator that measures the contribution to the final result, and not the execution of the process.
If the business process is of poor quality, then people will begin to sabotage its changes - they will be afraid that your changes will negatively affect the result, and accordingly their income.
But this option is also good - in that you involve people in creating / optimizing the business process that leads to the desired result, because you now have the same requirements for the result.
Whether or not to use this option depends on the situation and the people for whom you are creating a motivation system. If there is sensible, proactive, and there is a real impact of them or yours on the business process - you can try.
So, if there is no ceiling, determine how much you pay per unit of product. Usually this is a percentage of sales / profits, or a certain rate - hourly, for example. Next is a matter of technology.
If there is a ceiling, then the formula is simpler - you pay for the percentage of achievement of the ceiling. For example, for fulfilling a sales plan, or an average-sliding percentage of buffer fullness, or for completing all the tasks received. Percentage - in units of the product that you defined for the function.
In the process of developing a motivation system, I highly recommend using at least the triad of changes (there will be a separate article about the triad).
Surely it turns out that the business process does not allow you to produce, or isolate and measure the product that you called the main one. Surely the automated system that you use will not allow you to calculate motivation indicators, especially in a daily mode.
Therefore, I recommend the triad - immediately change the motivation system, and the business process, and automation.
This is especially true if you will be launching a new motivation system in test mode, in parallel with the current one, for a certain period. By the way, I always do this - and people will look at the alternative in terms of income, and the system can be run in, the shortcomings can be eliminated.
Also, the test period is important for collecting statistics, especially if you are measuring a product that you have not previously measured. You need to determine the price for it, and for this you must understand how many units of a product a person produces per month.
In this case, the price is approximately equal to the ratio of a person’s income to the volume of the produced product. Perhaps with a slight decrease, so that there is an incentive to do more.
That's all - automate, test, run, track and adjust.
Let's look at the result from the employee. The main thing that gives the employee such a motivation system is certainty. He clearly understands what money is being paid for and what is not. And how much they pay. And what needs to be done to earn more.
Of course, there are workers for whom such a system would not be profitable - those who are used to hiding in the general mass, when the personal result is not measurable. Also, those who came just to sit. These are great guys, but the article is not about them and not for them.