Motivation

There are various definitions of success, and the ones I like revolve around the topic of happiness. Having fun doesn’t hurt, no matter the situation! And work should be fun: We stand up for what’s fun, we enjoy what’s fun, and we do stuff well if it’s fun. And without even noticing, motivation sneaked up and made us do our work better. And I love better!

Motivate your team colleagues

In our collaboration with Siemens, we recently realised how much fun it is to be the person who closed and merged the most branches in our GitLab repo, and rub that under everybody’s nose. We even started to keep track of how many branches we would have finished recently, and make sure that everybody knew whenever we finished another one.

Being the competitive sports man that he is, Julian joked about awarding badges and making a ranking. That idea stuck with me, and a few weeks later I surprised the team with what we call the HSE Finisher Badge stickers.

Whoever finishes a branch takes another sticker, writes the name of the finished feature on to it, sticks it to their chest, and runs around with it for the rest of the day. Benjamin was lucky to just have finished two branches that day, so he was awarded the very first two badges – congratulations! 🙂

Motivate your employees

This one is easy and hard at the same time. We never run out of ideas for how to make our lives a little more fun. Finding time for that is actually the bottle neck. Still, every now and then we manage to break out of our routine…

Listening and catering to the needs and wishes of your team is another way to keep the motivation up. Even if that means sitting alone in your posh office 🙂

Motivate yourself

This one’s probably the hardest to accomplish. The saying goes that you just need to do what you love, and life will be easy. But there’s always just one more feature you need to implement, just one more office task you need to take care of, just one more message you need to answer, and just one more person you promised to call back.

So if your daily agenda is set, and you’re having a hard time breaking out of it, how about slipping a little bit of what you love into what you do?

Now look at that – I had not expected that I’ll need to create a gallery to fit all of the things I enjoy into this post! Lucky me 🙂

What’s your deal? How do you keep your motivation high?

Update: After having a little chat with Steve Watts (read his Random Ramblings on LabVIEW Design!) about life, the universe and everything, I want to stress that it’s imperative to find out what it is that motivates you. Even Simon says “Start with Why“! Some people want to get ideas out there, some people want to put themselves out there, some people just love to hack away at stuff. Some people love the solitude of long walks, others enjoy crowded places. Only if you know what you love and what motivates you can you start getting more from that and less from the rest.