Motivation is extremely important for a healthy team, because it provides the drive for people to accomplish their goals and thrive when solving hard problems on daily basis.

It is through motivation that the team members achieve their full technical, and hopefully, productive potential. Because motivation implies that one is in a professional fulfilling environment.

It is common sense that to produce fire you need three things: fuel, oxygen, and a spark. Productivity is most likely the same: Your team is the oxygen — always present; Motivation is the fuel — expensive and not so abundant; Finally the spark can be a single act of change — apparently harmless, however in a propitious environment can cause an explosion.

Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort — Paul J. Meyer

For this context, productivity is strongly attached to motivation, one cannot be achieved without the other, at least not in a healthy way. If you care about team members, you care about motivation.

Key aspects of a productive team

There are several points of view on how to achieve productivity in a team environment, based on my own experience these are the essential characteristics of a motivated team, and what can you do to improve them:

Sense of accomplishment

Grab any productivity or self-help book and it tells you that the foundation of productivity is a sense of accomplishment, therefore, you must manage expectations towards your goals.

Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments — Jim Rohn

Benjamin P. Hardy emphasizes on Slipstream Hacking Time, that time can be one of the worst enemies of productivity, because by investing time on tasks we create an expectation, which may lead to unpleasant feelings.

We place huge a bet on that task, we rely too much on it, then we fail and stop trying. What we forget is that most of the times on the attempt of creating something new or doing something different, we get it wrong, and that can be incredibly frustrating, but nevertheless is normal.

It is said that failure is the lack of planning, yet, how can you plan for the unknown?

Benjamin's book has a whole section about this, master plans are not the way to go, there are too many variables for our brain to think of. It is very much likely for you to fail, an alternative is to have a goal and understand enough for you to plan only your next two steps.

As a matter of fact, a famous group of writers got together once to establish the foundation values for software development teams, you may have heard of it as the Agile manifesto. One of its foundations is Responding to change over following a plan. By responding to new facts and planning for the next few steps you restrict yourself from the frustration of following master plans.

On a master plan every decision is made by the expectation of the previous ones’ outcomes, and most of the times failure is not taken into consideration.

Within a team, to get something wrong is a frequent thing, since it is hard to prioritize between features, requirements, and needs. It is important to understand that success demands failure, it demands learning.

You cannot afford to be afraid of making mistakes, yet fail, fail fast.

Embrace failure and you will be prepared to success

In the real world, what happens is:

Your team starts creating an awesome feature, someone adds that final touch, then the client thinks of something else to add, the UX wants to change everything, a user reports a bug… boom!

When are you going to deliver the feature x? What about solving the bug y? When are you going to refactor that nasty code? How can you prioritise?

You get stuck in a loophole and any effort on escaping seems in vain, because the mistake is deeper than that: your tasks are too big, your team does not finish and does not deliver anything anymore because your team does not have the definition of when the tasks are finished, the ending of the cycle.

The smaller a task is, the less frustration potential it holds

The same is valid for delivering, combine that with a short time-range and that happens to be the foundation of Continuous Delivery.

For Continuous Delivery, Cycle is the key factor in behind the management of our expectations. Break your goals into small tasks, prioritise, work hard, test, deliver, learn from your mistakes, and then start it all over gain.

Without the Cycle there is no sense of accomplishment, there is no begin, no end. The sense of accomplishment is only achieved by delivering. Delivery is the ending of the cycle, soon is the closure that our brain was waiting for, it is trained to expect that outcome.

Sense of belonging

A lot of the team-building books are based in sport teams because they are the perfect example: Short deadlines, well-established measures for success, pressure, physical tension, envy, as if that was not enough there is also huge amounts of money at stake.

Coaches have a hard-time managing teams, on sports like basketball, volleyball, and soccer, each player must rely on his teammates to perform its best and each player has its role, usually different and essential for the group success. In some cases, it is possible that a single player dominates the game.

Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships — Michael Jordan

Generally speaking, the fewer players that are active at a time, the more each player is responsible for the outcome. Accordingly, a single player can dominate team sports such as basketball, which uses only five players at a time. By contrast, soccer teams feature 11 players at a time, and the game is rarely dominated by a single player.

To avoid any individualistic sprints, it is important that everyone understand their part and trust each other.

Looking back, it is easy to notice a tendency of humans to bond and form groups. That is our nature, now, the way that these relations flow over time and the accomplishments are the result of trust.

People who connect and build fluid relationships are trust agents — Chris Borgan & Julien Smith

In order to promote trust, every group member must have a clear role and the resources to fulfil their part in the process.

A well-integrated team makes it hard to distinguish one’s work from another, they are aligned in the way that they think and act, they have learned from each other and they have established their own rules of conduct. They can approach hard technical problems knowing that everyone is working for the best solution for the team and the product. They are constantly consulting each other on the decisions, with or without a process or a tool to support this activities. It can be a single question asked now and then, or a well-established code-reviewing process.

The path to build trust is not a such relevant part of this process, there are several books and articles that may help your team achieve trust, some of which are listed at the end of this article. Though, the expected outcome of this section is the visible impact of trust on your team’s motivation.

Sense of awareness

So far it has been established that a productive team is composed of people with sense of accomplishment and sense of belonging. Our team members accomplish tasks and trust each other on accomplishing their own, which is quite relevant.

Yet man shall not live by tasks alone. At some point these tasks are going to be questioned, if they are not meaningful there will be complaints about it.

The less people know, the more they yell — Seth Godin

Even worse than that, when these tasks descriptions are not enough to express the work to be made, or they do not express their purpose for the long term strategy, people will make premature assumptions, which may lead to a dangerous path.

If you don’t give people information, they will make up something to fill the void — Carla O’Dell

People need to understand that what they are doing is meaningful in order to continue doing, to feel motivated by doing it and to do their best.

Another interesting principle of the Agile manifesto is Individuals and interactions over process and tools — valuing communication is more important than following any process.

The whole point of a process is providing you with well-defined ceremonies that encourage you to communicate, and, once your team understand that, the process becomes disposable. It is like removing the training wheels once you have learned how to ride a bike.

Always remember Conway’s Law:

Any organization that designs a system … will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.

Meaning that your applications will reflect your company’s communication structure. When, how and how often you communicate will have a strong influence on the outcome tasks of your teams.

As you may have noticed the key point of this section is communication among team members. For everyone to accomplish their tasks in the best possible way and trust their team members to do the same, they must understand about each others work and have a clear picture of the essence of their work. That is only achievable by having open and focused channels of communication. Small and well-defined meaningful ceremonies, moments that provide reasonable time, focus and oportunity to approach and discuss topics regarding each section of your development cycle.

Everything mentioned in this section help your team members to understand where they are in the process and give meaning to their tasks. The tasks must become meaningful, not just a group of activities that comply on their jobs titles.

Countless are the inspiring and productive moments achieved by a team that thrives the challenges of communication. Combined with the belonging and accomplishment, both productivity, and hopefully, success are a short step away. Yet that only time will tell.

Sense of self-improvement

Team members are volatile, you provide them with meaningful tasks, sense of accomplishment, trust and awareness, but in the end they still need to able to track individual progress.

The human being is well-known for its individualism, yet it is crucial for our internal fulfilment to notice our own improvement over time. Self-development is also one of the essential elements of motivation.

Several big companies provide their employees with rich trainings, sponsoring or even hosting events and conferences. They put the spotlight on their employees, allowing them to reflect and expose their accomplishments through their individual efforts.

Unfortunately, hosting a conference is not financially possible to every company, but in a smaller scale, it is in every company’s reach to provide knowledge-sharing sessions, buying books and allowing innovation to happen. Employee input is important as much as hiring them.

Small initiatives such as hack-days can provide your employees the keys for the company’s truck. Allow them to feel what is like to drive this huge and powerful vehicle.

The effects of such initiative is highly noticeable, by putting people on each others’ shoes they end up doing different tasks, creating ideas, making decisions and realising how important they are for the whole thing to happen. That creates a rich experience and that pays itself off by the end of the day.

Those are a few of the several ways to foster self-development of your team members, but, the most simple and impactful way still might be feedback.

Constant feedback sessions help you to improve the other senses of your team, they will trust each other more, they will improve the notion of accomplishment, they will renew their sense of awareness.

Always remember that feedback is a two way street, no one is self-contained. If you are part of team, act as one, because the employee input is quite valuable for the planning of the next cycle, it may solve your problems or at least highlight how people feel about them.

Check the references at the end of this article for further reading on the subject of feedback.