At the recent AHRI HR Practices day in Melbourne I had the privilege to introduce Joris Luijke from Atlassian to speak about the performance review process and employee engagement.
Atlassian realised that the performance review process caused undue stress and anxiety among employees and decided to rip the process apart. I have to say I was swooning a bit when Joris was talking about this and the changes they implemented at Atlassian, you can check out the full story on their blog.
Here are a couple of things that Atlassian realised, money doesn't create motivation, and small changes can lead to people being more satisfied in their roles.
Another speaker on the day Pete Baines summed it up by saying, 'all money does is enable you to do the things you want to do'. Money in itself is not a motivator. Here's the disclaimer though - people have to be paid adequately and at a satisfactory level for money to be taken off the table as an issue (think hygiene factors).
How did they deal with this at Atlassian? First off, they pay people at a good market rate, secondly they increased everyone's salary by 8% across the board. It turns out that people want certainty, even high performers were satisfied with the raise because they knew they would receive it as opposed to having to guess what their raise would be.
One of the other things that Atlassian did was get people to list their love's and loathe's. Everyone will have a portion of their work they love to do, a portion they're pretty happy with and a portion they loathe. The solution: try to reduce the things you loathe by 2 hours a week, and increase the things you love by 2 hours a week. By doing this people are working on things that engage them, they're passionate about and love doing. They're working to their strengths. It's pretty self explanatory why reducing the loathe's is a benefit (this can lead to process improvements or your loathe might be someone else's love so you both win).
The other benefit of the love/loathe trade off is that people feel like they're being listened to, they feel valued and they work harder.
What does this all boil down to? Pay people what they're worth and enable them to focus on their strengths.
Seems pretty simple to me.
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