Not Sure What’s Killing Your Team’s Productivity?
5 strategies that helped our team fight boredom and get engineering excellence award at Google
👋 Hi, this is Akash with this week’s newsletter. I write about leadership in software engineering. Thank you for your readership.
This week I’m sharing 5 key strategies you can adopt today to spark motivation in your team. Hope you enjoy this edition!
Do you ever feel like the team is not making significant progress in the last few quarters? Are you missing those interesting conversations in your team chat? Do you suddenly start getting too many reasons for not being able to finish the work?
There’s a good chance they’re all connected. Studies indicate 80% employees feel more productive if they’re inspired. The downtrend in performance might indicate a lack of motivation in the team. As a new leader, I mistook it for cycles of ups and downs. I'll admit, often I assumed everyone else was as excited as me.
Today, I’m sharing 5 changes that you can make to fight the boredom in your team. You’ll be able to apply them and get your team as excited as you’re.
⭐ Main Takeaways
How to look for signs of boredom in your team
Simple changes to get your team back on track and performing at its best
🚧 Signs to Look For
How often does someone on your team tell you that they're bored? They're not enjoying their work anymore. As much as we’d love to hear it directly, it’s rare.
In my case, I knew our team was doing important stuff. I assumed everyone must be pumped. But the results were telling me a different story. Are you making similar assumptions about your team?
After making this mistake long enough, I started noticing some patterns.
🥱 Behavioral Signs
team chat drying up, participation in discussions going down
less attention to detail, code reviews taking longer
lack of enthusiasm in meetings, disengaged body language
🐌 Output Changes
no new ideas, reliance on existing solutions, reluctance to experiment or take risks
slower task completion, more bottlenecks, less output overall
waiting for instructions rather than proactively suggesting solutions, avoiding ownership
🙄 Subtle Clues
losing focus on current priorities
more complaints about tech stack, tools, or processes
increased hesitancy to ask for help or clarification
Initially I thought these were signs of burnout or individual issues with a few folks. That was a mistake. I never thought it was missing something. I was the Tech Lead and I went to my manager for advice.
We implemented 5 changes that reinstalled our team’s motivation. You can learn from my mistakes and boost your team’s motivation.
⚖️ 1. Balance “Grunt” Work
Not all projects are created equal. Some will have more visibility than others. Your team may have responsibility to:
Work with legacy systems
Maintain existing software
Participate in busy on-call rotation
We noticed that our team was brand new but had a lot of “grunt” work. This affected the team’s morale. There weren’t enough time left to work on some of the interesting problems. Everybody needs to pick up some uninteresting work, but that can’t be the majority.
Keeping a healthy balance between new, exciting projects and maintenance work will improve motivation of your team. Depending on your team’s place in the organization, try keeping grunt work below 30% of your team’s time.
🎯 2. Set Ambitious but Achievable Goals
For a period we missed OKR promises for two consecutive quarters. We had pretty ambitious goals. Setting high targets is important, but ours felt like unachievable. This hurt the team’s morale.
After looking back, I noticed that everyone was stressed about OKRs from the beginning of the quarter. We never spent enough time to assess whether they were achievable.
To avoid this you need to:
Manage expectations of stakeholders
Spend extra time on project estimations, read more about engineering project estimation
Prioritize goals properly, not everything can be a P0
We’d score an OKR “1.0” when you go above and beyond. “0.7” was the default score for complete. Discussing this with the team helped everyone divide milestones and prioritize effectively. Communicate your expectations clearly with your team.
Another important clarification was using OKRs as guides, not set in stone. Based on priorities we became more open to shifting things around. Establish best practices that suit your team and communicate.
🏆 3. Incentivize Model Behavior
Generally incentives are rewards given at the end of a milestone. The problem with that is there’s no certainty. This was one area that was beyond my control and was going well. Our team lead (manager) had this sorted. Here’s what I learned from him:
Positive reinforcement works: Due to cultural background, positive reinforcement was always a foreign concept to me. Here I saw it working. Callout good behaviors and appreciate your peers publicly.
Personalized growth plan motivates: Not everyone is trying to rush to the next level. Some individuals (including me) wanted to grow faster. But, some wanted to work on deep technical problems. Our manager did a great job creating unique plans for everyone.
Celebrate wins publicly: Despite the size of the win, our manager did an awesome job highlighting model behavior. Kudos were very common in team meetings.
As I was aspiring to be a team lead, I spent quite some time chatting about incentives. If there’s one thing I remember from those conversations, it would be:
“Most managers fail to create a systematic incentive structure”
If you’re interested in learning more about how you can build that, read this article.
♻️ 4. Create Space for Failure
One of the biggest mistakes for me was assuming leadership was just a promotion. When I first became a lead, I thought I needed to do the same thing more.
My obsession with delivery and speed got the better of me. As a side-effect, I was:
killing team’s innovation, you don’t innovate with a tight deadline
responsible for quality decline, as we were scrambling to get things done
destroying collaboration, everybody started to focus on their piece
The quality of the work was trending down. Productivity soon followed suit. Are you noticing that your team is doing “just what’s told”? Here are some ways you can fix this:
Delegate: Transfer ownership to individuals, have them own it end to end
Delegate: Get yourself out of decision making as much as you can
Communicate: Celebrate failures more than you enjoy successes
Acknowledging failures are inevitable when you’re doing something meaningful. Me stepping back from decision making boosted team’s productivity.
🤝 5. Engage Team in Crafting Vision
Defining roadmaps, dividing work streams are works of a leader, right?
That’s how I started leading. I used to have all the conversations with stakeholders and plan for our quarters.
It worked well when the team was brand new. But, as people grew in their roles, getting interesting work wasn’t good enough. Rightfully so. I don’t know if I’d survive an environment where I’m told exactly what to do and how to do it.
Here’s what I learned:
“People don’t like to follow processes, they want to be part of the process”
This changed how I thought about vision and planning. If you notice people disinterested in talking about their work, you should start to:
Involve everyone in crafting vision for your team. We used to draft our team goals every year. This was a collaborative document. Everyone knew the overarching direction and they’d write their own parts.
Establish shared values and lean into them. One of Google’s core value was “Respect the user”. All of us cared about that. Additionally, our work reaching 3b+ lives was a common motivation.
You can increase motivation within your team when people feel heard. Tapping into organizational values/impact is helpful.
Once we started distributing process ownership, thoughtful conversations started to reappear. I’d participate in highly technical discussions, mostly as an active listener.
🌟 🔍 Parting Thoughts
Building and maintaining a high performing team is difficult. If your team is putting out fires all the time, it’ll drain them quickly. To bring back the spark, you can:
Balance “grunt” work
Keep uninteresting work below 30%
Reframe maintenance as objective improvements
Set achievable targets
Set the right expectations with stakeholders
Invest and improve on project estimations
Reward model behavior
Celebrate wins publicly
Create personalized growth plans
Highlight positive behaviors
Embrace failure
Get yourself out of most decision making and delegate
Remove negative connotation with failures and embrace them
Involve your team in setting direction
Run planning exercise with the team, for the team
Tap into shared values and culture to inspire your team
I was the very first hire on my team at Google. We were overwhelmed with years of tech debt when we started. In 3 years, we delivered a high visibility project that had an impact all over the company.
In fact, Google open sourced it and now it’s a leading industry standard. Techniques we discussed today, brought back the spark from temporary setbacks. That’s how we got the “Engineering Excellence Award”!
Have you experienced gradual drop in performance across the board? How did you deal with it?
Share them in the comments!
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👋 💬 Get In Touch
Want to chat? Find me on LinkedIn.
If you want me to cover a particular area of leadership, you can reach out directly on akash@chromium.org.
If you enjoyed this content, please 🔁 share it with friends and consider 🔔 subscribing if you haven’t already. Your 💙 response really motivates me to keep going.
I love this.
Relates well to the idea in Team Topologies book, just read it earlier today.
In the book its mentioned that each team should own one domain and responsibility, getting more than the cognitive load becomes the productivity killers.