Moving Motivators

I am managing an IT team and last year I thought it could be a gret beginning talking with the team about motivation, because we never talked about that and to have feedback about how a change affected them (we were recently took over by bigger company). For these reasons I played with them “Moving Motivators“.

Introduction

First of all, let me explain a couple of things about this game and who we played: every player have 10 little cards, each one it represent an intrinsic desire: Curiosity, Honor, Acceptance, Mastery, Power, Freedom, Relatedness, Order, Goal and Status (CHAMPFROGS)

1. Every player place the cards in order from more to less important.
2. Score each one from 1 to 8 (1 disagree or unhappy because this desire is not covered at my work place and 8 agree or happy because this desire is totally covered at my work place).
3. Shared it with the team.
4. Move up or down every intrinsic desire if was affected or not since the biggest company took ver us.
5. Shared again with the team.

Let’s do it!

I like being a good Host so I started booking a comfortable meeting room, I introduced the game and we spent 15-ish minutes talking about: rules (ordering from left to right? top bottom? spiral?) and meaning of every card (what is status for you? Power? etc) in order to be in the same page.

Then I gave them 20 minutes to complete the first part, once finished they stuck a little post-it in every card with their score. Then they shared with the others — it’s important that they were able to stand up

and take a look what their peer had done.

After this first round I tell them the second part, “What of this intrinsic desires have changed since we were in this new office working for another company?” and I let them 15 minutes to complete and once we were ready we shared briefly again our movements.

Conclusions

Actually it was a really good experience because we all learn from each others, I also had an important direct feedback about what the team really needs and thanks to this we had a discussed a few actions to do:

1. We didn’t spend too much time investigating and most of the team members was wiling to, so now we have and special day were you can investigate at your own: technology, project or whatever you want which you think could be useful. Obviously with few boundaries defined by the team itself.
2. People from operations show us that they need more order, so since this day development people know that they have to be really clear when talking or working together with operations.
3. We are focused in our goals we like challenge then we want to be more useful, so this year we want to develop internal prototypes which we belive will simplify company daily work.

At last but not least, was really impressive that since the company we worked for was took over and we moved to a hug office what we all agree is we were more satisfied with order, but anybody talked us to take care about order, we did it be ourself!! It was like, wow! be careful that’s big, we must be ordered or we will become mad! Amazing!