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What are the factors for motivating a team?
Each team is context-dependent, so I usually like to focus on the theory for evaluating the different actions you need to do according to your particular context.To explain the reasoning behind the different actions we do in Engineering at TravelPerk, I will compare them in this post against Paloma Medina's BICEPS concept.
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One essential aspect of high-performance teams is trust. So any action you can do to build trust and accelerate it will be crucial for success.In our case, we have very strong core values at both the company and the engineering levels, and we align these core values with our brand-building activities and with our hiring process. Hiring the right people is key for adopting and cultivating company culture and generating a feeling of belonging between team members.More technically, the configuration of the different teams also matters a great deal. We're currently working with ”squads”, following the Spotify model. We have around 20 squads, and on principle, we never create a new squad with only new people. We always allocate people with a previous track record in the company as foundational members, to help reduce the forming and storming phases) as much as we can.Team size also plays a fundamental role. In our case, we operate on Dunbar’s number of between 7 and 9 multidisciplinary members. We only exceed this number if we're considering splitting the team soon. In this way, we're trying to transform one “performing” team into two “norming” teams in a relatively short time.We've seen a dramatic impact on this because of COVID-19. Previously, our company was optimized for face-to-face interaction. That’s why both during the lockdown and afterward, it's been a lot more challenging to find creative and safe ways to keep the team atmosphere and connection alive.Finally, the company and team missions are other important aspects for building relatedness, since they are directly connected with team members' intrinsic motivation.
ICE - Improvement/Progress + Choice + Equality/ Fairness
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P - Predictability
S - Significance
What are the main KPIs for driving performance?
At TravelPerk, we designed a director plan for scaling up the engineering team. We wanted to almost triple it—from around 40 engineers at the end of 2019 to more than 100 by the end of 2020.For me personally, it was essential to have metrics and monitoring in place (both qualitative and quantitative) that could bring visibility that we were not degrading the quality of our impact.So, we decided to adopt a customer lifecycle framework and use it as an employee lifecycle framework. We defined KPIs in every area of the journey of an engineer. We decided to adopt the PIRATES metrics and we defined the following:
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- Brand-building (Awareness): Activities regarding how our engineering company is addressing the talent.
- Acquisition: How we get engineers in the funnel, how our hiring process performs.
- Activation: Once an engineer is part of our organization, how do we speed up their contribution (onboarding)?
- Revenue: For us, the revenue of the PIRATES metrics is correlated to the engineering contribution. Probably the most complex area, so I will develop it below.
- Retention: Do they stay? ****Monitoring the retention of the engineering team.
- Growth: Do they progress? Some of our KPIs are NPS over the training in our e-learning platform, ratios of promotions, and raises.
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