Hi there! The secret to success in creating awesome software products is well-known – build a solid team of Angular developers, give the team a cool idea, and don’t interfere with the team’s work. Cool developers are rare and popular guys. Some recruiters even say that they get the impression that giving birth to a cool programmer is easier than hiring one from the market. In addition to the difficulties with hiring, such as the experience of each individual developer, his knowledge of the existing product and the history of its development are often irreplaceable with the level of difficulty and time. Therefore, if you are lucky and you already have a cool team of Angular programmers, it is important to work on their motivation. Hiring, training new developers, making them a team is almost as difficult and time-consuming as giving birth and raising children.
Let’s consider the main factors of motivating the programmers, using Maslow’s pyramid for clarity and structure of presentation. If you have not heard about Maslow’s pyramid yet, this is a very popular and illustrative theory of the American psychologist Abraham Harold Maslow, who proposed a theory of personality motivation that is based on the hierarchy of human needs.
Maslow arranged the needs of the individual in a hierarchical order, from physiological needs to the need for unlocking one’s potential and self-actualization. A key assumption in Maslow’s theory is that “a person cannot experience higher-level needs until their lower-level needs are satisfied”.
Before going into details, let’s look at the obvious fact – the team consists of people, all people are different, each has its own motivation structure. In addition to the fact that each person is driven by different interests, each person is also in different living conditions. Someone is at the beginning of a career and is thinking about how to build it, someone is going to get married, and someone wants to master a new scientific sphere. What is important for one person might be completely unimportant for another, and tomorrow everything will change again. In order to correctly understand this context, there is a simple tool – you need to think about it and work with it. The most important thing, to my mind, is communication.
Do not be afraid to talk to your team about something more than just work and try to build informal relationships with your people.
What Can Be Helpful To Build A Solid Angular Developers Team And How To Motivate Them?
Table of Contents
Salary
When talking about motivation, many people often think about the salary first. The fact of a salary increase may motivate them during the first times, but after a few months the new salary becomes the norm and can even demotivate. In general, I would say that for programmers at the beginning of their careers, the salary factor is more important, as their professional growth and development, but after some time and gaining more experience, its importance decreases, and other factors begin to prevail.
The second important point is the presence of a fair balance in the level of salaries in the team. If the team feels that the contribution of one of the participants is noticeably lower, but the level of compensation is not different, this will demotivate the whole team. In such situations, it is worth looking for other approaches, unless, of course, this is a unique specialist who needs to be retained at any cost, even for a short time.
Safety And Comfort
So to say, 10-15 years ago, a comfortable office, good hardware, delicious coffee, fitness, flexible hours, etc. could be good motivators, but now it has become more the norm for a good programmer to work. At the same time, the absence of all of these things, again, will be very demotivating.
An important demotivating factor is the lack of ability to concentrate. To be more exact, I’m talking about a noisy work environment. The work of a programmer requires silence and concentration. If the office space does not provide an opportunity to provide developers with a proper workplace, it is necessary at least to ensure comfortable collaboration between colleagues who do not disturb each other while working. It is better to unite energetic and loud comrades with each other, and that will allow those who need it to concentrate.
In many companies flexible working hours and no dress code may also be the motivating factors.
In addition to this, the lack of chaos, structure and order – the Angular team must understand who is responsible for what, how the tasks are assigned, what to do, who is the client, when, what requirements lie at the heart of the product, what are the expectations of the bosses and the customers from Angular developers.
What is more that concerns comfort, is a calm and friendly atmosphere. Developers all spend most of our time at work, and they want to do it without stress, conflicts, or fear. The Angular development team, as a rule, works under the pressure of the schedule and customers. And considering this fact, nobody needs additional stress from colleagues, superiors or managers of teams.
Recognition
Let’s be honest, everyone is motivated by the recognition of the importance of the work he or she has done, in other words, its positive assessment. Create yourself a habit to talk to programmers regularly, give them periodic feedback, celebrate a job when it is well done. If you have a large and distributed Angular team, periodic meetings (what is called one to one) are great for this goal. In case if the team is very small and works together locally, this opportunity is usually provided without special meetings on the calendar.
It would also be a good idea to mark the significant contribution of especially distinguished colleagues with diplomas, commemorative signs (at least with a kind word) at the parties where all the team members gather together. People usually value such attention signs and memories very much.
A demonstration of recognition and a manifestation of a higher level of trust on the part of the team, can be the provision of more freedom of actions or involvement in some new areas of work. For example, with the accumulation of a certain experience, the achievement of certain results, the programmer, in addition to the implementation of his features in accordance with the specification, can work on the architecture of new things.
Opportunities For Self-Development
Many programmers are focused on different programming activities at different stages of their lives. Someone likes machine learning, developing new data models, while reading a lot of scientific literature for work, creating new ones from scratch. Another is closer to debugging and supporting an existing application, in which you need to dig deeply into the existing code, study logs, stacktraces and network captchas for days and weeks, and write almost no new code.
Besides, you must know the expectations of your programmers, understand which of them would like to expand or change the field of activity and take these expectations into consideration.
Proximity Of Results
It is difficult to go to the goal that is far beyond the horizon, especially when the amount of work is terrifying, the goal is far, not clear and invisible. Like it is said in the Game of Thrones “the night is dark and full of terrors”. It is better to split the road to the desired aim into several parts, pave the way to the nearest. so to say, a tree, which is visible, achievable, the outlines are clear, and it is not far from us – and go to this close goal.
When you have completed part of the work – fix it, exhale it, discuss it, punish the guilty, award the innocent – then you can easily start the next cycle.
This motivation is a little bit similar when playing computer games: players periodically receive medals, points, bonuses when they complete each level, this can be called “a dopamine motivation”.
Conclusion
So, Angular developers are very smart people, and by the nature of their work they are extremely logical. They are used to build long and complex logical chains for 8-10 hours a day. While doing something, they, like everyone else, want to understand why they are doing it, what will change for the better. It’s mega-important that the goals you set for your team are honest and realistic. Trying to sell a bad idea to a programming team is a bad idea. An idea is bad if you don’t believe in it yourself.
Be friends with your team, give them a huge motivation by showing an example and you’ll see how dedicated and reliable your Angular developers are.