What motivation means for you?
In my career, I was able to work from side of the manager and from side of the employee. I saw a lot of motivations for people and I know exactly what motivated me. When you face such kind of query on an interview it is easy to say about your personal motivators, but more complicated explain your principles in motivation of your team.
There are a lot of articles on Internet like 100 ways of employees' motivations with detailed explanation of psychology. All these researches and theories based on Maslou's pyramid levels. But people more complicated and motivation is a more difficult process which consists many dependencies and impaction, and for each person there is his unique assets of motivators.
It is clear why we are so attracted by its pyramid: it is convenient to have a visual list of motives and put a check. But we are not dealing with a mechanical and not universal phenomenon: involvement depends on many factors, including team morale and more or less independently on how interesting the work is for the staff, from the trajectory of personal development of the members of the collective and from general recognition.
In my work I separate motivators on some groups: material, non-material, standard and not-standard.
As usual like a team leader I used not-material benefits like promotions, complicated and more responsible tasks, additional vacations, flexible work time, public award of good work, offered conference participation, new professional courses and always tried to create friendly command atmosphere in my team. Of course in the end of quarter/years I gave years bonuses to the best stuff accord special assessment system used in company.
I never used penalty or public blame stuff, because from my perspective, it is ineffective and didn't help in the work. Also penalty demotivates the team and there isn't any good at it.
Non-standard motivators like competitive, games - it is not always work, especially in elder team with big IT experience after back.
But elementary social bonuses - corporate kindergarden, sport gyms, language and professional qualification courses without limits are so essential benefits in any company.
When I started my work way after university on factory in a cold building with a salary which wasn't enough for food. Since that time for me a warm, clean office with equipped comfortable workplace, morning coffee in the office is "must have". I think it is "must have" for many people.
Next my essential point - it is a team. The leader is always part of team and team which work in safety friendly atmosphere is more effective in results. Work-balance life is "must have".
Nest point is "interesting" project. For each person it will be his unique project with technologies, companies, business-area, languages, team, processes, countries and so on. And people usually know what their ideal project at this moment. If you don't know it - think about it 😉
Сonclusion:
Clarify what means "must have" for you/your team
Find out what drives every employee personally, draw a matrix of motivations in the team
Apply/use motivations flexible according to your matrix
Do not be guided in your management strategy and relations with employees only basic needs: any of your subordinates is much more complicated than this pyramid.
