It can be a challenge for business executives to motivate high-tech employees to meet an organization's strategic goals. It typically doesn't work to focus on traditional status rewards, strict hierarchies, or the bottom line. What is important is to understand the basic differences between those who work in business and those who work in technology. Recent research reveals that technology workers often identify themselves by the technology work they do rather than the organization they work for. Technology workers also are inspired by intrinsic motivators, which come from enjoying the work itself and having the desire to do it well. Savvy managers need to understand that instead of attempting to motivate high-tech employees, they should focus on creating an environment where workers can motivate themselves. Read how applying specific principles can help business executives establish an environment that will encourage high-technology employees to thrive.

As Published In November 2006

Closing the Geek Gap
By Minda Zetlin

How to Keep Tech Workers Motivated

An IT expert who'd worked on several high-profile space missions was invited to an annual dinner for sales reps. Those who had met their targets that year were seated at elegant tables, elbow to elbow with the company's top executives. Their gourmet meals were served on fine china. Each of their spouses received a lavish present, such as a fine piece of jewelry or a ticket for a cruise.

The salespeople who'd missed their targets were seated on the other side of the room, at picnic tables. Their dinners were served on paper plates. Their spouses gazed enviously across the room at the spouses of the more successful salespeople. One wife turned to her husband. "I don't want to see you home early," she said. "I don't want to see you on weekends. I want you out selling so we can go on that cruise!"

To the IT expert's surprise, the husband nodded. In fact, all the out-of-favor salespeople seemed eager to do better and sit with their more-successful colleagues the following year.

"If you tried that with technology people, they would all quit immediately!" says Stefano Stefan, PhD, assistant director of business, management, legal, and information technology programs, University of California, Irvine Extension, who heard about the dinner from one of the school's instructors.

For many high-tech employees, the ways of the business world, with its strict hierarchies, status rewards, and relentless focus on the bottom line, can seem alien and incomprehensible. Business executives who must interact with these "geeks" and oversee their work can find the relationship equally challenging. How can they get technology workers motivated about meeting their organization's strategic goals? How can they bridge the "geek gap"—the business/technology divide?

Begin by recognizing that there are fundamental differences between those who work with technology and those who work in business. The consulting firm BlessingWhite, in partnership with Stanford University, conducted a three-year study to determine what makes tech employees love their jobs and how they may differ from nontech employees. First and foremost, they found, tech workers identify themselves by the technological work they do, not the organization they work for. That is, ask geeks what they do for work, and you're likelier to hear "I'm a database programmer" than "I work for General Motors."

Technologists Love Technology Work

"The theoretical literature says motivation is either intrinsic or extrinsic," explains Paul Glen, founder of C2 Consulting in Los Angeles and author of Leading Geeks: How to Lead and Manage People Who Deliver Technology (Jossey-Bass Pfeiffer, 2003). Extrinsic motivators include bonuses, bigger offices, and the chance to sit at the "good" table during a sales dinner. Technologists, he says, are inspired mostly by intrinsic motivators, which come from loving the work itself and wanting to do it well, much like painters and composers. In fact, says Glen, technology work demands creativity—much more so than most nontechnologists realize. "You can motivate people to do things, but you can't motivate them to think things."

The goal for managers, then, is not to motivate technologists but instead to create an environment in which they motivate themselves. "What can you do to make a seed grow?" Glen says. "Nothing. But you can create a setting in which it's likely to grow."

Here are some principles that will help you create an environment in which geeks are likely to blossom:

Technologists need to be included in decisions that affect their jobs. "Businesses experience knowledge inversion—people who work on technology know more about it than their managers do," Glen notes, "so excluding people from decisions is insulting and distracting."

Of course, inclusion makes more sense with a small team than a large department. If 50 programmers are working on a project, they can't all go to every planning meeting. In such a case, make sure the decision process is as transparent as possible and that technologists feel that their interests were represented. "If Joe was there, who knows my issues really well, I'll feel that the process was fair even if the decision didn't go my way," Glen notes.

Technologists need consistency. Another major source of frustration and distraction for most geeks is inconsistent directives from managers or business colleagues. Of course, this is Management 101: It's always a bad idea to send changing or mixed messages. But technology workers are particularly bothered by any kind of inconsistency, and it's easy to see why. They spend their time interacting with computers, which, by definition, should behave logically and predictably. An unexpected or varying response indicates that something is wrong—and must be fixed.

"Geeks are problem-solvers by nature," Glen says. "Present them with inconsistency, and you become a problem that needs to be solved. Essentially, you're a bug."

Technologists need autonomy. In the BlessingWhite study, the deep need for autonomy was one of the most striking differences between technologists and others. "Geeks find being managed too closely appalling, for two reasons," Glen explains. "First, it indicates distrust of their professionalism and skills, both of which they take great pride in. Second, because of the nature of technical work, frequent monitoring can be counterproductive. Research shows that, depending on the work, it can take anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours to get back on track after an interruption."

Bo Peabody, managing general partner of the venture capital firm Village Ventures, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and author of Lucky or Smart? Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life (Random House, 2005), believes it's also a mistake to try to get technology experts to focus exclusively on a single project. "You have to understand that they are always working on 10 different things at once and that that's their nature," he says. Peabody, who is the cofounder and former CEO of Tripod.com, recalls how he would often find his tech employees working on projects completely unrelated to what they'd been assigned to do. "Trying to get them to stop was counterproductive," he says, "and sometimes what they came up with was very valuable."

Some managers might find the idea of letting techies work on unrelated projects worrisome—shouldn't they be sticking to assigned work on company time? But Peabody says the secret is to learn enough about the technology to understand the issues involved. This means being able to talk to the techies intelligently about their work and set meaningful deadlines that they will commit to meeting. Many techies tend to work extra hours in any case, so it makes more sense to hold them to a realistic deadline than to worry about how they're spending their time at the office.

Technologists need to be better businesspeople . . . This may be the most difficult principle, because it is the only one geeks themselves are likely to resist. But it's essential, both for their careers and for the health of the organization.

"Certain aspects of technology are dissimilar to other types of jobs, but I'm not a big believer that IT can continue to treat itself as completely different," says Diane Morello, vice president and research director at Gartner. "We need to get to the point where IT is so integrated in the business that it doesn't hold itself out as separate."

Morello recently published her prediction that demand for IT specialists would shrink 40 percent by 2010—a viewpoint that met with predictable anger from technologists on message boards and blogs. She emphasizes that as the number of technologists diminishes, their integration into business management will grow.

"Some people believe that 15 or 20 years from now, IT and business will be indistinguishable in some areas," she says. In today's typical IT organization, she notes, perhaps 20 percent of employees are highly knowledgeable about business. She believes that this number needs to grow to 40 or 50 percent in the next 10 years.

Sounds good—but how do you get the techies to learn about business? One of the best ways is a lateral transfer that will let them spend a year or two working in a nontechnical business area. Not every tech expert will be able, or willing, to take on a business job, but those who do so return to the technology arena as highly effective managers. Another option is to send technologists for business training, something that more and more geeks are seeking themselves—in the hopes of protecting their jobs from being outsourced.

Also, try to include technologists as much as possible in meetings and on memos about business and financial issues. Often managers who try this report that financial information comes as a revelation to many technologists, who are surprised to learn that company revenues are lower, and expenses higher, than they had imagined.

. . . and vice versa. If it's essential for technology workers to understand business, it's no less important for the business executives who work with them to gain an understanding of, and interest in, technology. One of the greatest demotivators for geeks, Glen notes, is when they perceive an organizational lack of interest in the work they do. "If you tell me that the project I'm working on is important but it takes me six months to get an appointment with the executive overseeing its use, that sends a very bad message," Glen says.

And taking an interest in technology is as much a survival skill for business managers as taking an interest in business is for techies. "Most business innovation happening today is happening in tandem with technology," declares Faisal Hoque, CEO of Enamics and lead author of Winning the 3-Legged Race: When Business and Technology Run Together (BTM Institute/Prentice Hall, 2005). "It doesn't matter what sector you're in. That means that managers need a creative process that integrates both technology and business." It also means that top execs who aren't educated about technology are in danger of becoming obsolete, he adds.

"No one in business today would doubt the importance of understanding a financial statement," he says. "They need to understand technology in the same way."

Technologists need to know the greater meaning of their work. Sometimes engineers get so engrossed in the facts of what they're doing that they lose sight of the larger context, Glen says. It's important to help them gain more of an overall view. This can help them make wiser decisions on the ground (for instance, whether adding a new feature is worth a delay in delivering a project). And it can give them a real morale boost.

Glen recalls a presentation he heard by the CIO of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). As the speaker described the organization's work in setting up network nodes in Third World countries, Glen found himself imagining what it would be like to work on that project.

"Setting up network nodes is highly repetitive and not very interesting as technology work goes, so my job in itself wouldn't be much fun," he says. "I'd have to travel and be away from my family quite a lot, and not to the vacation spots of the world but to war zones where I might be shot at. And because I'd be working for the United Nations, I would probably not be earning a high salary."

On the bare facts of the job, it sounds completely unappealing. But consider its broader meaning, and it takes on a whole new complexion. Helping interconnect UNICEF's operations to better coordinate aid efforts directly helps children be healthier and better fed. "If my work meant that thousands of children could eat, then I'd feel very committed to it," Glen says.

Admittedly, few corporate technology projects have meaning that compares with feeding hungry children. But most of the time, Glen says, technologists are working on something that will help their employer or its customers do better, and it's important for them to know that, even if the results seem trivial.

"If, because of our work, people will get their lunch 10 percent faster, then we're saving people time," he says. "We're giving them a little more time to be with their children or do what they need to do. That's not insignificant, and we need to know about it."

Motivating Geeks in the Age of Outsourcing For many technology workers, the reality of the past few years has been the progressive outsourcing of jobs overseas. Offshoring is such an emotional issue that geeks have taken to the streets in protest. The fact that emotions are running so high has had a chilling effect on managers of tech workers. In a 2005 DiamondCluster survey of senior IT executives at Global 1000 companies and senior executives at outsourcing service providers, 88 percent said they were concerned about anti-offshoring backlash. How can you keep geeks motivated and enthusiastic in these uncertain times? It isn't easy. "You can't create motivation until basic needs for such things as job security are met," notes Paul Glen, founder of C2 Consulting in Los Angeles and author of Leading Geeks: How to Lead and Manage People who Deliver Technology. "It may be unrealistic to ask technology employees for loyalty in the face of potential layoffs and what is perceived as disloyalty on the part of the organization." But if motivating geeks to love jobs they fear may be short-lived is a daunting task, there are some things managers can do to help them stay as focused and enthusiastic as possible: 1. Help technologists learn as much as possible about business. There are good reasons for IT experts to learn more about business. One of the best is that the better they understand business, the more indispensable they become to their employers. Many technologists recognize this. "When I ask people why they're taking our business analyst certificate program, a lot turn out to be IT people who are afraid of being outsourced," says Stefano Stefan, of the University of California, Irvine Extension. 2. Provide up-to-date tech training. Technologists spend their careers in a constant race to keep up with new systems and computer languages. In many cases, working on their employer's existing technology—doing software maintenance or computer support on products that might be a year or two old or older—means falling behind the "bleeding edge" of tech innovation. So geeks who spend their workdays on yesterday's systems feel doubly betrayed if they are then laid off and find it hard to get a new job because they lack current skills. One way to allay this fear and help keep technologists employable if their jobs are outsourced is to provide them with training in new technologies. "I see a lot of technology people whose energy seems to be sapped because of outsourcing concerns," Stefan says. "The ones who do better are those whose employers provide retraining." 3. Be completely honest. Let's say your company is exploring the possibility of offshoring. The idea is still at the evaluation stage; all you're doing for the moment is evaluating potential savings and hearing some pitches from vendors. Your organization may well wind up deciding against the move. Most top managers would conduct this research in strict confidence and plan to make an announcement to the company at large only when—and if—a final decision is made. But, says Gartner analyst Diane Morello, that strategy is wrong. "Many managers wait way too long, and they wind up fomenting rumors, because people don't fail to notice closed doors and the like," she says. "People can communicate almost instantly, so keeping something like this secret is challenging." Instead, she says, if management tells employees up front that the company is considering outsourcing, the employees can set priorities and will be less demoralized. But won't the most-skilled employees start leaving for other jobs as soon as the possibility of outsourcing is out in the open? "Some people will leave no matter what," she says. "But as long as you treat this as a business decision only and ignore its effect on employees and their families, you create an environment in which they will not trust you. In situations in which companies treat employees with respect and tell them honestly what's happening, we've seen that a substantial number will wait."