�ݺ�ߣ

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to this session. I am Joost Mulders and in this presentation I will take you along in the culture in the Mendix Engineering department.
• #3: For me, as a manager, I have the privilige to be working with this group of talented people. And today I would like to share with you what we do and why it works…... For us!
• #4: Often people ask the question why companies such as Netflix, Spotify, Google and Mendix have a competitive advantage over others. There is one very clear differentiator…. Motivation
• #5: The success of an organization has it’s roots in the motivation and engagement of the employees working in the organization.
• #6: The bad news in this is that you cannot make people feel motivated or engaged, you cannot tell them to be and you cannot coach or guide them to be. But what we can do is influence the environment around them and create an environment that allows them to become motivated and engaged.
• #7: And that’s what we call the company culture, the vision, values and belief system that defines your organization or department.
• #8: Now the good news is that from all of the factors that influence the success of a company, the companies culture is a factor that is fully under your control.
• #9: And if you do get it right, if your culture does provide that environment to your employees, the rest will just take care of itself. This sounds easy, but it actually is one of the most difficult aspects of running an organization. Sticking to your values and beliefs under the commercial pressure of running a company is not an easy feat to accomplish.
• #10: Now let’s jump back into the aspect of motivation, there are two distinct types of motivation in people, extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation. Let’s have a closer look at each of them.
• #11: Extrinsic motivation is based on external rewards or even ”punishments” People receive an external (usually money) reward for the delivered performance.
• #12: Or even worse receive an external punishement (losing their job) when they don’t deliver the desired performance. Extrinsic motivators often seem to work but have a very limiting and short term effect. In fact they most likely will end up de-motivating your employees. That does not mean that elements like salary and other job benefits are completely unimportant and don’t need attention. They should be up to the level where they are taken out of the equation. Extrinsic motivators will never truly motivate people so all you can do is ensure that they don’t become a de-motivator. Only when the extrinsic motivators are taken out of the equation we can focus on what really motivates people and what drives them to do the work they do because they love doing it.
• #13: The key is in the intrinsic motivators, how can you create an environment in which people do the work because they love doing it? Intrinsic motivation provides a long lasting motivation. It takes time and effort to create the environment but the investment is worth it.
• #14: I would like to take you along in a small personal example of extrinsic motivation vs intrinsic motivation. Just as many people on the planet I had a point in my life where I was trying to loose weight. In fact a lot of weight. Weighing in at 127KG I wanted to loose weight to improve my health condition. And so I started eating healthier and started running as a means to increase the calorie outtake. And it worked, each time I stood on the scale it showed my weight was decreasing. And so I kept running my regular 5 to 10K runs a few times a week as long as the extrinsic reward of the number on the weight scale kept going down (reward) or up (punishment). And then it stopped, the number was what I wanted to reach and the motivation to run dropped quite fast after that. But then someone introduced me to trailrunning, the change of environment and challenging aspects in it sparked my interest. Running became pure fun… and this is me two weeks ago around kilometer 50 in the Vaalserbergtrail, 13 km to go until the finish line. On the left is the motivation that made me go out for a short run a few times a week. On the right is the motivation that makes me set the alarm clock at 4:00 AM to get in a 30 KM run before the workday starts. This is th type of motivation that you will want to have within your work environment!!
• #15: Because as Steve Jobs once said….. The only way to do great work is to love what you do.
• #16: So now back to the work environment, how can we create the space for this type of motivation in the workplace.
• #17: How do we create a company culture that engages and motivates employees?
• #18: There are several models that describe motivation in the work environment. Some of you might now the 16 basic desires from Steven Reiss’ research, or the 10 intrinisic motivators from Management 3.0 or the well known book from Daniel Pink describing the 3 motivational factors Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
• #19: The bottom line of all models is mostly captured in Daniel Pink’s theory with one more recent addition to it. Purpose Mastery Autonomy Relatedness The Ramp to a great company culture. I will briefly touch these 4 elements and give you an overview of what we do within Mendix to embed these in our culture.
• #27: Our team members organize themselves in Guilds to become better at their craft. For example we have guilds focussed on: Testing practices. Functional programming. Continuous integration. Etc.
• #45: There is no dress code.
• #55: And there is no recipe for the best environment, it is a constant discovery.
• #56: And continuous improvement
• #57: And to be able to continuously improve, you need to gather feedback and use that as input for further improvements. Within Mendix we do that through several means.
• #58: And most importantly we continuously iterate on the feedback we receive.
• #59: Any Questions? Oh yes….... There is one more thing.....