Plastic: how not to hurt the team by an engraved statuette

Companies meet different. There are those where a strict and deep hierarchy of management is built, and where the issue of employees' self-realization is associated primarily with moving up the career ladder. On the contrary, there are organizations with a flat structure, in which the spirit of equality and fraternity constantly hovers in the office air penetrated by the rays of sunlight. Speaking about the first images that come to your head, you probably already imagined a skyscraper of a large and bureaucratic corporation on the one hand, and a startup flourishing among the hills of Silicon Valley - on the other. At the same time, British scientists have for certain proved that the world is not black and white, and that most companies live to one degree or another at the junction of these two metaphors - the mechanism and the family. It is likely that in one of these work and you.



However, the discussion today is not about organizations as such, but about plastics. Management, as you know, doesn’t really like material methods of employee motivation (and does it right), but loves various kinds of plastic awards, figurines and dies, designed to measure success. Meanwhile, the main rule when holding such events is “Do no harm!”.

Where the legs grow

In my head, there are two scenarios. The first scenario is a kind of Chief with a capital “H” lounging in a black leather chair. He slightly scrolls on his leg to the left, then to the right, gleaming with straps of suspenders and inspired by the tip of a fountain pen in his mouth. The cunning plan is almost ripe in a balding head. Tomorrow, the middle manager Anatoly will be given the task of contacting an advertising firm and ordering a box of acrylic figurines from them. There is no sense to spend money on annual bonuses, because it is much cheaper and more expressive to award production leaders with memorable souvenirs, which are exhibited near the working monitors, will not only be the pride of the owner, but also the motivator for the rest to work more, better and better for the same money.

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Another scenario is a small company that slowly trades on outsourcing, rents three rooms in a class A business center and does not rely on its strong and friendly team. The director is an energetic young man, he likes to sit in an embrace with his MacBook in a soft “pear”, hang inverted portraits of Merlin Monroe on the walls and generally behave very progressively. Discussion with Anatoly, twice a programmer on Python and part-time CTO, is being held this time as never before. The idea to make memorable awards for outstanding employees captures and excites. Creative and pret - round or square, glass or crystal, with a gold plate or silver, "The Best Scrum Master" or "Programmer of the Year"? But you can even set up corporate for this business! Near the swimming pool? Yes, of course by the pool, but how else!



Surely it seems to you that a citizen with thinning hair is an asshole, and a fan of “pu-pu-pi-doo” is good. However, it is not. Both are of the same berry field, and the reason for everything is competition.

About competition

We live in a competitive environment - this is a fact. The principles of meritocracy are deeply ingrained in modern society. On the one hand, this is good, otherwise we would still live in the world of estates, castes, slave labor and unequal opportunities. On the other - bad, because we have become too concentrated on our own well-being. This is expressed at the level of the individual, at the level of business and even at the level of geopolitics. “I and he”, “we and them”, “ours and others” - all this has not gone anywhere, only now these “he”, “they” and “others” are not given constants at the time of our birth. Moved to a new position - and you have a new competitor a step higher, moved to another company - and you need to compete with other players in the market, moved - and, you see, after five years you have been sick for a completely different team at the World Championships.



At the same time, we all know what wonderful magic is going on, sometimes, in some teams of software companies. Coherent, cohesive, crystallized teams show the wonders of performance and get great pleasure from work. According to the results of some studies, the best teams surpass the worst by 28 times! However, there is one thing that can very easily disrupt the team, and in general, spoil the atmosphere in the company. And this thing is competition.

And here is plastic?

And really. But before answering this question, it is important to indicate what the competition in teams is bad for.

• Competition creates a desire to deceive the system. If the management personally identifies employees, therefore, there are certain criteria for such selection. It can be anything, from KPIs dragged in by the ears to subjective judgment of the boss. In the first case, the numbers can be screwed, in the second - to advance to personal pets. Whatever the outcome, the quality of work ceases to influence career success; the one who is better able to circumvent the system succeeds.
• Competition provokes knowledge hiding. If a person owns some unique information - this is his competitive advantage over all others. Law of the jungle. Sharing valuable knowledge is like shooting your legs with a Gatling machine gun. It is hardly worth further explaining why teams and teams built on such a model work worse than those where people are open to sharing knowledge and even striving for it.
• Competition leads to the appearance of politics. Perhaps this is the worst side of it. People, teams, and even entire departments within an organization begin to play undercover games in order to bite off as large a piece as possible. Someone podszhitsya someone, another knocks around a clique, a third dismisses the rumors, the fourth blackmails, and the fifth regularly carries bottles of "Hannessee" in the office of the authorities.

So what does it have to do with plastic?

Yes, you yourself probably already guessed. Distributing seemingly innocuous figurines for services to the fatherland, it is very easy to do it wrong and nurture the shoots of competition, even in the healthiest team. “Vasya is the best programmer? Are you laughing Yes, he has such a code just because I clean it after him! ”. “Is Petya our employee of the month? Yes, he was sick for three weeks, and I covered his snotty ass! " “Kohl wrote the most lines of code? And for this medal? Next time, half a word I’ll transfer you to a new line, let's see who will have some indicators! ”The result is sad: no one corrects the code during the review, no one wants to replace the team members, and the listings turned into endless sheets tailored from almost empty pages. It's a fiasco, bro!

What to do?

Finally, the favorite section of Chernyshevsky. Of course, as mentioned in the beginning, the world is not black and white. In some form, moderate competition may well exist, the main thing is not to give it paramount importance, not to overdo it. If you certainly want to leave the staff to remember something other than pleasant memories of your organization, try to listen to the following tips:

• Distribute plastic - distribute it to everyone. Treat statuettes as souvenirs, not as rewards. In the end, you do not offer employees sweatshirts with the company logo just for special achievements?
• Make plastic personalized, thank people. Not for concrete merits, because their definition, as we found out, is an exclusively subjective judgment, but for the fact that they are great, for the fact that they love their work, for the fact that they do not stop on the path of self-improvement. There is no more magical word in the language of human relationships than “thank you”.
• Make a really good plastic. If this thing will stand on the desktop of each employee, it should not be a hack. If you do not have enough budget, time or some other resources, then give up your idea at all or set it aside for later. It is better not to do at all than to do badly.

Well, what if the “Best of the Best” statuette was given to you? Fight temptation, throw it to hell and forgive your boss - perhaps he did it not from evil.