What do you need when running a Cloud Engineering Team, turning them into A-Class Performers?

Many people are doing it for the first time. Some of them are are feeling stretched by the lack of support of resources within the organization

image source: Analytics Insight

After many conversations with different managers, the same questions keep popping up:

1. I have inherited a team of engineers who have been in the company for many years
2. What is the team size that I need to support the organization?
3. I am dependent on teams to decide if they would like to get onboard onto Cloud.
4. Keep getting the same questions, “What is in it for them (WiiFM) for getting onto the Cloud?”

The most important question of all is, “How do I keep my team motivated?”

Usually, the questions mentioned above are interrelated as Cloud Engineering and adoption is still relatively new in many organization. Many organizations are still pondering what impact does it help on their business. What is the effect on my people within the organization?

I like to address the elephant in the room, “How do I keep my team motivated?”

Firstly we need to understand the team members within the team:

1. What are their core competencies?
2. Have they been going for training to upgrade themselves?
3. How long have they been in the organization and their previous roles?
4. What are the current team dynamics between them and the team?

You must be wondering why this is important. With the trend of talent crunch:

1. It will make your hiring process difficult. It will take longer to hire the right people for the organization and the team.
2. It is not easy to attract the right profile or submit their applications.
3. Your budget might be tight starting up, and options to hire senior experience people will make it more challenging.

Hence with so many challenges, sometimes a “quick win” can quickly turn a hasty assembly hero into A-Class Team. Eventually, the team will be helping to steer the organization into a new world and capture the great promise that Cloud will bring? FinOps, SRE, Dynamic Scaling, to name a few.

These are some of the ways you can start to liven up the spirit in the team and get them motivated.

1. If they have been working on the same thing for a long time, is it time for them to pick up new skills through training or be left alone to start “dreaming” how to make their job more manageable? You will be surprised that a minor downtime can do wonders to a “tired” brain exposed to mundane and repetitive tasks that can also be rejuvenated and creative. As a leader, you will need to take some hits as giving downtime will mean that the team will not complete tasks on hand. If you believe in that team member and have rest for creativity, you will be able to find ways to delay some non-critical tasks.
2. Sometimes in a traditional organization, voices are usually not heard. How about getting them to run their webinar sessions and record them. It gives them a sense of achievement in their work. Allowing them to present provides them recognition of their work. It also helps to build up credibility for the team. Eventually, other groups will start to notice the team’s excellent skills that they can tap on to accelerate their work. It is a win-win situation, the engineering team gets to work on exciting problems, and collectively, everyone learns from each other. Motivation feeds off positive energy. Other forms of voice can be starting a blog within the intranet, running meet-up sessions on their own, sponsor some food and drinks to make the session more casual and fun.
3. Retrospective within the team, you could ask the team, what is the most challenging and easiest problem to solve? Have a mini competition between them to solve those problems. Incentivize them for competing. It need not be cash prizes. It could be simple things like doing fewer days for operation support (if support is a painful thing to do). The competition will get them off their seats. The off day is like an immediate gratification reward if they win. To them, it could be an opportunity to take a rest, go for training or even work on mini-projects on their own. In Google, everyone is encouraged to take on a 20% project, which does not become Area120. As an engineering team, the core mission is to develop tools and services to make life easy for everyone. Innovation and creative thinking are essential.

Like to hear from you, what are your view and your journey?