Teamcheck English

Mirrored Motivation

In previous posts, we introduced to you our team, talked about what the teamcheck method is, and announced the post about mirror motivation. Today is just about it. 

Our big idea is mirror motivation. Mirror motivation is an opportunity for employees to be charged with energy from each other, and not from the leader. Mirror motivation works because there are mirror neurons. When we watch someone, we want to do the same. Surely each of you was a karate kid watching Jean-Claude Van Damme films as a child. I personally shouted "KIAI" after each movie for a couple more days on every occasion. 

But what if the same thing could happen in a work context? Imagine that each of you is Jean-Claude Van Damme in small everyday affairs. We set the task, closed the task, talked about it. Everyone admires you and wants to do the same. 

Let's take an example. You are the leader of a startup. You have several colleagues from different specialties in your team. You solve the creative problem - to launch a startup, get the first customers, raise a round of investment. Every minute of the startup's CEO's time is very expensive, but for some reason, you spend a lot of time (sometimes up to 4 hours a day) to discuss current tasks and plans. It is not clear to you who does what and if anyone does anything at all. The introduction of mirror motivation will help you. 

So, implementing mirror motivation to your team is very easy. Today let's look at the steps. 

Stage 1. Divide people into teams/departments and create appropriate channels in Slack or even WhatsApp. If you use Bitrix, you can create groups there. You can even use groups in VK. Any way will do. 

Stage 2. Ask everyone to write a short chat post with a greeting in the morning. It will be a kind of check-in on a working day. We will talk more about check-in in the next post. 

Stage 3. Make sure that you have some top-level artifacts that store goals or large tasks for at least a quarter. Have a meeting with the team in which you re-read these artifacts together and form a daily plan. 

Stage 4. Ask the team to add a daily plan to the check-in message in the chat every morning. This will not work out right away, but you can easily achieve this if you are persistent. 

Stage 5. I congratulate you. You have already received 60% of the result if you are here. An important intermediate result is that you have already stopped helping the team to set goals every day. They can put them on their own. Stay at this stage for a week, enjoy it. You are already getting the result and saving yourself the effort. 

Stage 6. Now, in the evenings, the team reports what, out of this plan, has been done for the day. It's very dry at first. It is important to get messages every day without gaps. Such a procedure involves the minds of colleagues in a process of analyzing their productivity, which is useful in itself. 

Step 7. To perform dry fixing of the result, ask to add a mini-essay about what was cool, what was so-so, what could be done better, and who the hero is today. 

That's all. You succeeded. We congratulate you. If you did everything right, you now spend 30 minutes a day on team synchronization instead of 4 hours. And you can go on vacation for a month and nothing will break. 

As I said, the technology is implemented very much in chat rooms or Slack. At some point, we grew out of this and decided to find a system that would do it more correctly. But we failed. We have implemented dozens of tools into our companies, but none of them solves the main problem - creating a feeling of comradeship. 

Therefore, we created Teamcheck. Teamcheck is a service that allows you and your team to work more efficiently using mirror motivation technology. I suggest you try it in practice. On one screen you will see which of the employees is active and who is on a break, who has what focus for the day, and how much the team has progressed. 

Contact us to get access. 
See also
Meeting the team and idea
Leonid Dovbenko ・ 05.06.2020
Article on onboarding employees for remote teams
30.10.2020 - Maria Novoselok HR
How to enter the flow state at work using TeamCheck
Leonid Dovbenko ・ 23.06.2020
Basic introductions
Leonid Dovbenko ・ 15.05.2020