
Ask HN: How do you motivate your team to work on mundane tasks? - jimsojim
At my company, part of product involves on-boarding new developers  (freelancers) on the platform and evaluating their profile and the online coding assessment. We are not at a stage where we can have a separate team of evaluators to take care of this so our tech team is required to set aside time from their coding work and evaluate these profiles, which is a mundane and non-rewarding work for them. How do you keep your team motivated to do such mundane tasks that are important for the company&#x2F;product and yet not directly related to their individual performance?
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cimmanom
I’ve never had trouble motivating people to do this.

How?

By hiring people in the first place who are mature enough to recognize that
their job isn’t just writing code, it’s helping the company grow.

And hiring people who aren’t just motivated to succeed for themselves, but who
are community-minded and want to improve things for the people around them and
make the team as a whole better.

And by being consistent with messaging about this. If you need someone to take
two hours per day this week for onboarding, make sure projects are scheduled
and incentives aligned in such a way that a) you can confidently make
onboarding their top priority for the week so it’s OK if other projects slip
as a result, and b) the timeline for those other projects takes into account
that the developer will be short 10 hours (not to mention almost certainly
constantly interrupted and unable to achieve flow) this week.

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detaro
> _not directly related to their individual performance?_

If it's important for your company, then why is doing this job not part of
their performance?! Of course they don't want to do it if it just takes away
from duties they're judged on.

