Offering Official Rewards

Within this section “official” rewards, as a classification, are those that require involvement from the HR department and/or company leadership to carry them out. These are often going to be more “formalized” and long-lasting rewards, and more subject to formal company policy and procedure to deliver—for that reason, as a manager, you should be researching what it will take to do any of these things for your team members as soon as you take your role, so that you can be aware of the timeframe and procedures involved.

Title

Although it may seem trite—and certainly the Silicon Valley has seen its share of “custom” titles that developers love to select for themselves—the title assigned to a role can make a non-trivial difference to members of your team, particularly when (not if) they leave the company and move to a new role.

Chief Bench Warmer: At one consultancy at which I worked, it was considered a “perk” for consultants of a certain level to be able to choose their own titles for their business cards. Unfortunately, it led to quite a few nonsensical ones, such as “Chief Bench Warmer” and “Chief Dispenser of Pleasantries” and other empty collections of words. Eventually, the company ended up standardizing its titles as they grew larger, and the “quirky” titles were moved over to being internal nicknames and inside jokes.

Often the title can be a reflection of a nuance in the individual’s role, such as the difference between “Program Manager” and “Project Manager.” Or it can signal a particular direction of the individual’s efforts: “Technology Community Manager” conveys better detail than “Program Manager” about the direction, scope, and intended audience of the programs this individual will manage. Within the developer world directly, for example, we’ve seen the rise of titles like “Site Reliability Engineer” (SRE) as a preferred replacement for the more anachronistic “System Administrator”. In some cases, your engineers may be ...