Ask HN: Motivitating employees to work harder through project bonus?

[bigdang]

I lead a remote team and give each individual the flexibility to choose their own working hours and capacity—"your work speaks for itself", etc. We're working on a long-running software project with a deadline that's fast approaching.

I want to ask my team to work a little harder to meet our goal. However, I find it unethical to require people to work overtime, in return for pseudo-glory or empty promises of growth. I want to instead reward them with something tangible.

I'm considering a project bonus: if we ship by this date, everyone on the team gets $X USD.

However, I'm reading that money isn't always a good motivator. I'm wondering if anyone has experience with this, or any other strategies for getting teams to work harder than usual without encroaching on their right to live and work on their own terms.

[bladegash]

A lot of people say money isn’t their motivator, which can be true. There are people wholly intrinsically motivated, but it’s rare. There are also people financially secure enough to where they don’t care about additional money, but that’s rare as well.

If you have the ability to do this, one solution I have seen work is a phantom stock agreement that sets the valuation at the present value of the company. I won’t go into all the details, but it would given employees a percentage of any growth above that valuation. There would be an event that has to take place to payout and such, but it’s a good motivator to drive growth. In addition, it gives employees equity without actually giving them actual company ownership.