Katie Schueths – Incentivizing InnerSource Adoption #InnerSourceSummit2025 ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/TjDQLdGFi6o/maxresdefault.jpg) So my name is Katie Shuititz. I have um been with Inner Source Commons now for about four years. And today I am going to be talking about the culture part of what everyone in these other talks has mentioned. People talk about process. We talk about change and transformation but and everyone says that people are the most important part and they're right and there's only one way to make those changes happen and that's to get people to change. So the way that we do that is through incentivization. I think that I am doing something incorrectly. Um, it's not advancing. Plug in. There we go. So, the most basic question is uh what is an incentive? And the very short form is it's something that gets somebody else to do something, but it's something that helps people want to do something else. And but it's ultimately it's a motivator. It's something that someone desires. And in the inner source world, we have u different things that we can use. We can use money. We can use u desire for individuals to want to change for their own personal um ease and making life easier during the workday. And all of those u motivations are different based on how much effort is required by the person. If they have to do absolutely nothing and they're given a million dollars, they probably would. And I guarantee you nobody is going to give you 24 hours of their day for a dollar. So there is somewhere right in the middle of that balance between money and u internalized feelings or intrinsic motivations. That is the right balance. And the the basic equation is the incentive is the desired behavior multiplied by the motivator's value and divided by the effort. And those incentives that same formula is applied across the board. You have executives who are running at the enterprise level. These are your um your VPs, your CEOs, the person who says, "We want Inner Source. It worked at our last company. We don't know how to do it, but we really want it." And they tell another person in the company, "Go ahead, make it happen." And from there down an incentive is applied at each level of the organization in order for um the change to occur. we have um at the top level of your organization. Those individuals are going to um see your results of inners source through um external u factors, the success of a product, the customer satisfaction. They are not going to see as many of the small internal details that we often see as working at a program level. And each one of these levels, our success is dictated by metrics. So that that keyword and the CEOs really like metrics at the enterprise level. Um you have more monetary based based incentives. At the individual level, it goes all the way down to the intrinsic incentives and the intrinsic motivations which are those internal um small personal satisfaction. That was an easy explanation. So you might have a enterprise executive who wants the success of an inner source program and the success may be tied to stock value. It might be tied to a bonus or something that that person receives as a um as a benefit for the success of the entire organization. They give a directive to the organization or the business unit and that person sees a little bit of both sides. They are also happier when the success of their directors or their team under them um occurs because those people are happier in their one-on-one team meetings. And it tr it's a trickle down effect. But the higher up you go, the more money is important, the more money is a motivator. it's harder to uh use that self-satisfaction and feel-good um strategy with your high level executives. It is important to acknowledge though within inners source that every person is um is ultimately driven by the fact that they want to make their life easier and they want to make the lives of the people around them easier. They want to increase productivity so that they can go home earlier at the end of the day because they finished their work earlier. We are reusing. We are making things easier. We're not reinventing the wheel. If you reuse the wheel, you can go home by noon instead of remaking it and going home at 5. And that takes us down to the team and often their activity- based incentives. So when you have a a team and you need them to work together to work on a GitHub repository or develop a new product, develop a project, those people, you need them to work together and to collaborate. It's not um necessarily across teams at that level. you're working with the people next to you at your desks. And oftentimes those people are friends. They want to have activities like a pizza party or a time to get to know each other, a um a work remote day where they can all meet on Zoom or u something that brings them together and helps solidify their their team bond. As much as we hate our simple team building activities, sometimes an afternoon game day can be a great ex excuse for taking off early on a Friday. And then finally, um the individual level or these are the intrinsic and non-monetary incentives. They are uh longterm they focus on the long-term sustained changes of individuals and that is the self being satisfied with hard work and their own um their own success. This could be a um su or a success of a project, their pride of ownership, their um having a making their life easier. Some of they say what do they say that some of the best engineers are the lazy ones because they figure out the easy way to do it that's most efficient and that rings very true and that is ultimately the most those are the people who are going to be the most successful at implementing reuse because they're doing it the most efficiently and in the simplest manner. And those incentives are going to lead to the long-term sustained change. Uh looking deeper at the organization and business level um incentives. This really is a strong impact on cross team collaboration. These are um a strong impact to metrics of cross team collaboration. And when we talk about um contributing to other code bases or making changes to other teams documentation or submitting a poll request somewhere else um giving a suggestion or having to encouraging documentation that makes things easier for self-service that is all across teams and it's not internal teamwork. So those are u the success of those programs are what are going to be very evident and direct to the directors. You can give a metric. You can show that you had 17 external poll requests submitted in a specific month. You can show that documentation was viewed externally on from people outside of the primary maintainers on a project a certain number of times. You can identify important metrics that are um more relevant to the entire organization and show cultural impact. This is the larger um sustained culture change that we're looking for and we want those numbers to go up and keep going up in a sustained manner and then be sustained at a higher plateaued maintained level in the future. And these can be anything from free team lunches, like the team that has the most pull requests from other teams gets a team lunch because that means that the team that had received the most poll requests had the best documentation or the fastest response time. They had the most people interacting with them. They had uh they have implemented practices that allow for individuals to u access their information more efficiently and that takes a lot of best practices put together and a lot of sustained effort. And another incentive that is often um thought about is early access to new tools um and efficiency tools that maybe a company is rolling out a new part of an inner source platform and it's a for example over at Analog um one of the first features that was rolled out for the inner source program was co-pilot and we had a number of teams that were eager to be pilot teams for co-pilot and we selected teams to be a part of the inner source program who had demonstrated the most success with best practices. They were encouraged and excited to become a part of it for access to new technology and we also used access to conference panels. These were non both non-monetary. They didn't cost the inner source team any additional funding. And the conference panel for us was set up so that the team sent four of their top people to the company's conference that was a privilege to attend every year. And we had a guaranteed spot so that we could share inner source best practices with the rest of the organization. and that team could brag could brag about their projects. The team level incentives were um then this is where the teams were working together and to improve the quality of individual projects. Um this is I had mentioned earlier that this might be um getting individual teams to work together internally and you can do that by promoting a little bit of competition but also collaboration and and something small. These are very common, non-monetary, and not going to be a gift card because that gift card has a different value from one person to another. I can tell you that a $25 gift card to the grocery store for one person is going to make a lot less difference than it would be to somebody else. But, um, small tokens to incentivize. Sometimes this is something fun. It goes on the desk and it's just a a small reminder that what those what they did meant something. It might be a fidget spinner that says great job on it. just something that makes them remember they did they had a great moment. And it might be a a special frame that uh is given to them with for their team picture to be put in it or a little thank you note, something small, a token. Um it could be a workplace improvement and that might just be a back support pillow. That is something that was mentioned during a team meeting. This could be something that isn't even a a common object. As managers, as program um leads, you listen to your team. You listen to conversations. You hear that one team member's favorite color is red and another's is purple and another one likes glitter. Well, that might be a a red back support pillow instead of the standard one off of the catalog that's gray. Um, it could be a virtual team game hour where a certain person gets to select the team game for the day or whoever the top contributor that week was or had the most collaboration with the rest of their team gets to select the pizza um restaurant for the team afternoon activity. It could also be um access to an extra remote workday or um a no meeting Friday. And then what I often think of as one of the most important is actually the individual level con um incentives. And that's because when you work with each individual's needs, it impacts the bigger hole and it's longer term sustained because there's team turnover. A team is going to change. A group of um the executives are going to turn over, the directors are going to turn over. You're going to have new talent. Your teams are going to be different groups of people. But with inner source, we are focusing on um making improvements that also increase um talent retention within a company and keep our engineers happy and um at a at the company longer. So hopefully we have those individuals around and we can create sustained um incentives for each individual long term. I these are discussed often one-on-one with managers and they are most often non-monetary. They're equal across every member of the team. That could be access to attending a conference. that could be um a focused on um a access to education or professional opportunities. Maybe you have some u certain members or people are able to access u new to new educational tooling or there's subscriptions given out at the organization. um time off, remote work, Friday afternoons, work from home or uh working on a project, getting it done early and taking time off. This could be and this is most often uh beneficially um implemented through a performance evaluation. You can put those metrics in that focus on behaviors that you want to improve across the entire organization, but it focuses on individuals. So people can talk with their um their managers about areas of improvement or areas of excellence. And that might be a behavior that's exhibited in documentation and the need for individuals to have certain levels of documentation before they're promoted or different certain types of uh collaboration um that you want to see. a a analog devices. We had a hardware and software sides of the organization and there was a collaborative effort between both sides so that the performance evaluation for all engineers both hardware and software across the entire um company matched because documentation for both types of development was so important and it mirrored. We wanted them to be able to collaborate at the point where um the processes combined and they were working on embedded software. So we matched their um desired behaviors and created performance plans that then individual managers talked with each of their engineers about. And we used that to um find our um trusted committers, our maintainers and people who exhibited the best performance across those skills. We used our performance metrics to compare team success based on individual performance. And these different companies encourage different things. if they encourage speaking opportunities at conferences, you can have um you can offer speaking opportunities to those employees. Um maybe they're going to speak on their innersource success. Maybe they're going to speak on a um a best practice surrounding inners source that is specifically relevant to their project of giving people the opportunity to of share their success is intrinsic motivation. It of course there's a little bit of monetary because you're sending them to a conference, but it's bragging rights. It's telling people about their success, their projects, and what they have accomplished. And a sustained change is more valuable to the company than um small changes that have to be rewarded monetarily. Like every time you find a bug, you get a bug bounty internally type of program. But a sustained long-term change will also impact your culture. And this is the opportunity for people to have individuals encourage each other and to um give each other um tips and tricks about their successes. It is if someone reaches a goal as an individual, you reach back out and you have that person share their own success because that's what creates culture change. It is when someone is proud of their work and you finish a project, you launch a product, you have reduced manh hours on that project by reusing code by maybe the course of the project it was 3,500 hours and over the course of a year and you share that with your teammates. They realize the best practices that you have used and that that and other teams realize the success of that project and that uh enthusiasm spreads. A manager can go and tell everyone and every team that something is going to make their life great, but until you talk to someone at your own level that says as a firsthand account, I had a great success with this. Then that's when you believe it. the you're going to ask your neighbor who the best um what the best strategy for making their lawn was next door to you because you have a similar lawn to them than you are from going and talking to someone who wants to has an ulterior motive. And oftentimes people see more eye to eye with equal level peers. So find how your engineers can be neighbors to each other and can share their own successes in order to improve that intrinsic motivation across um the teams. And that reward really is the um the comfort and the resources. It's they're happier. They're more comfortable in their environment. They make everyone else happier. So that goes beyond just the the red back pillow for their chair or the um the new finger bobbles to play with and fidget toys. That is those are your going to be your change your change agents. And once you find people who are highly successful and that that type of motivation has impacted, those are the people that you want to promote. Those are the people that you want to bring that can be an evangelist for your inner source program and those are the people that you want to help lead the charge for your change. So once you find your five or 10 people that this type of motivation works with, it will spread and it will spread up the chain all the way to the executives. So the more people you have at your base, the more successful your metrics will be at the top, the more money that you're going to see your executives get when they get their stock bonus and the more success your program will have. That brings us to metrics. Metrics are really we often say that metrics are hard with inner source because there is a lot of measurements are subjective and a lot of things are based on internal work that are not directly related to an external product or the amount of money a customer is paying for a product. And some examples of these may be for individual contributors that it's documentation quality or issues closed. It may be the number of um PRs that someone has submitted to another team. These are all metrics that you can discover through a metrics dashboard and platforms such as um backstage or um any other um inner source portal that your company has developed that reaches into GitHub or um your wherever your source code is located to um identify the best metrics for um demonstrating success at a team level. Sometimes this is often average time to review for PRs. These are harder to capture from time to time, but it is important. So you can come start with things that are small and then make them more challenging. We asked our teams to uh make sure that they had their documentation created and we wanted to see how many other teams viewed their documentation. We had teams that were um encouraged to reach out and um communicate over um asynchronous communication instead of team meetings. And for those teams, the reduction in in external meetings was a calculation that we were able to um focus on and that was hours of time saved. If if you have a thousand engineers and each of them has 50 weeks of work a year, they each have if you can reduce the number of meetings by an hour a week. Just one hour a week. Maybe that's uh one one-hour meeting or four 15 minute Zoom calls for them asking questions. You just had 50 weeks of work for a thousand engineers at one hour a week saved. That is a very high metric to show your executives if you can capture those numbers. Um then at the Oregon business unit level we have company success and your overall collaboration across the organization. you have um it might not show up on a slide deck as easily as you would like, but it's going to be that person that walks into the executive's office who is happy and who has said, "Oh, my team just finished a product early because we were able to reuse this much code or we were able to find the documentation and didn't have to go talking to 50 people. So we saved three weeks worth of work and we achieved our deadline and met something on or before time and expectations that is what is going to make the most impact to some of the people at the top is word of mouth. So the numbers, the figures, they are great but uh ultimately it is um it will also be the word of mouth and the success when those metrics are harder to find and some basic next steps. If you want to start implementing metrics and inner source um incentives at your organization then what you need to do is you need to identify those behaviors and those metrics that you want to address. figure out a behavior that cross team collaboration. Let's identify the number of PRs increase in P across team PRs and you want to increase that by uh 5% in the next quarter, four or half a year and do your research. find out um what would improve somebody's work experience, what would be a motivation to them because it's not going to be the same for every person, but you can find a selection or something that most people would like and then um tailor it to each team or the person you're targeting and talk to HR. If it has something to do with your performance evaluation, that is going to take time. That is going to take a lot of engagement. And it took us a year and a half to get the behavior onto the onto the performance um evaluations just because of the number of layers of people we had to talk to. So we um and that was still a work in progress. So find find what you want to target first. Start small and work up. And sustained metrics. This is just showing you that they impact so many things. It's not just a sustained impact on the a product figure. It is your culture. It's individual motivation and productivity, quality and collaboration. You can um you can show your executives that or your managers that incentives impact more than just work. They impact every aspect of an individual's life. And that's what I have. If I'd like to open it for questions if anybody has any questions., Katie Schueths – Incentivizing InnerSource Adoption #InnerSourceSummit2025, YouTube, 01kchgb7f084dnn5ssrc3vtb1n.