What Valve does differently to manage and motivate people is basically by having no managers. Valve lets their employees pick their own projects they want to work on. Since Valve is a ‘Flatland’, employees pick which projects they want to help work on and can even be recruited by other employees to work on a project with them. You can even move your desk around to different places to work with different people on different projects. They motivate their employees by letting them be creative and grow on their own to feel a sense of greater accomplishment. This works because they hire the best and they let their employees be themselves and in return they’re happy. They get more work done and better work from their employees. Running mostly everything in team based projects helps everything get done right as well. This flatland way of running things wouldn’t work if there were a large argument within a project. Say someone wanted to take the project one direction and someone else another. This would cause a lot of fighting and controversy, which is never good in team projects, especially when there isn’t a manager to over- rule them. It also wouldn’t work when it comes to someone not pulling their weight. There would seem to be a lot of employees who work harder than others and it’s hard to get recognized for that when there aren’t any managers to see these accomplishments. Since Valve has made a name for themselves and have done so well on their current way of doing things, I wouldn’t change much. The one thing I would recommend changing would be their lack of leadership. I know they have small leaders for individual team projects, but there should be at least a handful of managers there just to deal with inner-team fighting and for employee complaints on other employees. Basically like HR managers, except on a larger scale for the whole company. This would lead to smoother operations, quicker project completions, and even happier employees
