Software Development Team & Motivation

Todays Software Developers want more than just a good salary. Although not crucial it's certainly very important fact to consider the benefits that a company provides are important too, but mainly these benefits are no longer just related to having a "fun-room" and Google like environment. The benefits I am talking about here is giving them a part of the cookie, and a share based benefits, so that developers can feel like they are part of something.

Shares, Salary, Focus, Creativity, Performance, Planning, Mentorship, Recognition, Team, Benefits (Ability to work from anywhere, Felxibility in Worplace, Training and Learning), Growth and Innovation

So what are the ways to keep you Development team happy and motivated?

1. Firstly lets not lie each other about it, the Salary has to be at least competitive with the rest of the market, but I would agree its not the most important or a deal-breaker in most cases
2. Tech Focus and the alignment of where the company wants to move and where the individual wants to move within the tech stack and within product or service. If the two align that's a perfect match. There are obviously individuals who want to be good all-rounders with tech, and want to know a bit of everything, but majority of Engineers love to have a focus and "be amazing at something". I strongly suggest having an open discussion in the first interview around this point and it goes both ways.
3. Next is what I would call a variety of good challenges, and creativity. Providing Software Developers some Freedom for Creativity as coding is a type of art if you ask me. Since coding is half engineering and half creativity this one is quite important.
4. I believe Developers need to be challenged, but how they will know their progress if its not being measured by a some sort of a solid system in place. This is a job of a good IT management, getting a system in place for measuring the Performance of the team. A way to get this is by introducing a Framework in place, from which statistics can be pulled. Although sometimes they don't mean much, they can also be a great tool, in self motivating individuals working in a team to "pull more weight" for the team.
5. Developers do like organisation. Planning is the key here in order to be a part of a successful project, so agile methodologies and frameworks such as SCRUM can really help along the way although they can play a critical role in teams motivation it's how they are executed rather than the type of a framework used.
6. Next point on the list is the Mentorship. Having that mentor, a senior or an architect, who will show you some tips and tricks and transform the mindset of the juniors and "medior" developers into more senior mindset is the key to the success for getting the motivation right up in a software development team. 
7. Most people crave Recognition, so do Developers, in-fact in my career I have noticed that they really love recognition, even though sometimes they don't like to admit it. If they've worked hard on something and done a good job, they deserve some recognition. This is one of the most important functions of a manager.
8. Who you are working with , what are your colleagues like, what's the management like and do you see yourself with this Team? Socialising amongst the team, getting to know one another is very important. Possibly one of the most important points is this one, and the "cultural-fit" or just whether the individual fits in. If that ticks the boxes, motivation is pretty hard to miss. 
9. I have placed this towards the end of the list, not because I believe these are not important, they are, but I just wanted to emphasise other points before this one. Benefits. Actually some of these are no longer even considered as benefits, but a standard practice in most dev-shops: Remote Work, Flexible Work Hours, Trainings and Development, great Gear to work on, such as a funky laptop of choice and a company phone etc.
10. Few other things worth mentioning but not raving about, as I believe they should be "given" are ability to provide for Growth of the individuals, which should be managers job. Another one would be providing them with ability to Innovate.

I am not saying this is a full list, but some critical tick boxes for a successful running of the development team, these are the basics. Certainly the trend from having Google like environments, with toboggans, games, and fun-rooms is changing. In my opinion the Engineers (and not just engineers but the entire industry) are becoming a lot more motivated with having the ability to earn the "Piece of the Cookie" and become a "Part of the Game" in some ways a share-holder or an owner of a small piece of the cookie, much more than with any of the above mentioned points.

Please add to the list :)