Do you want to know how to motivate your employees?

STOP DEMOTIVATING THEM. This is what one of my clients told me last week. Although not demotivating employees doesn't mean that they will be motivated, knowing what could be demotivating might help in building a solid and productive team.

Therefore, here are some of the most common things that can demotivate people at work:

Uncertainty. Employees expect from their managers and from the company clear messages and full information regarding what is expected from them, what they need to do, who is evaluating them and on what criteria, what they need to do to have a good performance, how they can achieve that, how the company functions and why certain decisions are made. Without that, the employees will not feel part of the company, will not understand what their role is and will feel like their efforts and skills are not used and appreciated.

Inappropriate or no feedback. Everybody needs feedback in order to see where they have done good and wrong, to improve and to see if they are going in the right direction. Giving only negative feedback or positive feedback can be very demotivating and have a huge impact on the productivity.

Unclear strategy. When the employees don’t understand what the strategy of the company is and why some decisions are made, they will see them as chaotic and they will show resistance in implementing those decisions. On the long run this is very demotivating.

Lack or poor leadership. Lack of support towards the employees, poor communication, lack of empathy, not keeping ones word, inconstant decisions and unfair treatment towards the employees are just some of the signs of poor leadership.

No development or new responsibilities. Repeating the same processes and not facing new challenges can negatively affect one’s attitudes. Most employees want to keep on learning new things. Some want to do that faster, some slower, some want to take on more responsibilities and some not. In any of the situations, people need some variety in their work in order to keep their motivation and performance high. What managers should do is to find out what are the expectations of each of their employees and try to offer manage them by offering the right development opportunities at the right time.

The most common situation is that employees who feel demotivated leave the company. However, not all demotivated employees do that. Some of them stay there and complain, have a poor performance and create a bad atmosphere in the team.

No matter if they leave or not the company, having demotivated employees can be extremely negative for any company. 

Looking forward to your feedback!

Giving and receiving feedback is a powerful tool at the workplace. It informs employees about their performance and behavior within the team. Without feedback, employees will get in a frustrating uncertainty that can become very demotivating. Feedback should be given and received in all directions in a hierarchy: from peers to peers, from employees to managers, from managers to employees. The purpose is to give guidance and to motivate people in reaching their goals. Giving feedback is not as easy as it may seem. If not done properly, the effect can be extremely negative: people will feel unmotivated and might even take the feedback as a personal attack.

It is commonly known that the feedback can be positive or negative. We need both of them to improve our performance even if the negative feedback is sometimes harder to accept. Both forms are ok from my point of view as long as they are constructive. Knowing how to give feedback is especially important for managers because they are the ones who need to guide and motivate the team. If they fail in giving right feedback, the performance of the whole team will suffer. What I discovered to be a very efficient way of giving feedback is the sandwich technique. In this process positive and negative feedback are offered alternatively. This way the employee will accept easier the negative comments as he will see that despite the things he needs to improve there are also things for which he is appreciated. Let’s take for example a meeting between a manager and one of his employees where the manager wants to give feedback to the employee about a specific situation.

This is the way I would see things going:

• The manager asks the employee his opinion about the situation he wants to address: “How do you think it went?”, “What did you think went well?”, “What do you wish you had done differently?”,
• The manager gives positive feedback: compliments the employee on the behavior or performance he wants to encourage and states the specific current behavior or performance that is complimented
• The manager gives negative feedback: focuses on the actions of the employee, not on the person, mentions the actions the person took or specific things said and defines positive future steps
• The manager gives positive feedback again and develops goals that the employee can work toward and explains how he will provide guidance.

Most of us are afraid of negative feedback because it is unpleasant and hard to accept. However both positive and negative feedback should be seen as sources of learning and improvement.

If we don’t receive feedback at work, we should go and ask for it. Otherwise we will lose a great chance to grow personally and professionally.