Stop Focusing on Motivating Employees in Office Culture
Avoiding demotivation has a much higher ROI.
Demotivation comes at a high cost for companies: Not only does it promote a grumpy office culture, but it also costs bare money. Like profit due to lost orders because the employee hasn’t gone the extra mile in persuading the potential customer.
More severely, indirect impacts aren’t visible to the bare eye and hurting way more than a revenue loss: It’s all about innovation culture and the war for talents. Demotivated employees not fully invested with their minds make the company less innovative. In our high-technology environment, innovations are crucial to a company’s revenue and even future. The increased fluctuation following a demotivated workforce also drains the company for their best talents.
An honest and trustful relationship between management and employee can work wonders in avoiding demotivation. Ensuring the employee knows about the company's state, the strategic course, and the struggles let them be a part of something bigger.
Providing a shared goal
It all starts with honest communication culture. Holding back information from the employees or even passing the wrong ones may work once or twice, but they will notice. It hurts in at least two ways: Not only will the employees feel like being second class and not worthy of being told the truth, wreaking havoc on their motivation. It will also make them second-guessing their boss as they will always suspect being fed with wrong information.
Holding classified information as a secret goes without discussion: Some strategic information can hurt the company when getting public. But there is no value in telling your employees for years how bad the company's economic situation is, how little money it’s earned, and how bad the outlooks are. When not telling truthfully what the counter-measures are, what the shared effort has to look like to overcome the drought is the right thing to do right now; management doesn’t catch up on their employees. When they are left with their worries without a possible way out, the company loses them.
Failure culture
Mistakes happen. We are all flawed humans, so a healthy failure culture is vital. Failure management is a quality management system that prevents as many mistakes as possible before they even happen. Double-check systems and four-eye-principle can help uncover errors that sled through. Anyway, failures will sometimes happen, especially when unforeseen events require immediate action to prevent more significant losses. After the crisis is averted, there will be found some mistakes or some potential to improve, but this is inherent to improvisation situations.
How is the management reacting to this? Are they blaming the employee who made decisions, disassembling every flawed action, and even doing this in front of the workforce? Are they thanking him to take the initiative, prevent greater losses, and perform lessons learned to avoid such situations in the future?
Blaming the initiative employee leads to work-to-rule in the short run and inner quits in the long run. Both are severely hurting innovation and improvisation culture.
Keeping agreements
One major part of building and maintaining a trustworthy relationship between manager and employee is keeping agreements. To make this point more vivid, I’ll share a story that happened to a co-worker.
Back then, we were working in the same department but in different roles. He had a technical education and was asked by our manager one day to think of getting a university education. There will be a spare role in the future he wants to put my colleague in, but this role's specific requirements included a university degree. After thinking for a while, my colleague agreed on taking four years of part-time university education besides his job for the promotion when he gets the grad. All good so far.
I have to say, I am still astonished at how my co-worker handled all this. He did his full-time job, studied part-time, and took care of his two kids. He put in the effort.
Two years later, halfway through his studies, our manager dropped the bad news in the appraisal. Because of a restructuring of the entire department, the focused position for him is no longer available. He can surely finish his studies part-time, but he will stay in the same role as before with the same salary.
Understandable, he was done for weeks. The company not keeping the agreements left my co-worker in the void and all his efforts practically useless. How this episode influenced his willingness to go the extra mile.
Divide et impera
During ancient Rome, a foreign policy, translated with divide and conquer, is still practiced in management culture. By letting departments play off against each other, the employees instead fight themselves than their management.
This is somehow the result of a failed communication strategy, an unhealthy failure culture, and not keeping agreements. To get themselves out of focus, employees are pushing responsibility to other departments.
By blaming others, employees try to get themselves out of the management's wrath when mistakes happen. They also can blame the other employees for making themselves shine a little brighter.
This manifests in a not my job attitude, nurturing frustration among co-workers. Consequences are a grumpy mood in the office, employees insulting each other, and refusing to work together.
Needless to say, this is devastating to motivation and the overall process. Somehow interesting jobs get still done in such an environment.
Final Thoughts
Demotivation can not only hurt a company’s revenue but also their innovation culture and their fluctuation. When communications between management and employees lack honesty and trustworthiness, employees tend to be not fully invested. When not listening to their worries, the company can lose their best employees.
This gets even worse when the company isn’t even taking up on agreements. It wreaks havoc on the willingness to go the extra mile. Combined with an unhealthy failure culture and divide-and-conquer habits, it leads to many employees' inner quits, harming the overall ability of the company to innovate and resist competition.