Business Management ABCs

Secret Employee Motivation Strategy Cont

I recently received a comment with some very good questions, and I wanted to address them.

The comment is: Don’t you also think that some employees are going to act the same no matter what you say to them?

Do you think this would work for an employee who has been working for awhile, receiving the “negative” feedback, such as, “You need to pick up the pace, you’re slacking.” or “You keep making mistakes, don’t you know what you’re doing?”

What if you decide to try and change an employee using this method and you try for awhile using statements like, “You’re a real asset to the team. I can depend on you to keep busy” etc. But they don’t change and you end up having to let them go? Couldn’t this make an already difficult task, even more difficult?

Answers

First question is concerning weather employees will act the same no matter what you say. While it is true there are some employees it seems refuse to change, the reality is in all my years experience, I never met an employee who deep down didn’t want to be the best employee he or she could be. Sometimes employees don’t change because they’ve given up. Sometimes they don’t change because they are trying to undermine the managers authority. In most cases though an employee’s refusal to change is simply due to the fact that they’ve lost their sense of purpose, and don’t understand how they make a difference within the company or don’t know how to change.

I once had a person on my team who continually fell below company goals. When this happens there are three issues to address. 1) doe the employee know what the goals are? 2) does the employee have the skills / training necessary to meet those goals? 3) does the employee have the tools necessary to meet those goals? If all three of these are true, there’s only one reason they’re not meeting the goals, they don’t want to.

What was intrigued me about this employee was that he seemed like a very decent individual who wanted to be a good employee, and yet he was not meeting the goals. When I monitored his performance and worked with him, he did everything right and was able to meet company goals. It was when he was on his own that he didn’t. I pulled him into my office one day and asked him why he wasn’t doing the best he could when I wasn’t watching him and interestingly enough, he didn’t know. He knew he could do it, he just didn’t when I wasn’t there, but he said he wanted to. In his case, I could tell there was simply something in his subconscious that was causing him to self sabotage.

I took him through an exercise in which I essentially linked poor performance with negatives like failing as a father, failing as a grandfather, and not being someone his wife and kids could look up to. I then helped him link good performance with freedom, feelings of accomplishment, feelings of being a good role model, someone his family could be proud of etc. The next day he met the company goals and did so until I left the company some months later.

The secret is to know a person well enough to know what drives them and then to use the right techniques with the right people. There will be more posted in this blog as I get time so that my readers will have an assortment of motivation techniques to chose from.

Second Question

Do you think this would work for an employee who has been working for awhile, receiving the “negative” feedback, such as, “You need to pick up the pace, you’re slacking.” or “You keep making mistakes, don’t you know what you’re doing?”

The answer is an astounding YES! I can’t tell you how many teams I took over where everyone on the team was in danger of losing their jobs they knew it, and the supervisor was very negative toward the team. Within about ten days I was able to turn these teams around to become the number one to number two teams in our offices. Part of what I did to turn the team around was to catch them doing something good, and then tell them how much I appreciated them doing it. I would also add words like and I’m so glad I can always count on you to… You get the idea.

Warning!!! It is very important that if you are taking over a team, you meet with them one on one before anything else and find out what their goals are and what drives them. Misreading someone and trying to motivate a person using the wrong rewards can backfire. I’ll try to write more on this subject down the road.

Third Question

What if you decide to try and change an employee using this method and you try for awhile using statements like, “You’re a real asset to the team. I can depend on you to keep busy” etc. But they don’t change and you end up having to let them go? Couldn’t this make an already difficult task, even more difficult?

This can be a problem if you are lying to them. If someone is consistently late and you walk up to them one day and say it’s so nice to know I can always count you you to be on time, they’ll just think they’ve pulled the wool over your eyes. However, if they are consistently late except for today, and you walk up to them and say “I really appreciate you being here on time today. It really makes everyone on the team look better and I know that from now on I can continue to count on you to be on time.” A statement like this will cause the employee to try much harder to be on time than to say something sarcastically like “Nice to see you made it on time today.” Of course if someone is consistently late, there may be a good reason for this and unless that reason is resolved they will continue to be late.

If you have an employee who consistently fails to meet company standards and you have worked with them and they have worked with you, but they just can’t make it, believe me, they are not enjoying their job because no one likes to fail and they may be looking for a job somewhere else, or hoping you’ll let them go so they can find something they can be successful in. More on this later if when I get time.

I’ll just wrap it up by saying a good manager never has to let anyone go for performance reasons. I had people quit from my team because they knew they would never make it, and I even talked people into quitting so they could find work elsewhere, but I only fired two people in a five year period and it wasn’t for performance, it was for breaking company rules.

In summary, find different motivation theories that work with different people learn what works with what types, and always be positive for best results.

For more great motivation strategies to empower your employees, visit: motivation theory.

Written by: Robert Ratliff