Five Ways to Demotivate Your Employees
Employees that feel appreciated will always go above and beyond to make their company an amazing place to work and do business with.

Even managers with good intentions can cause good employees to leave by creating an environment of demotivation. Here are the top five ways to demotivate your best employees.

Micromanaging: If your department managers and human resources representatives are thoroughly vetting potential hires and checking references, you’ve likely got a solid team on your hands. What drives capable adults nuts in the workplace? Feeling like big brother is always watching. Archaic practices like monitoring bathroom breaks, web browsing, and cell phone usage send the message that you don’t fully trust the team you have in place. Sure, you can require remote employees to send detailed accounts of what tasks they completed working from home. However, this quickly builds silent resentment. This is especially true since most companies are already tracking employee location in company vehicles, the volume of phone calls, and the number of sales made. A skilled manager with real-time data should easily be able to tell who is carrying their weight and who isn’t.

Rapid-Fire Policy Changes: If a department’s initiatives are a moving target, it can be overwhelming for an employee to keep up. Goals and job roles should be clearly explained and consistent. Peer groups, conferences, books, and podcasts are all amazing and effective ways to learn new skills and strategies. However, they should be incorporated into policies in place that are currently working. Pulling the rug out from your employees’ feet every few months only creates despair and resentment.

Consistent Bad Hires: The task of training new employees often falls on those already working within a department. Training a new hire is tedious and time-consuming. Performing this task on repeat because the caliber of new hires is poor, it demotivates good employees. When vetting potential hires take the time to evaluate whether they would work well with others, have the right skillset, and are a good fit for your company’s culture.

Making It Clear You Don’t Care About Their Personal Lives: There are 168 hours in a week. In many cases, employees only spend 40 of them working for you. It’s easy to create employee loyalty by popping in to ask them about their family, pets, part-time coaching position, or the recipe they posted on their Facebook page. Failure to recognize personal and professional achievements, birthdays, and employment anniversaries makes it blatantly clear that a person is expendable. Employees that feel this way quickly make their way to other organizations.

Continuous Criticism: No one is perfect. All employees need feedback to reach their full potential. Not all feedback can be positive. That’s perfectly acceptable. However, instead of launching a verbal attack of what employees did wrong, use the sandwich method. This means starting the conversation with positive feedback, offering a few areas for growth or improvement, and ending the conversation on a positive note. This leaves the employee understanding what you feel they do well and leaving them eager to add more items to the list by implementing the suggestions you provided.

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