How to Demotivate your Performers

Some things are expensive to businesses when managers and companies destroy morale. An issue with a Demotivated employee is generally underperformance and attrition.

Lack of motivation is common, and research shows this is a serious problem with almost 72% of the workforce is not engaged or motivated. Most of the time the leaders or managers are blamed, however, it is a collective approach, and much deeper than one point of blame.

How do you motivate your employees?

We all know demotivation does not happen on purpose, the primary reasons are the actions taken without thinking, and this generally kills the spirit of the employees.

When the encouragement systems are set up properly and executed, they act as a great means to motivate the performers and build super-performing teams.

Most often not great plans fail, and that causes bigger distress, discontentment, and attrition, the key is to identify the key motivators, start simple, and then gradually increase the scope while recording and correcting failures.

Read on to understand and avoid some of the pitfalls, in this three-part series I will be covering some of the behaviors that demotivate performers and undermine recognition and rewards programs.

1) Do not celebrate small wins

A simple pat on the back, especially with top performers works wonders. All of us like small praises, it is very important to those who work hard and go above and beyond to solve everyday problems.

Recognizing individual accomplishments demonstrates that the seniors and company are paying attention, and keep an open communication channel with employees to find out what?motivates them, for most, it is simple praise. It’s a manager’s role to assess, understand and meet different motivational needs.

Regularized 1:1 discussion helps to chalk out these issues.

2) Don’t encourage development and offer opportunities for growth?

More often than not we assign the same tasks and responsibilities to our employees, if there is a lack of challenges and learning opportunities negatively affects our teams

Managers have to understand that continued learning opportunities for the team members are the only way to keep them current and motivated, ignorance of this fact is not only dangerous to the team but also to the Business and the Organization.

Good performers generally want to stay ahead, and advance their careers and will really appreciate encouragement and support in the process.

Organizations should have a good training plan and also provide team members to train others so that they feel responsible for uplifting the team.

Assign additional projects when possible and increasing responsibility to the performers will help to improve motivation, and regular workshops and online learning programs increase?the skill.

3) Hire and promote the wrong people

?It is very demotivating when wrong team members are hired, and to make matters work if a wrong person is promoted total demotivation sets in.

As per the survey, 95% of financial executives surveyed indicated a bad hire affects the morale of the team.

When you go above and beyond and someone undeserving team member gets promoted it not only kills the more but it is also an insult to the one who deserved it.

Good, hard-working employees want to work with like-minded professionals.

Always look at strong members of the team and hire like-minded team members who can work together, it is not just hiring the top scorer in a test, while the technical skills are important, team skills should carry equal importance, remember if you hire a wrong employee who cannot work well with others you are creating an imbalance in a harmonious team.

Implement systems to ensure hiring only the right fit for your organization’s culture and work style.

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I hope you have liked reading this far, we will continue this in the next week?where I will be going over some more pointers which will help in ensuring your top performers stay and perform.

About author:

Raghavendra Bhat ?heads the Professional Services at Chimera Technologies . He is a food freak and knows all the best restaurants in Bangalore. If you want recommendations of where to eat, please feel free to connect with him.