Toxic Clients Do Demotivate Employees!

Summary: When it comes to improving workplaces, an area that is not usually discussed is how clients influence employees’ motivation. Your clients do have an enormous impact on your employees’ overall work experience and levels of engagement. You can be a great employer, but if you work with toxic clients, your employees’ job can become an absolute nightmare. Here I discuss how clients motivate and inspire employees to do their best work!

“A bad relationship is like standing on broken glass, if you stay you will keep hurting… If you walk away you will hurt, but eventually you will heal” (Autumn Kohler)

Relatively few organisations seize the opportunity to create motivating connections between their employees and clients. Harvard Business Review indicates that a growing body of research demonstrate that end users (customers, clients, patients, and others who benefit from a company’s products and services) do motivate people to work smarter, more creatively, harder, and more productively.

Yes, people are driven and energised by their clients. For this to happen, employees need to be truly interested in and even inspired by their clients’ business activities which is a critical aspect of people’s engagement (Read more: Employee Engagement).

To show you what I mean, recently I surveyed 4,900 employees operating in a conglomerate of various business sectors (manufacturing, retail, professional services, etc.). From the 80 different survey statements that I included in the questionnaire, it was

Our customers would rate the service we deliver as ‘excellent’

the item that had the highest correlation and strongest impact on people’s engagement and motivation. So, the main driver of engagement for these 4,900 employees was their willingness and commitment to offer the best possible service to their clients (Source: Great Place to Work UK).

Engaged employees are those who constantly provide great service and a unique experience to clients… but what happens when that connection between your employees and clients is broken?

How Toxic Clients Affect Your People’s Morale

Toxic clients are not those who constantly underpay (or do not pay at all) for your services, but those who wear down your team’s motivation and morale. If a client’s bad behaviour is causing your employees to be unhappy working for you, this is a problem that you need to tackle immediately, especially if you are a small business, where recruiting good talent is always a challenge.

Avoid forcing employees to work with clients who make their lives miserable. Nobody wants to work with unpleasant clients, those that consider your employees just another supplier, a simple commodity that they pay for or think they have the right and power to bully them. These clients believe your company is being handsomely paid for the agreed contract and assume they have to squeeze every single penny out of your employees.

Employees know who those toxic clients are. Comments in employee surveys and focus groups in organisations offering professional services reveal that many people work late at night just to deliver unreasonable deadlines for pushy clients. They also commented that some clients even displayed anger management issues, raising their voices and shouting at them for just trying to do their jobs, in general, being rude to them. Many times, the efforts and even sacrifice of these committed employees are not appreciated and recognised by clients, and sometimes not even noticed by their own employers.

It is important to emphasise the ‘long-term’ impact of regularly doing business with toxic clients. In the short-run, it may not impact your organisation too badly, but in the long-run and with continued exposure, it may severely damage your employees’ engagement levels. I always mention to my clients that they should be cautious when renewing contracts with organisations that directly damage their employees’ morale and motivation.

How To Identify Toxic Clients

There is nothing more disengaging for employees than having to work for clients whose behaviour towards them is not up to scratch, their business is not aligned with their personal interests, or worse, with their ethical and moral principles.

Here I list a few examples of how some clients’ actions and behaviours can actively demotivate and destroy your people’s morale and goodwill. Focus groups and interviews with employees (mostly professional services companies) revealed some interesting client profiles. Consider the following:

• The Unfriendly: These clients tend to dislike small talk. If the people you are to work with can’t connect on a human-to-human basis and instead dive straight into impersonal business processes and protocols, then this is an early indication that it is going to be a very tough work environment for your team.
• The Unreasonable: They always want your employees’ full attention and expect your people to be at their full disposal. They call, email, text them during the weekend or late at night and expect an immediate response. They can’t stand being made to wait. This does not only include unscheduled calls but also constant meeting requests which in most cases are not necessary. 
• The Inflexible: They don’t respect the agreed scope of work and timelines. They want things you can’t give them or impose impossible demands and unrealistic deadlines. The word ‘urgent’ loses all meaning. They want your employees to always do whatever they ask. No matter how absurd or technically unfeasible, if they ask for something, they want them to do it. No room for discussion. 
• The Clueless: They are not sure what they want, offer zero direction and can’t answer simple questions about their business. They constantly change their criteria. They can’t articulate the information your employees need to know to do their job but have endless revisions and additional requests once the final service has been delivered.
• The Complainer: Despite your employees’ best efforts, the complainer will always hate the deliverable. They constantly moan about the service your company provides, complaining about your team, and why your people should always treat them special. These individuals constantly tell your employees the service is too expensive. They constantly ask to discount your rates, and to make matters worse, they will make up any excuse (including citing the poor quality of your work) to refuse to pay the agreed upon amount.
• The Egocentric: These individuals question your employees’ knowledge and expertise. They don’t value your employees’ opinion, don’t listen to their suggestions, don’t care that they are experts in their field. Egocentric clients impose their own gut feel, but then blame your employees when things go wrong and the whole project is in an unrecognisable mess. 
• The Unprincipled: Finally, and more worryingly, sometimes bad clients can pressurise your employees into compromising their integrity. This sort of requests has an impact on your employee’s self-respect, integrity, and, ultimately, his/her reputation and ability to stay motivated. 

I trust the above examples make it clear how toxic clients can absorb all your employees’ energy. After working with such clients for a while, you will discover that your team’s energy and goodwill slowly dwindles to dangerously low engagement levels. You will notice your people feeling depressed, tired, irritable, overwhelmed and completely stressed out… And if you don’t find a timely remedy, sooner or later, this unnecessary pressure will affect your organisation’s work environment and business performance.

What To Do With Toxic Clients

If some of your clients happen to match various of the profiles we have just discussed, you are definitely dealing with potentially toxic cases, and for the sake of your employees my recommendation is simple: if they are not willing to talk and compromise, cut ties with them as soon as possible.

Clients who put your people down and think your employees are not worth all the hard work they have put into developing their own skills, and on offering a great service to them, these are clients your company will not want to deal with on a regular basis.

Some more compassionate organisations, who recognise this situation, but don’t want to lose the client, tend to offer special incentives and rewards for employees who are willing to take projects with unpopular clients. I personally do not think that is the solution. It is in this sort of situations when employees, rather than being exposed, need to be protected and backed up by their own company’s leadership.

Senior leaders need to manage unreasonable client expectations. They need to talk to these clients in private, explain the situation, be clear on what is possible and what cannot be delivered, define a clear project scope and workplan, and make sure nobody deviates from it. Leaders need to be firm in this respect. It is so important to put your people first. It’s about creating an effective partnership with clients that can enhance the meaning that employees derive from their jobs and move them to do their best work.

If the client doesn’t want to compromise or is unreasonable, then I would suggest walking away from that specific business opportunity. It is not right, irrespective of how much that client is willing to pay for the service, to inflict pain and misery on your own people just for the sake of a good bottom line for your shareholders. Your employees’ well-being, their respect and trust, should be more important. So, sometimes it is necessary to say goodbye to a bad client. No one enjoys firing a client, but every now and then it is for the best.

Losing a paying client is painful, but what is the real cost for keeping this client over time? Don’t forget toxic business relationships will bleed dry the life out of your company and prevent growth. Business performance and employee morale often improve when toxic clients are sent home.

Some Final Thoughts…

Great clients advocate infusing the work of supplier employees with greater meaning and purpose. They respect their own employees, treat their customers fairly, partner with their suppliers, are good citizens in the community and care for the environment. They help supplier employees see for themselves how their work benefits the organisation, their people and communities where they operate (Read more: Five Non-Negotiable Corporate Values).

Great clients offer supplier employees a clear sense of achievement and opportunities for learning and professional growth. Supplier employees appreciate clients that challenge and at the same time encourage them to find creative ways to solve problems. Great clients are open to new ideas and keen to trying new things; always take the supplier’s advice seriously and show strong willingness to improve; offer relevant feedback that, in some instances, mean more to supplier employees than their own employer’s appraisals; and finally, show gratitude for the efforts and celebrate successes together with suppliers (Read more: Employee Motivation).

It is this sort of empathy and deeper understanding of mutual challenges and needs that fully engage supplier employees to become more committed to helping clients achieve their goals and vision. This is a powerful reminder of the value of strengthening a continued partner relationship with supplier organisations.

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Disclaimer: The author is making this ‘Opinion Blog’ available in his personal effort to advance the understanding of best practices in workplace related matters. The author assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions in the content of this ‘Opinion Blog’ or for the results obtained from the use of the information provided. The information is provided on an ‘as is’ basis with no guarantees of completeness, accuracy, usefulness or timeliness and without any warranties of any kind whatsoever, express or implied. The views expressed are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of any entity whatsoever with which the author has been, is now, or is to be affiliated in the future.