Three Secret Steps To Motivate Employees

Cal, I have several employees who are slackers.  They waste precious time every day being nonproductive.  It has gotten so bad that I now have a morale problem.  The productive employees are starting to complain.  I’m afraid if I don’t do something, the productive employees will slow down and my organization will suffer as a result.  What can I do to get my nonproductive employees to stop wasting time and get their work done?”

This is a question I get in every supervisory class I teach.  It is a great question.  Sometimes I ask them a question before I answer. “What's the first step you would take to motivate them?” I get answers like praise them more often, give them more money, let them participate in my decision-making, help them with their personal problems, etc.  All these answers are great but the employees remain unmotivated.

Motivational experts have been doing research and publishing books on this subject since the early 1900s.  By reading these books, you can get excellent theoretical approaches to motivating employees.  That is what many contemporary managers do.  They read the book, find a motivational scheme that sounds great, put it into place and six months later, the scheme dies.  Then they try something else and that dies.  Why?  In my view, the reason these schemes die is they don’t address the root cause of the lack of motivation.  Before I proceed further, let’s define what I think motivation is.  After a observing employee behavior for over 50 years, I believe motivation is stimulation of an internal drive or impulse to do more good things and less bad things.  The internal drive or impulse is already there in most people.  For many people it is just lying there dormant, waiting for someone to wake it up.  That's the supervisor’s job.

Motivating employees can be done easily in three steps.  The first step is to get to know the employee like the back of your hand.  Know what their habits are.  Know their likes and dislikes.  Understand their attitude toward the work and the workplace and the people.  You find this information through daily communication and observation.  The reason you are taking this first step is to determine the internal drive or impulse that might be lying dormant.  Don’t stop until you know the employee so well that you clearly understand what turns them on and what turns them off.  In the unlikely event you don’t find an internal drive or impulse, work with the employee and place one there.  Then nurture it with some water, sunshine and fertilizer, and it will grow.  Once it is grown enough, stimulate it and the employee will respond in a positive way.  That leads to the second step.

Once you understand every employee’s internal drive or impulse, you should act.  You should, each day, find an employee doing something right and stimulate that employee’s internal drive or impulse.  It might be praise for a job well done, some time off, some additional responsibility, a special choice project, a letter of appreciation.  Each employee is different.  Therefore, the items you select will be different for each employee.  Just make sure that the employees understand your motivational methods so you will not be accused of favoritism.  Employees like nothing better than the personal attention they get from their supervisors.

If supervisors would follow these three simple steps they might find that motivating employees to do more productive work is a very easy task and, in fact, can be fun.