Four things that demotivate your best employees and how to avoid them

Do you love your job? As a manager or CEO, you're probably delighted with your paycheque at the end of the month. Your employees, on the other hand, will punch in at 9 and out again at 5, but with less responsibility, there is more time to reflect upon their role in the office. And so the question really shouldn't be whether or not you love your job, but whether your employees love theirs?

Lack of Face Time

In today's active workplace, managers must make sure all employees, especially the ones who work remotely, are engaged. Employees should have a frequent feedback system and be made to feel as if their opinions are valued. A lack of real-time, face-to-face communication among teams and with managers can leave employees feeling less connected to the organization, hence demotivating them.

Playing Favourites

Every organization needs to nurture top talent, but creating an elite group of people who are given special development opportunities or the best projects can and will often backfire. Playing favourites can be anything from taking one team out to lunch to celebrate some achievement, but not giving other teams the same treatment when they achieve something alike. When talented individuals see themselves as having no future in the company, they're going to look elsewhere.

Unnecessary Rewards

According to researchers at Harvard Business School, external rewards and punishments can work well for algorithmic tasks but are detrimental for heuristic ones. Rewards aren't demotivating if they are unforeseen and offered only after the task is complete. Offering it at the beginning will inevitably focus people's attention on obtaining the reward, rather than solving the problem. When managers use rewards to motivate, that's when they are most demotivating.

Micromanagement

Micromanagers can really get under the skin of personnel. There's nothing worse when trying to do your routine job, then to have someone breathing down your neck the whole time, trying to control your process. When CEOs or managers start to follow this, employees feel like no one has confidence in them, and that inevitably triggers disengagement and apathy towards the job at hand.