10 Things to Avoid Doing So Employees Stay Motivated (And What to Do Instead)

Managers have a lot on their plate, so it’s easy to get distracted and leave employees feeling uninspired to work or do their best. It’s much harder for a company when the boss starts doing things that kill employee engagement. They say, the secret to great leadership is to stay authentic, but here are 10 pieces of information to break it down much further:

It’s important to remember why you hired an employee in the first place. By micromanaging, you are making them feel useless, as if their talents and skills aren’t enough for the job they are doing. It’s a surefire way to demotivate a person. Trust them and just do regular checkpoints instead.

An office environment is much better when surrounded by positive vibes. Instead of surrounding your people with negativity, try to evoke a positive attitude instead. Rather than focusing on people’s mistakes, focus on both accomplishments and whatever it is you as a team could do to move forward from such mistakes.

While not all ideas are good ones, at least hear them out. Give employees the chance to voice their opinions, give out suggestions, and contribute to the decision-making process of your business. If you’re in a bigger team and can’t handle one-on-ones with everyone, try a tool that can collect ideas instead.

This is one of the top things that kill all employee motivation, mainly because it’s just rude and disrespectful to everyone else involved. Whether it’s saying you will do something, or saying you won’t do something, keep your word.

In connection to the previous point, don’t make promises you will break – promises are sacred whether in the workplace or otherwise. It’s very difficult for employees to get their hopes up and then end up having them destroyed. It makes them eventually lose trust in their employer.

There’s a fine line between being a “cool” boss and being offensive. Remember to maintain that employer to employee relationship, as it is a professional one. Save the funny stuff for when you’re with your friends, not your employees.

For one thing, meetings that go unannounced often disturb a person’s work groove. Half the time these types of meetings are spent where the manager who organized it mainly talks about something. Many employees often start dozing off or getting distracted. Try either meeting with the team leads and let them disseminate the information, or record yourself on video then send a link via e-mail.

The tip here is to always look to improve how you and your company would measure success. This may vary depending on the nature of the business and job description, but think of it this way: it’s wrong to measure the quality of an essay purely based on the number of words written. It could be a thousand words of gibberish and still get ranked “great” because it’s a thousand words.

Remember your employees are people, not machines. Once you set unrealistic deadlines, it will easily demotivate employees mainly because they feel they won’t be able to meet them. Try breaking things down to smaller goals and use previous experiences as basis for better deadline-setting.

A company is a team of people working towards the same goal, so stop picking favorites as that would easily kill employee motivation as well. Each person has a skill that’s integral to the team, so never keep certain people on a pedestal as other employees can easily tell right away that you’ve got a couple of “teacher’s pets.”