How Can We Stop Demotivation?

By Doug Hissong

We see a lot of writing about motivating employees.  Highly motivated employees are certainly a key to a successful organization.  But I suggest that we should focus more on preventing the demotivation that too often occurs in our employees over time.  Our new employees are generally highly motivated (we try not to hire persons of low motivation).  But why are so many long-service (dare we say “older”) employees cynical, negative, apathetic, perhaps coasting until retirement?  And they should be making such great contributions because of all their experience.  They have just as much talent as the young go-getters, and they used to be go-getters themselves, but something has changed.  It's tragic!  We need to find out what has changed and put a stop to it.

But before I go on let me emphasize that I said many of our older employees.  It's important to know that not all employees suffer this problem.  It's not an inevitable consequence of aging or experience.  Some employees remain highly motivated until they retire, which is as it should be.  The fact that not all employees become demotivated gives us hope, and may provide clues for solving, or at least lessening, this problem.

Let's think about that young go-getter.  He's fired up because he believes that he has the talent to do good work and that he'll be rewarded appropriately for that work as his career progresses.  He chose an employer that he believes values the kind of contributions he can make.  He hits the ground running.  What could possibly cause that employee to lose his motivation as his career progresses?  Let me suggest some possibilities.

Jerk bosses

New employees tend to be somewhat in awe of their bosses.  They don't know how the boss got there or much about him, but they treat him with respect.  But the recent hire may soon find out that his boss doesn't know much about, or have much appreciation for, the work he's doing.  He may start to wonder what's really important to his boss.  And this relates to performance appraisal, since this boss is the individual having the most input in evaluating his performance.  He may wonder what criteria the boss measures him against.  Is he rated on how much he's like his boss?

A favorite is when the go-getter works his tail off and puts in lots of overtime to get a piece of work done on time, only to have his boss sit on it for a week before finding a chance to give it his superficial half-hour review.  And it's even worse if the boss still finds time for two-hour lunches and lots of chitchat while the work is sitting.  He thinks, "If it's O.K. for work to be a week late, next time I'll take it easier and use the extra week."

Promotion policies

When the new hire joins the company, he looks around and sees the various people in their various positions, and everything appears logical.  The bosses seem like bosses, and the higher bosses seem like higher bosses.  He presumes that there are good reasons why they're all where they are.  But as the years go by, he sees people change positions and he begins to see some younger people moving into leadership positions.  At times he wonders why Employee A was promoted rather than Employee B, who seems to be contributing more.  He wonders what the criteria for promotion are.  Maybe he wonders about criteria for "demotion" too.  And he wonders what this means for his own chances for promotion.  Maybe he's emphasizing the wrong things as far as getting ahead goes.

Non-challenging work

Before long, the recent hire finds himself doing tasks that are much less than he's capable of.  Maybe it's because support people have been cut to reduce costs.  Maybe the company has such a bare-bones staff that they contract out all the good work and just expect their employees to be contract monitors.  He wonders, "Is this what I spent all those years in college (or training) for?".

Time wasters

The go-getter is working his tail off, putting in overtime and striving hard to be as efficient as possible because there's so much to do.  But he soon finds that he has to attend certain worthless meetings and take care of mindless bureaucratic nonsense and "administrivia".  He asks himself, "Why should I bust my butt trying to do all this work when the company makes me waste time on junk like this?  If they don't care whether I get any worthwhile work done or not, why should I care?

Pigeonholing

Although he was hired for his strong and unique abilities, he finds there are some who think he should be like everyone else.  They seem to want all their employees to be interchangeable so they can be moved around like pawns on a chessboard.  His unique abilities are not appreciated.

What can we do?

How can we summarize?  The go-getter can become demotivated by things he sees or experiences over the years, things that change his view of the corporate culture.  These experiences clash with his own value system, which provides the basis for his self-motivation, or intrinsic motivation.  And self-motivation is the only kind of motivation that really works and lasts.  Is the new picture he’s getting of the corporate culture a necessary correction of a naive, unrealistic view?  I don't think so.  His initial vision of the company culture was the one we sold him on.  And since we weren't deliberately deceptive, we must believe that the culture he envisioned is the one we really want to exist.  We want our company to be one in which people focus on the work our customers want, and one in which they are appreciated and rewarded accordingly.  We know that in order for our company to compete effectively we must make the best use the great talent that our people have.  So how do we stop the demotivation?  By getting our priorities back to the way we really want them to be.

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