Are You Actually De-Motivating Your Employees?

"Most companies have it all wrong. They don't have to motivate their employees. They have to stop de-motivating them."

With this one attention-getting statement, three researchers recently demolished a whole school of thought on business best practices, in effect, trashing the idea that employees only do work for the money, and therefore, require prizes, slogans, and other special measures to keep them focused on the job.

The researchers are David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind, and Michael Irwin Meltzer, of Sirota Survey Intelligence, a Purchase, New York, management research firm. From 2000-2004, their company conducted surveys of some 1.2 million employees at 52 Fortune 1000 companies, with results reported in the Harvard Management Update. The key finding:

"The great majority of employees are quite enthusiastic when they start a new job. But in about 85 percent of companies, employees' morale sharply declines after their first six months - and continues to deteriorate for years afterward."

The researchers laid the blame on both companies and line managers, citing deficiencies in how they dealt with their people that ranged from overly bureaucratic structures to attitudes of "well, that's what we pay them for." Just as important, they also created a recipe to allow that initial motivation to continue and grow.

In digested form, here's what they say to do:

--Create an atmosphere of pride and recognition. Every employer, they say, needs to instill in workers a sense of mission in what the company does. "In effect," say the researchers, "a 'reason for being' that translates into a 'reason for being there' that goes above and beyond money." Companies must then recognize every achievement toward that purpose, large or small, and as soon as possible after it occurs. The Sirota surveys show that a great reason for de-motivation is the lack of even a simple thank you for a job well done.

--Redefine the manager's role. "A command and control style is a sure-fire path to de-motivation," say the researchers. Instead, they recommend that managers redefine themselves as "expediters," whose prime mission is making their workers' jobs easier by clearing obstacles and lobbying for their needs at all levels of the company. This role includes "facing up to poor performance" by "dealing decisively" with the 5 percent of workers who truly shouldn't be there.

--Build a Team. Singer Barbra Streisand was right when she musically celebrated "people who need people." Sirota's studies show that "the quality of a group's effort ... is usually superior to that of individuals working alone." Also, teams build camaraderie and provide opportunities for team members to learn from one another. However, managers need to "carefully assess who works best with whom," and to provide clear expectations on how the team will operate and on what goals it is expected to meet.

Facilitating all this, say the researchers, is the need to clearly communicate, in both speaking with and listening to employees. In fact, they say, "workers' frustration with the absence of adequate communication is one of the most negative findings we see expressed on employee attitude surveys."

We at BLR can confirm this. In our ongoing National Employee Attitude Survey, which to date has involved more than 1,000 companies and 22,000 employees, companywide communication posted scores far below those for any other category of organizational performance.