Soft Skiils

Keeping difficult employees motivated

Rajkumar D on the strategy of motivating employees by focusing on their success stories

Keeping people motivated is a key challenge for any organization. The big question is— what should be the motivating factor? Time and again, there are new methods/programs introduced to keep the workforce motivated. Motivated people have a high level of engagement and in turn they have greater creativity and productivity. While we may use the conventional tools to motivate people, you may need something different to motivate difficult employees.

I have heard of a good number of motivation tools such as money, benefits, developmental opportunities, innovate work, promotions, insurance, international travel, ESOPs and so on. All these have a time-limit and do not work beyond a certain amount of time. Probably, it might give a temporary relief as a motivator but I discovered something that motivates for ever. Every single success—whether big or small—has an enormous potential to motivate an individual. Nothing can best motivate like success.

It is very important for every manager to seek for an opportunity to catch the employee at a success, small, medium or big, size does not matter. Many a times, we see managers catch people only when they fail. It is very important for you to provide the needed resources for your people to succeed.

You call something a success only when everyone knows about it. For example, if the Indian cricket team wins a big tournament and the same is not known to anyone in the world except the two teams, do you think they will have the motivation to win another tournament? On the contrary, there are many wins in the day to day work of an employee and it just goes unnoticed by anyone, including the concerned manager, and thus people lose motivation to do great things. Thus, there are successes in everyone’s work-life and the problem is in it not getting noticed and published.

Introduce tiny, small, medium and big recognition programs around every success and celebrate success in day to day work. If the employee consistently delivered some significant results, call the attention of the floor, ask everyone to clap and give a small gift, nothing can motivate like this. People long for recognition of their successes. Thus, you have communicated the success to the immediate environment and everyone looks for an opportunity to succeed. This spreads lot of positive feeling among people and they are motivated.

The Hay Group proved that organizational results flow when ‘employee engagement’ is effectively supplemented by what they call as ‘support for success’.

Today’s competitive work environment has completely wiped away this ‘support for success’. People find very less support for their success and it is very important to build a culture that supports each other’s success. Reviews and meetings should become a platform to discover how we can help each other’s achievements rather than passing the blame.

Imagine an environment where everyone waits for an opportunity to support someone else’s success, the entire team and as a result the organization will succeed. End of the day, we all contribute to that great goal of the organization to succeed.

In summary: Do not end up degrading what success is by recognizing everything, carefully guide your people through real successes, and a day will come when they will realize that they are real achievers and not difficult people.

• The best motivator for difficult people—success.
• Importance of publishing individual and team success.
• Celebrate success.
• Support all efforts by people leading to their success.

Rajkumar D is Senior Manager-HR, Microland. E-mail: rajkumard@microland.com