Avoid Demotivating Your Employees With These Five Points

Perceptions of unfairness inhibit the inner work life of your employees, which makes unfairness a powerful demotivator.  Evidence-based managers understand the power of negative events and assume responsibility for making their workplace as fair as possible.

In his book “Becoming the Evidence-Based Manager,” Gary Latham states “failure on your part to put principles of justice front and center will kill worker motivation as feelings sweep through your team that some people are getting a better deal than others.” (p. 92). Latham provides the following five-point checklist that we can use to help ensure that our employees perceive that our decisions and actions are fair (pp. 92-93):

1. How will resources – salary, bonuses, office space – be distributed?
2. Do you have agreed-upon processes or systems for determining who gets what (for example, a salary increase, a bigger office) and why?
3. Have you explained to your people the logic of your decisions as to who gets what?
4. Are the agreed-upon processes for making decisions applied consistently?
5. Have you taken your employees’ viewpoints into account before you make your decisions?

Make sure your employees know their voice counts. Make it a matter of processes and policy to consult employees on important decisions that will affect them, and invite your employees to hold you accountable for this process. If you discover signs of lagging motivation in your employees, it might be because your employees have discovered you don’t value justice as much as they do.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below!

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