Motivated or unmotivated employees

This is a translation of an article which was published on lederweb in november 2013.

You have no unmotivated employees – they are actually always motivated. Sometimes they just happen to be motivated for doing something different than what you want them to do in a given situation. Learn how to point motivation in the right direction.

Imagine that you have just held a staff meeting. At the meeting, you agreed to implement new working procedures for all employees as a necessary tool to reach your department’s strategic goals. Four weeks after the meeting, you realise that three of your employees have not changed their working procedures at all.

If the change represents something important to the employee, and the work assignment contains a certain level of complexity, good advice and instructions are of no use. Surprisingly, they will probably have the opposite effect and drive the employee further away from the new desired working procedures.

This is due to your good advice which may evoke the employee’s need to justify himself and to tell you that you have not taken all aspects into account. As a result, the new working procedures may seem a bad idea after the conversation now that the employee has heard himself argue why they do not make sense.

If that is the case, you need to affect the employee’s motivation in a different manner. Here you will be presented with two tools to help you point motivation in a certain direction.

Explore the decisional balance

Every time an employee has to make changes in his working procedures, a mental balancing act occurs. On the one hand are the advantages and disadvantages of the familiar working procedures, on the other hand are the advantages and disadvantages of changing to the new working procedures. Whenever the employee may be perceived as unmotivated, it may be due to the fact that he is divided between the two alternatives: either to carry on as up to now or to change behaviour and do it the new way.

Being divided and feeling ambivalent is the nature of all changes. What decides the employee’s future behaviour when making a change is which side carries the most weight on his decisional balance.

The first step towards avoiding a reinforcement of the employee’s negative pattern of thought is that you are conscious about what you make the employee say and think during your conversation.