Employee Motivation: 3 Reasons Why Employees Are Not Motivated

Do you recently feel that your employees are not motivated to work anymore? If your answer is yes and you are about to blame your employees for that, you may want to take a break and think again why they are no longer motivated to work anymore. Then, you may realize that it is not the fault of employees, but the fault is with you and organizational practices. The problem of lacking motivation normally lies in one of five areas: selection, ambiguous goals, the performance appraisal system, the organization's reward system, and the manager's ability to shape employee's perception of the appraisal and reward system. This article will explore why and when employees are not motivated in general.

In order to understand employee motivation, you may want to explore more about three relationships that are very much related to employee motivation. If the relationship is strong, employees tend to be motivated; on the other hand, if the relationship is weak, employees tend to be de-motivated. As a manager, you may want to analyze the following three relationships and how they affect employee motivation.

Firstly, you may want to ask yourself whether your employees believe that they will be recognized in their performance appraisal if they give a maximum effort. Your employees may rightly or wrongly perceive that he or she is disliked by the boss and as a result of that he or she does not have good rating in the performance appraisal. Or, your performance appraisal system is designed to assess non-performance factors such as loyalty, initiative, more effort will not result in higher appraisal. That is why, it could be one of the reasons for low employee motivation as they do not see the relationship between their effort and the performance appraisal is strong.

Secondly, you may want to find out whether your employees believe that a good performance appraisal will lead to organizational rewards. Normally many employees may see the relationship between rewards and performance appraisal is weak because not many organizations are practicing pay for performance.

Lastly, you may want to observe whether the rewards the employees receive are the ones that they want. Many managers are limited in rewards they can contribute, so it is difficult for them to customize rewards. As a result of that many employees are not motivated with the rewards because they may not like the rewards that they received as they expect to receive differently.

Therefore, employee may not be motivated if the relationship between their effort and performance or the relationship between performance and organizational rewards or the relationship between rewards they received and the ones they really want are weak. Therefore, you must always strengthen these relationships in order to keep the level of employee motivation high.

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