Are the leaders of your business unintentionally demotivating your workforce?
Trying to work out how your managers are unintentionally killing staff morale and chipping away at a positive organisational culture?
The answer could lie in your leaders’ approach to task management, as micro-managing is one of the quickest ways to demotivate your workforce, according to culture change consultant Micah Solomon.
“In business, we have a terrible tradition that jobs are things done by employees, but designed by their so-called superiors. As our society has grown more specialised, this bias has increased in its intensity,” Solomon told Forbes.
“While, of course, to some extent this has to be true… it’s important to simultaneously push against it, to let your employees know what they need to get done but not necessarily how they should go about designing their day and carrying out their duties.”
If your employees are only doing things right because you held their hand through every little task, then “you haven’t created a culture, and you haven’t created an approach that is sustainable”, Solomon said.
“A culture is a living thing, powered by and kept up to date by the people who are encouraged to be, in a meaningful way, part of it,” he said.
He points to the ‘daily line-up’ approach that the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain uses as good practice for organisations, particularly service-oriented industries, to follow.
“This approach [starts with] a few minutes every day discussing just one of your list of cultural values or service standards, with the meeting led by a different employee every time,” he said.
“The result, added up over a year or years, is a lot of reinforcement. And it makes every single one of those days of that year or years better on its own.”
