How to pull down the motivation of your workforce

When a team/startup starts getting traction and money/fame starts trickling in, unsuspecting founders start feeling relaxed.

It seems all the cogs of various departments are in working in tandem and now the only way left for the company is moving upwards in the value chain. But this situation can easily turn into "Boiling Frog" situation. Let us find out what brings down the motivation of employees in this post.

Rise of pseudo workers

Pseudo workers are those workers who are now whiling away their time at the expense of teams hard work. These people are usually the same people who helped you build the team/company in the first place. These associates are usually mid level managers and now enjoy fancy titles like director of engineering or head of product management or vice president of some unit. Usually they don't work directly at ground level anymore but take credit for all the original work done by their respective team. 

Founders are generally reluctant to remove them due to their earlier image. These people act as termites eating away the company from the inside out. As a founder/team lead, you should be looking out for such pseudo workers and weed them out on a regular basis.

Modus-operandi of pseudo workers

Due to their established reputation, they start abusing their powers. Usually they pretend to be working by pointing out mistakes in other people. If you dig deep, you will eventually find this  is actually the doing of this person which she is trying to pass on. 

To find out faults, they micromanage other associates, pulling down their motivation level. To detect and check such behaviour keep your eyes open on each associate's work and how that affects the power dynamics in the team.

Some pseudo workers have a class of their own. They work for meeting the monthly or bi-weekly or weekly meetings. Their whole day job revolves around creating that weeks presentation. They don't have any original thoughts about business features and they never stand-up in support of their team at tough times. They just live to give that presentation on that day of the week/month. If you find such workers, give them some tangible targets and ask them to bring new features into the table.

Another breed of pseudo workers are  comparable to lobby managers. They will never take any responsibility. If you ask them about some aspect of business, their typical response is like -- "Abhaya was monitoring this part and this will work out just fine". Subtly they are telling everyone that if any problem arises then it's not them, it is some lower rung associate Abhaya's fault. 

Root Cause

Often times, the root cause lies with the root or head of the business or the founder herself. Due to initial traction in business, they take it a bit too seriously. They try to grab more profit by paying less and believe automatically skilled candidates will apply due to good name in market. They don't understand that skilled associates are also intelligent enough not to apply in a bad working place that doesn't pay well to compensate. The work culture starts rotting and gradually even the founder feels the heat. 

Instead of bringing new talent with fresh mind and paying them handsomely, the founder starts blaming existing associates who work there. These old associates loose the motivation to work and start investing their quality time in their own independent projects, giving mere lip service to their day job. To stay in the good books of founder they themselves take the form of pseudo workers blaming lower level associates and the vicious cycle continues.

Did that sound like your company culture? Do let me know in comment section.

Have you met any of the above type of workers? Do let me know.