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Ask HN: How to motivate employees?

19 points by fumar ↗ HN
I have an employee who is smart, experienced, but will often find excuses to avoid work. I added more details below. Does anyone have advice on how to proceed?

This employee works on our top client. They have on associate reporting to them. I frequently see the associate work longer hours and more consistently. I am not sure if all the work is trickling down to the associate. I am not into micro managing. I get the sense they do work as a team, based on broader conversations with both of them.

As a manager, I want to help my employees grow and take on new challenges. This employee consistently asks for a promotion due to tenure and working on a top account. However, compared to their peers, they are behind. I see room for growth on technical acumen, client skills, organizational leadership, and solution design. It is tricky, I also don't want to tell someone they need to "work harder." If their client is happy and the team is happy, should I not push? Am I imposing my own values onto someone else?

Apologies if I am not consistent. I have a hard time framing this issue in my head.

Thanks!

14 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 39.2 ms ] thread
itamarst
You seem to be conflating number of hours worked with value produced. Working long hours doesn't necessarily imply producing anything more useful.

You say "find excuses to avoid work", but you also talk about lack of skills - which is it? Getting stuff done without working long hours may imply really good skills.

If this comes down to "I don't see them sitting in chair sufficiently long" then this is your problem, not theirs.

If it's "they could be doing better things" then maybe you should have a conversation about which particular skills they're missing.

If it's "avoids doing actually necessary work", again that's a conversation you should have with them.

IpV8
Perhaps they are bored. Can you give them something interesting to work on, or totally outside their current responsibilities? I find I get bored when my job gets too repetitive, and a good solution is a big general directive like "go to some conferences and come up with a market research presentation for our company" or have them hire a replacement for themselves to free up time for other types of work.
gormz
If their client and team is happy, then what could they work harder at? Should they have bags under their eyes when you come check on them? Should they be the one to turn off the lights and lock the doors at the end of the day?
fumar
I do not want that. I agree people should not work just for work. What I want is to see an engaged employee. If they have lets say 40% additional bandwidth, would you be fine with that time being completely free? Or would you want an employee to signal to you the ability to take on a new project of their choosing or let me know they have additional bandwidth?
mindcrime
I frequently see the associate work longer hours and more consistently.

How are they going to benefit by working harder? And whatever that answer is, is it apparent to them? If the employee sees no benefit (money, or whatever) to working harder, why would they?

I see room for growth on technical acumen, client skills, organizational leadership, and solution design

Have you told them that, given them support in developing those skills, and shown them a clear path to how doing those things will lead to a promotion, or some other benefit to them?

fumar
Yes, I told them where we see areas for improvement. They have not taken any action. In our 1:1s they say something like, I still looking into it or I haven't decided what I want to do. My gut tells me they are not interested or motivated to learn new skills outside their comfort zone.

Personally, monetary comp is only part of my motivation. I think this person's main priority is monetary. I was wondering how else, can I motivate a person.

I am sure I worded my original response incorrectly, but I don't care about hours logged. We don't track that stuff, nor is it important. I am aware that their workload is diminished, because their junior associate is taking the brunt of the work. I expected my direct report to step up and play a more strategic role, naturally. Instead they micro manage the associate.

The more I think about it, maybe my employee is not quiet mature enough to take on new responsibilities. I was also hoping my employee would be proactive with their own career pathing - most everyone is. I guess that is a bad on me. I need to help them with a tactical guide to success. Otherwise, they might flounder.

Thanks everyone. You helped me think through this one.

NTDF9
Short periodic bonuses as a reward for hard work/innovative work/grunt work

Hey Jack, I saw you created a test suite for this giant codebase and now we can make changes without worrying about breakage?

Thanks for doing this unsexy work. Here, take $500. Go celebrate with your partner.

Do this a few times a year, it adds up to an incentive based bonus and keeps employees happy (of course jut the hard work with no reward will make them leave)

ble
It sounds like you have a hard time putting yourself in this person's shoes.

Why are you using a 6-year old account to (not quite) anonymously request assistance with your personnel concern? I'm not going to try to find out who you are or who your employee is, but you are doing yourself no favors by using a non-throwaway account.

fumar
You are right about putting myself in their shoes + I am not providing the guidance they need. For what it is worth, it helped to talk it through here.
segmondy
You can't solve for decades of bad habit. Someone being lazy, lacking grit & determination is not something that's easy to solve for. To be motivated, an individual must have a sense of autonomy, ability to self organize and regulate, to set goals, plan, schedule, manage time, and be able to tie in their personal goals to the organizational goals. I've found out that at best all you can do is put a carrot in front of them and once they eat it, replace with another carrot. It's tiring, best of course is to hire a great person so you don't have to deal with this, but if this person is worth it, then it might be worth you mentoring them for a long time, giving them the right books to reads, building systems and processes that covers their weaknesses. This is something that I have put a lot of time into and I'm not sure can be addressed in a post or even a few pages.

Nevertheless, you need to listen to their excuses, and then probe for the reasoning behind the excuse. It's either that they don't want to work or they don't know how to do the work. The later is easy, you train em. If they don't want to the work it can be for various reasons, it could be fear, it could not seeing any value in it, it could be boring. If it's fear, address it, environments such as blame free culture where people can experiment and failure is owned by the team helps address this. If it's not seeing value, then you have to show how the work is valuable to you, the team, the company, the world and to the associate. If it's boring, you have to teach and educate them that even the most exciting works are 80% grunt and mundane things and those things are just important. What are the excuses?

If they are asking for promotion but not delivering, you must deny it. It should not come as a shock to them since you should be having 1on1s often and a good feedback loop to them. Best of luck.

esbafb8
To each their own method of delivering value. If this employee found a way to deliver and make the client happy with "normal" working hours, then good on them. I would congratulate and promote!
JSeymourATL
> This employee consistently asks for a promotion due to tenure and working on a top account.

What does a meaningful promotion look like to them? Is it title? Compensation? Responsibilities?

Sounds like you want this person to level-up first. Get clarity on what that means to you and your organization.

Understand, if your employee feels unrecognized and unappreciated -- they are a flight risk. Are you prepared for that? What's your bench strength look like?

Good read on promotions here from HBR > https://hbr.org/2018/01/how-you-promote-people-can-make-or-b...

rajacombinator
Do you have a track record of rewarding employees who work smart/hard with increased compensation, responsibilities, etc? The most likely answer is no, and that you have not established a clear connection between "work hard" -> "reward". A smart employee will naturally minimize their effort in this kind of environment.