Motivating Your Employees: Turning the Below-Average Worker into an Olympic Performer

What if Shaun White never became a snowboarder?  What if, instead, his parents told him, “Kid, enough with the snowboarding already.  Crack into those books and aim for a respectable job.  That sport’s going nowhere anyway.”  Jump to Shaun’s adulthood:  He sits behind a desk pushing numbers as an accountant.  Think he’d be any good at it?  Even if he performed alright, his heart certainly wouldn’t be in it.  In much the same way, our employees can be seriously underperforming if they are misplaced.  So how do you most effectively go about motivating your employees?  One of the best ways is to make sure their job description best matches their talents.

That’s not to say we tell them to trade in their keyboard for a snowboard, building them a halfpipe in the parking lot.  But if an employee seems less than motivated, even disgruntled, one area to look at is their day-to-day activities.  An employee turning in subpar work may simply be misplaced.  In smaller companies it’s easier to get to know an employee on a one-on-one basis than it is in larger companies, but it’s never impossible to learn the likes and dislikes of one’s workstaff.  Getting to know more about the personal lives of those who make your company operate is a great way to figure out where they might better be placed, or what new responsibilities may be added to their workday that would motivate them.

Take, for instance, Sandy.  A true story, Sandy worked at a factory.  She was young and wasn’t planning on making the factory her lifelong job and the bosses knew that.  She was placed on a machine producing parts, and the work environment was quite repetitive.  Others did very well in that position, but Sandy got squirrelly, wandered around and talked instead of working, and consistently produced bad parts.  Other employees complained that she wasn’t holding up to the task, and it wasn’t making for a very pretty work environment.  She probably would have gotten herself fired, but her supervisor saw it for what it was – Sandy was bored to tears.  She needed movement and mental activity that would change from day to day.  Her supervisor moved her to a different position where she would get what it took to make her a top performer in the company.  True, she did leave a couple of years later, but for the years she worked there she was happy and a top producer.  

As with the case of Sandy, misplaced workers can act out and even disrupt others; but like the image of Shaun White at the accountant’s desk, being misplaced simply means poor performance.  Reevaluating a worker’s job description may give you more than a happy, motivated worker – it may just lead to an Olympic performer who has the potential to take your company to Gold-medal status!