How To Demotivate Employees and Undermine Morale and Productivity

by Chris Banescu –
Here’s a list of dysfunctional, unethical, and destructive organizational practices that I have personally experienced or seen while working with or consulting for various companies, corporations, universities, and non-profit institutions. Each of these will demotivate employees, undermine their morale, and negatively affect their productivity. Each of them will corrode organizational cohesiveness, foment suspicion and resentment of management, and destroy employees’ trust in and respect of their leaders.

Once more than one of these dysfunctional situations become normalized and spread across a company, then employee dissatisfaction and disengagement will increase exponentially. Quality of work will be negatively impacted. Great employees will begin to leave. Then the good ones will quit. The remaining employees will stop caring, stop speaking out, stop trying to address problems or improve anything inside the company. They will “go to gray.” They will do the minimal work required of them and no more.

If this pathology continues over longer periods of time, a human resources crisis will envelop the entire company and disaster (financial, ethical, legal, criminal, etc.) will inevitably follow.

These practices are the exact opposite of how genuine leaders should ethically, fairly, capitalistically, and justly treat their employees. These behaviors make a mockery out of the universally true principle that an organization’s employees represent its most valuable resources!

None of these practices are taught in any business, management, leadership, or other academic course or program, as an ethical and effective way to lead and manage others. None of these practices have ever been proven to work in order to motivate employees, boost their morale, increase their loyalty and trust, raise their productivity, and help a company achieve long-term success or sustained profitability. Yet, managers and executives continue to adopt these “anti-human” strategies in order to “get the job done” or “make our numbers.”

If I didn’t know any better I would suspect these managers and executives studied some secret and dark “anti-management” or “anti-human leadership” book on how to destroy a company from the inside out.

How to Demotivate Employees and Undermine Morale and Productivity:

• Treat employees as if they are disposable.
• Make them feel powerless and insignificant.
• Remind employees that they can be easily replaced.

  Treat employees as if they are disposable.

• Make them live in constant fear of losing their jobs.
• Practice unjustified favoritism and treat employees capriciously.
• Don’t listen to what employees have to say.
• Pretend to listen to what they say, then disregard it.
• Ignore employee helpful suggestions, innovative ideas, and constructive feedback, even when they can improve the company’s product(s) or service(s), enhance customer service, optimize processes, reduce costs, or increase profitability.
• Ask employees for feedback on organizational culture, problems, and suggested improvements, then promptly ignore them.
• Micromanage their work and constantly override their legitimate authority.
• Drown them in overbearing processes and bureaucratic procedures that give more power and control to managers, but create useless busy work for employees while contributing nothing to employee productivity or helping them complete work more efficiently and productively.
• Make promises you know you can’t keep or offer them opportunities that will never materialize.
• Create a multi-layered bureaucratic management hierarchy and pecking order based solely on status and power, and make it virtually impossible for front-line employees or managers to reach or communicate substantively with senior managers and executives.

  Pay employees differently for doing the same work and/or similar productivity.

• Pay employees differently for doing the same work and/or similar productivity.
• Increase workloads and job responsibilities only for some employees, while pretending they won’t be doing more work and getting paid the same.
• Offer pay raises or cost-of-living increases only to some employees, while ignoring others who do the same work and contribute just as much to company profitability.
• Don’t give long-term employees any stake in the business.
• Don’t provide profit-sharing or other performance-based rewards to key employees, while giving them only to senior managers and executives.
• Pay them fixed salaries and require unlimited hours of work, even on the weekends.
• Thank employees for showing great initiative and delivering excellence or superior achievements (above and beyond their normal job responsibilities), but don’t give them any meaningful or valuable reward beyond the “thank you” email, card, plaque, cake, or balloons.
• Demand that employees sacrifice (lose benefits, take a pay cut, and/or work more for less pay) “for the good of the organization,” while executives pay, benefits, and bonuses stay the same or even rise.

  Increase senior executives compensation regardless of the company’s overall performance and profitability.

• Increase senior executives compensation regardless of the company’s overall performance and profitability.
• Use a company’s poor performance, lower stock price, and/or stagnating or decreasing revenues or profitability, as an excuse/reason why employees won’t get raises or bonuses this year, while senior managers and executives still get raises, bonuses, profit sharing, or stock options.
• Don’t reassure employees in times of uncertainty, change, or crisis.
• Keep them in the dark about key organizational problems or upcoming layoffs.
• Punish all employees for the abuses or mistakes of a few.
• Promote a win-lose confrontational culture where employees are encouraged to achieve success and monetary gains at the expense of others.
• Divide and conquer, allow departmental in-fighting that destabilizes organizational cohesiveness and centralizes power in senior executives only.

  Threaten employees with “be lucky you have a job” when they speak out

• Threaten employees with “be lucky you have a job” when they speak out about serious organizational issues or ask for help to address inequity or unjust organizational situations.
• Tell them “no one is forcing you to stay” or “you can always quit” when they point out unfair or inequitable work situations or ask for help dealing with an incompetent or abusive manager.

Does this sound familiar? Have you encountered similar or different dysfunctional situations in your workplace? How many of these practices did you witness? Feel free to share (anonymously if needed) your experiences in the Comments section below.