5 ways you could be (accidentally) making your team less motivated

That may still hold true in some workplaces, but the company culture trends of the last decade have put much more of a focus on employee satisfaction. And satisfaction, it’s been found, is a key component to employee retention.

Access to tools and support is a big factor, but so are managers and team leaders. If your job involves leadership, you could be undermining your team’s motivation and productivity without even knowing it. Especially now, as remote and hybrid work are common, you should take care and avoid these modern motivation killers.

You don’t use office and remote time efficiently

With hybrid work nearly the norm for US companies in the post-pandemic era, it’s easy to fall into a routine of, say, two days out and three days in the office, with workflow moving in the same way each day.

If employees have to make the commute to come in, their time in the office should be unlike work from home, focusing on collaboration and other in-person things that can suffer when done via Zoom.

“If you just need to code, the best place to go usually is in your house,” said Anil Karmel, cofounder and CEO of RegScale, while speaking on the “Remote Work, Employee Engagement and Avoiding Burnout Hell” panel during the Builders Conference at Philly Tech Week 2023 presented by Comcast. “You’ve got your setup, you’re comfortable, you’ve got whatever you need to do that deep work. [In contrast,] collaborative work is like, ‘I’m running into a roadblock, we need to come into the office, sit with the architects and the managers and CTO and and lay out that strategy.'”

Not planning to use in-office and remote time effectively can lead to employee dissatisfaction.

You require too many virtual meetings

Remote work time is not the best time to focus on collaboration or an excessive number of meetings. Some virtual meetings may be a necessity, of course, but filling employees’ work-at-home days with multiple Zoom meetings a day is a known recipe for burnout.

Your company culture is rigid

Company culture as a concept is about creating a place where employees want to be, whether it’s an office with lots of fun perks like arcade games and hammocks, or a flexible hybrid policy. Some tech companies have been known for creating ultra-cheerlead-y cultures where employees are expected to fall in line with the fun.

That can be decidedly unfun, especially for employees who are marginalized by some cultural standards.

Instead, CAI Neurodiverse Solutions VP Anthony Pacilio told Technical.ly last year, the company culture should not only accommodate employees who aren’t up for every team activity, but evolve as new employees contribute their wants and needs in the workplace. CAI is a workforce initiative for neurodivergent job seekers.

“When you hire that individual and you’re talking about cultural integration, it needs to happen the reverse way: The company doesn’t need to push their culture on the person,” Pacilio said. “That person’s going to drive the culture, making your organization empathetic. If they don’t have an employee resource group, maybe that gets started. There’s a lot of different things that come into play once you start placing people who think differently in your workforce.”

You inadvertently overwhelm your team

There’s a big project coming up. You want your team to know it’s big and important and getting it finished in time will take a lot of work. Stressing how stressful the project will be can have a negative affect on employees, leading some who are perfectly capable of getting the job done with minimal stress to dread it.

Instead, lay out a clear timeline and share progress. If the work does cause a team member a lot of stress, make sure they know that they can tell you that.

You haven’t effectively trained junior team members

The first time a team member does a big project is the most difficult and potentially burnout inducing, because it lacks repetition, says Kimberly Klayman, a partner at the law firm Ballard Spahr in Philadelphia, who also spoke on the “Remote Work, Employee Engagement and Avoiding Burnout Hell” panel.

“I personally find that part of the burnout comes from doing doing things that are very hard for you,” Klayman said. “Once you get to a place where it’s kind of second nature, it’s fluid for you it doesn’t burn you out as much because you’re not using as much brain power to do what you’re doing.”

Ballard Spahr found that training junior associates at the firm in person along with partners reduces the burnout rate.

This applies to tech as well: The loss of in-person onboarding and mentoring for entry-level software engineers was a challenge during the pandemic, and a reason IRL work is preferred as part of a developer’s career building.

And not just because it means management can hover over them as they work: “You get a good amount more social nourishment from being with your peers and colleagues at work,” Klayman said.