Why Employees Don’t Do As They Are Told

Do you have trouble figuring out what makes your employees tick? You try to motivate your warehouse pickers by offering them an early finish if they get the 1,000 boxes shipped to sales by afternoon break. Yet none of them get a move on. Your first mistake is thinking that everyone is like you, wanting to go home early.

Just as ineffective is thinking that workers are the opposite of you. This type of manager will offer a bonus for getting the boxes out on time and is let down when only three employees make an effort. Not every front line employee is motivated primarily by money. Both of these ways of thinking fail because they are one-dimensional, casting all employees in the same mould. If only life – and business – were that simple …

What motivates employees cannot be reduced to a single rule. Understanding some of the nuances of employee behavior will not only make you into a more effective manager, it will also help to relieve some of your stress as your employees begin to work with you and not against you. What are some of these nuances that will help you better understand your employees? You don’t need to know a lot of theory. Just being familiar with the basics can go a long way. Let me build on the example above to show you what I mean.

The warehouse manager offered to pay a ten dollar bonus to each picker that moved their quota of boxes before the deadline. That only three pickers put in extra sweat, the manager put down to the others being "dumb". Here are some alternative explanations that the manager could have considered that could have led to a better result. Maybe the ten dollar bonus was considered too paltry to be worth the additional effort. In this case, the outcome offered was not seen to be valuable enough for the workers to have behaved differently.

Another reason could be that even though the bonus was considered large enough, the pickers believed that even if they moved the boxes in time, they would not receive the reward. Perhaps the manager had promised a bonus on previous occasions, but in the end had been blocked by the business owner. Here, we could say that the employees perceived a weak connection between their increased effort and the reward.

A third reason for not putting in the extra effort is that even though the pickers wanted the bonus and thought that they would receive it if they moved the boxes in time, they did not believe that they were capable of meeting the target. From previous experience, they knew that the deadline was just too tight to meet.

With this simple yet real-life example, we can draw this lesson on how to guide employee behavior. For an employee to act towards a particular outcome, we would need to ensure that the employee accepts that:

The outcome is of sufficient value, and
They probably would receive the outcome if they performed a certain way, and
They probably would perform to the standard required if they expended the effort.

With these three conditions met – value, performance and effort – any manager can have greater confidence that the employee will work towards a particular objective. What I have illustrated in basic terms here is what psychologists call Expectancy Theory. This theory is far from explaining everything about human behavior, but it is a cornerstone in our current understanding of human motivation.

As a manager, how do you use this insight to improve your management skills? Expectancy Theory gives you a clue for where to begin looking when employees do not do as you expect. Using the three conditions above in this order; value, performance and effort, probe to get answers to these questions.

1. Does the employee value the outcome highly enough?
2. Does the employee expect to receive the outcome if they achieve the target?
3. Does the employee expect to achieve the target if they put in the effort?

Answering "no" to one or more of these questions will likely lead to the employee not performing. How and where do you begin probing to get answers to these questions? The wrong way to go about inquiring is to threaten employees and connive behind their backs. These tactics will see employees lose trust in you, with the result that they will clam up. Once that happens, opening up the lines of communication in the short to medium term will be near impossible.

Engage in an open dialogue with your employees. Notice that I said dialogue, not monologue. Your objective is to find out what they think and how they feel, not to issue orders and ultimatums. Once they see that you have a genuine interest in them, they will share their thoughts and emotions.

Activities that you can do to engender trust and openness are being available whenever someone wants to talk and frequently walking around the workplace to see how people are going. Holding regular and frequent meetings with your workers I consider a must in any workplace. Structured activities aimed specifically at gathering employee feedback include running focus group meetings on particular subjects and conducting employee surveys.

Using these methods, the manager in our example discovered the weak connection between effort and performance. By providing more trolleys to the pickers, the manager was able to allay their fear that the lack of proper equipment was hindering their ability to move the boxes in time. How will you use this basic psychological insight to improve your effectiveness as a manager?

Leslie Allan is Managing Director of Business Performance P/L and author of five books on training and change management.

Employee performance diagnostic flowchart
Management tool for diagnosing employee performance problems