How to Overcome Your Employees’ Minimal Efforts

Left to their own devices, employees who become accustomed to giving a minimal effort forget what it’s like to work hard. How can you, as a Jamaican manager, turn their performance around before it’s too late?

While the employee who leaves work everyday at 4:59 PM on the dot may be doing so to make an appointment, it’s more likely he has developed the habit of doing as little as possible. Here’s a tip: when staff members are only on time for one, single appointment each day – “Quitting Time” – you may have a problem.

It means that significant effort is being put toward doing the minimum. At this point, staff are doing just enough to keep their jobs, staying one half-step ahead of trouble. It’s probably not the mindset they came to the workplace with, but it’s one that with the encouragement of others, they have developed. The stampede out the door at the end of the day is sad: people who enjoy what they are doing don’t try to escape from it as fast as they can.

How do you, as a manager, break the deadlock?

As you may have noticed, preaching, scolding and cajoling won’t work. In fact, they push workers into passive resistance. Here are some of the approaches that do work based in part on recent research.

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