Employees are the lifeblood of any business or brand. It does not matter whether you manage two part-time staff in a family garage or 1,000 employees across a multinational team: employee performance is your business performance.
When employees are unengaged and working below their usual standard, the business feels it quickly. Under-engaged employees affect output, morale, retention, customer experience, and the overall success of your business.
Poor morale also spreads. A disengagement issue is easier to handle when you nip it in the bud, ask the right questions, and give managers a practical way to support employees before the problem becomes part of the culture.
This guide walks through the manager responsibility, the signals that an employee is struggling to be engaged, and seven creative ways to motivate disengaged employees without treating every person as if they need the same fix.
- It’s your duty to help employees succeed
- How to know if my employees are struggling to be engaged
- 7 ways to motivate your disengaged employees
It’s your duty to help employees succeed
The biggest mistake a manager can make is assuming that employees can read their mind. When managers and HR teams assume staff who are not performing as expected must be doing so knowingly, they can create a poor working relationship before any conversation has even taken place.
Before engaging an employee through the following seven steps, spend some time figuring out whether you have provided everything that employee needs to be successful in their role. In many cases, employee disengagement is not a lack of care; it is a lack of clarity, training, support, control, or confidence.
It is important to ask yourself the following questions when trying to assess whether the issue really lies with the employee:
“Has this employee been adequately trained?”
Employees who are not imparted with the skills for success have a good chance of struggling to succeed. Poor training almost always results in poor engagement, especially when someone is expected to complete work that depends on tools, context, compliance steps, or customer handoffs they have not been shown clearly.
Ensure your training programs are sufficient before pointing any fingers. If an employee is supposed to transition a process, manage a customer issue, or complete a workflow, they need relevant practice, reference material, and a clear standard for what good work looks like.
“Am I being reasonable in what I am asking of them?”
One of the biggest reasons for poor engagement at work is overworking. Employees who are being asked to do more than they are capable of will always suffer in terms of morale. A friendly check-in with an under-engaged employee can help you spot workload problems and avoid overworking your employees.
Once you have taken the time to answer these questions, you should have a better idea as to whether the issue truly lies with the employee. As a manager or team leader, it is your responsibility to do whatever you can to get the best from your employees.
A simple way to make this concrete is to write the things you have already done to encourage the employee on one note and the things you could still do on another. Being able to see both sides helps you decide whether you have done enough before asking the employee to change.
If you need a repeatable way to run these check-ins, manager tools should give leaders a consistent workflow for coaching, follow-up, and accountability. Process Street supports that kind of work through one Compliance Operations Platform: Docs for governed policies, Ops for recurring execution, and built-in AI to help teams find stalled work, missed steps, and handoffs before they become larger issues.
How to know if my employees are struggling to be engaged
It may sound like an easy question to answer, but when you actually think about it, it is not always simple. There are obvious pointers to an under-engaged employee, such as negative body language, completing fewer tasks, or a drop off in sales. But employees who smile, show up, and complete tasks can still be struggling.
Gallup’s workplace research continues to show that engagement pressure is real, especially when employees feel disconnected from managers, purpose, and development. That means managers need better signals than mood alone.
- Track their performance: Look for signs of a decline in productivity. This will be different in each job role and industry. It could be a drop off in sales, a slower response time, lower quality work, or simply completing fewer tasks per shift.
- Ask them how they feel: Whether or not you find signs of productivity decline, sitting down with an employee one-to-one and asking how they are at work is the best way to assess if they are engaged, anxious, overloaded, or unclear about what comes next.
Now you know whether your employees are struggling to be motivated at work, it is time to implement a creative solution that works for both them and your business.
7 ways to motivate your disengaged employees
1. Make your employees feel heard
Start with the easiest tip in this guide: acknowledge staff when you first see them and ask them how they are. This can take only a few seconds, but the significance of it cannot be overstated. A friendly good morning accompanied by a smile lets employees know you see them and value them.
You cannot control employees’ interactions outside of work, but you can set a positive atmosphere in the workspace. For what takes only a few seconds, why would you not do it?
Listening also needs a follow-up loop. If someone raises a blocker, write it down, agree on the next step, and come back to it. Employees feel heard when their feedback changes something, not just when it is collected.
2. Awaken their sense of purpose
People who can connect their daily work to a real purpose are more likely to stay committed. McKinsey has warned that employees who do not find purpose at work are more likely to leave, and that purpose gap can show up as low motivation long before someone resigns.
People whose employment does not offer the chance to develop are not going to show the same levels of motivation and commitment as those who can grow at work. It is all well and good knowing that employees will be more motivated when they can develop personally, but managers need to make that growth specific.
Reach out to the under-engaged employee and find out how you can support their growth. If an unmotivated employee wants to develop their sales skills through better communication, encourage their development through personal coaching with a senior sales rep, shadowing, clear practice goals, or external coaching that fits the need.
3. Boost their morale by acknowledging the small wins
In most cases, employees who are under-engaged and under-performing will still have some things they are doing well. Poor performance can be a sign of low self-esteem, confusion, burnout, or frustration. A verbal pat on the back can work wonders in improving an employee’s confidence.
Something as simple as, “I was impressed with how you finalized that sale today,” or “I noticed how calmly you handled that customer handoff,” can go a long way to motivating an employee to work harder for more encouragement and recognition.
Recognition should not come only from managers. Encourage positive feedback between colleagues and make it normal to acknowledge useful contributions in the moment. A culture of positive feedback is essential to boosting morale and engaging unmotivated employees.
Focusing on the positives, especially those small wins, is a great way to take an employee out of a place of disengagement and boost their morale.
4. Create a tailor-fit employee benefits and compensation package
People work because work gives them money, which they need to get by in life. Groundbreaking stuff, I know, but hear me out. If we recognize that employees are working, among other things, for a better financial situation, it makes sense that offering financial incentives can boost motivation.
That does not only mean wages or performance-based bonuses. A practical way to ease the cost of living for employees is to offer personalized benefits packages. This requires sitting down with employees and figuring out where their priorities are.
Consider adding little extras to benefits packages beyond the typical dental and vision options. Some employees may value childcare support, grocery discounts, learning budgets, commuter help, wellness stipends, or more predictable scheduling. The exact answer matters less than the fact that you ask what they want.
The fact that you take the time to sit down with employees and ask them what they want goes a long way to show that you care about them as individuals. Employees treated as individuals are likely to show the same care for their work. Personalizing employee experience should ideally begin during onboarding and continue throughout their time at the business.
5. Encourage taking regular breaks and flexible working hours
While on the topic of treating your employees as individuals, offering working hours that suit them is a great way to boost morale and, by extension, productivity. This is more feasible for some businesses than others, but where possible it should always be considered.
If an employee has young children, it may make their life easier to end a shift before 3PM so they can pick them up from school. If they volunteer on Saturday evenings, swapping their Saturday shift for a day midweek may remove a constant source of stress.
While this might seem like a lot of effort on your part, the benefits can far outweigh the drawbacks. Showing you care enough to give shift patterns that work encourages employees to reciprocate the effort. Alongside flexible shift patterns, simply offering more breaks during work can give employees the time they need to recharge and go back to a task at 100%.
6. Strategize a fun way to evaluate their performance reviews
Performance reviews are often a time of high anxiety. Managers are anxious about giving constructive feedback that can be misconstrued. Employees are anxious about job security, pay, promotion, and whether their work is being seen fairly.
A great way to make performance reviews more positive is to flip the process around and have employees give their own perspectives first. Give employees a week’s notice before the review and let them present what is working well, what could improve, and where they need support.
This does not mean avoiding hard feedback. It means starting with ownership. When an employee can describe their own performance, they are more likely to take part in the solution instead of feeling like the review is being done to them.
7. Invest time in providing regular ice-breakers
Another great way to motivate under-engaged employees is to provide regular ice-breakers, team meetings, or rituals that are not only about status updates. Common practices like quick check-ins, light team prompts, and shared wins help people associate work with something more human than a task queue.
Ice-breakers that are unrelated to work, like a short team prompt or shared warm-up, are a nice way to associate work with something lighthearted and fun. A boost of positivity before a shift can contribute to employees’ overall well-being, communication, and trust.
Keep these rituals small and regular. A forced hour-long activity can create more fatigue. A five-minute habit that gives people a chance to speak, laugh, or recognize a colleague is easier to sustain.
Disengaged employees: Their motivation is your success
Improving employee motivation and happiness in the workplace has been shown to have a direct impact on business performance. Providing employees with a sense of purpose at work, focusing on their strengths, and treating them as individuals goes a long way to uplifting both their well-being and your brand.
Disengaged employees rarely need a one-size-fits-all pep talk. They need managers who notice the signs, remove avoidable blockers, provide clear training, recognize small wins, and build workflows that make support consistent rather than occasional.
Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, an AI-powered cloud communication platform. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy.