Tips to motivate underachieving coworkers

fogspark

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Essendon

cupxs wrote: »

if they are not motivated to work that is their fault, your employer made a mistake taking them in, or they could have being motivated at the start and now they lost it, you cannot change someones attitude that is how they are.

Or just spank 'em.

msteinhilber

I've tried a wide variety of things to try and motivate my co-worker. He has been at the same role for just about 10 years now and hasn't achieved anything except Network+ maybe 5 years back. It is difficult to implement new technology since we are a very small shop of 3 guy's - my co-worker and I as the minions and my boss as the IT manager whom also pickups the slack with the regular day to day duties but also spends a lot of time in meetings to appease upper management. Normally this would be fine for implementing new technologies, but my co-worker is usually slow to learn or simply doesn't learn it enough at all except to barely cover the very basics of it so it's often me and my boss to do the real implementation, maintenance, and troubleshooting.

Lately the projects on the table have been switching our remote branch offices from Linksys VPN routers (yea, really) to Juniper's SRX line, migrating office servers over to Linux and designing/implementing LDAP for our network, and introducing VMware ESXi to virtualize our branch office and corporate environments. All of this effectively is a two man job between my boss and I because my co-worker doesn't believe in (says he doesn't have the time) to study outside of work. So by default he's pretty much shafted with all of the helpdesk calls unless it's stuff he can't handle and spends his days complaining about being so busy with the easy stuff while I ignore the phones to get real work done so we can finish a project for once.

If you find the magical motivational bean, let me know... I'd be interested

Unfortunately in my case, I do believe it's severe enough that there is absolutely no fix short of replacing the employee which doesn't seem feasible as our boss is too much of a nice guy.

snokerpoker

I work in a small shop where my boss is extremely lazy. He never has to go to meetings, shows up at about 10AM to 11:30 AM everyday and only really does minor helpdesk stuff. Some days he doesn't do a single thing besides look at some PC gamer forum about whatever game is playing at the time. He never wants to learn anything or work with new technologies. I deployed our first Linux server recently and he told me he hates Linux. I know that the only reason he hates anything is because he doesn't know it and doesn't care to learn it. It is very frustrating to deal with. It is impossible to motivate him, so I am looking for another job.

mikedisd2

fogspark wrote: »

I can't ask to have them fired for that, and that is not my goal anyway.

That would be my goal. I hate having to prop up co-workers who don't perform. That, and people with bad personal hygiene.

Being fired might be the wake up call that they need.

Pash

msteinhilber wrote: »

I've tried a wide variety of things to try and motivate my co-worker. He has been at the same role for just about 10 years now and hasn't achieved anything except Network+ maybe 5 years back. It is difficult to implement new technology since we are a very small shop of 3 guy's - my co-worker and I as the minions and my boss as the IT manager whom also pickups the slack with the regular day to day duties but also spends a lot of time in meetings to appease upper management. Normally this would be fine for implementing new technologies, but my co-worker is usually slow to learn or simply doesn't learn it enough at all except to barely cover the very basics of it so it's often me and my boss to do the real implementation, maintenance, and troubleshooting.

Lately the projects on the table have been switching our remote branch offices from Linksys VPN routers (yea, really) to Juniper's SRX line, migrating office servers over to Linux and designing/implementing LDAP for our network, and introducing VMware ESXi to virtualize our branch office and corporate environments. All of this effectively is a two man job between my boss and I because my co-worker doesn't believe in (says he doesn't have the time) to study outside of work. So by default he's pretty much shafted with all of the helpdesk calls unless it's stuff he can't handle and spends his days complaining about being so busy with the easy stuff while I ignore the phones to get real work done so we can finish a project for once.

If you find the magical motivational bean, let me know... I'd be interested

Unfortunately in my case, I do believe it's severe enough that there is absolutely no fix short of replacing the employee which doesn't seem feasible as our boss is too much of a nice guy.

Wow this is a hard situation to be in. I think the main problem is many of us believe IT to be a heavily orientated study job. I mean work 8-9 hours a day and then go home and study or study at weekends. It sounds like you pick up things at a fast rate and unfortunately your co-worker has been left behind a bit. It sounds to me as though the current job role he is in, is not a good fit..Your boss sounds quite technical, did he hire him?

Interesting topic.

msteinhilber

Pash wrote: »

Wow this is a hard situation to be in. I think the main problem is many of us believe IT to be a heavily orientated study job. I mean work 8-9 hours a day and then go home and study or study at weekends. It sounds like you pick up things at a fast rate and unfortunately your co-worker has been left behind a bit. It sounds to me as though the current job role he is in, is not a good fit..Your boss sounds quite technical, did he hire him?

Interesting topic.

Yea, it is quite frustrating - especially when we are (seems like mostly me at least) fighting to actually make our environment more manageable (we have essentially zero machines in the Windows environment I am pushing to migrate away from in a the domain - management hell really). My boss and I both have the ability to learn things quickly, and both invest substantial time outside of work to both study as well as continue to work on work-related projects so they get done. The co-worker in question, I don't view him as much of a techie person and he himself has questioned if this is the career for him. It wasn't too bad for a while once I essentially told my boss that if the co-worker wasn't going to get his stuff together and get up to speed that I would essentially detach myself from the helpdesk duties which we all share and the co-worker would be forced to do what he seems capable of - which is answer phones, perform the easy to moderate difficulty fixes and be the wipe and reload/spyware removal minion. Though at this point, the co-worker seems to be developing a bit of aggression towards myself since he's obviously aware I'm not contributing to that sector of the department while I focus on the areas he is unable to since he refuses to learn it.

My boss did hire him, and he was probably fine back then and for some time after that too. My boss and him were around since the IT department really started to become a reality for the most part. So the duties and responsibilities were a lot less then. Fast forward 10 years and having grown from a half dozen or so offices fairly close by to about 50 spread all over the state along with a much larger user base but still for the most part retained the small handful of offices approach to IT with the exception of VPN's to remote branches and VNC to assist people remotely (but no domain, nothing really centrally managed, nothing documented, etc, etc) and that's where the department effectively was when I came aboard almost 4 years ago. I've been fighting, and with pretty good success, to make the changes needed to run the department more efficiently, more easier to manage, and so forth. It's more of a reality to implement things now as before it was effectively my boss being the main brains of the entire operation as the guy whom I replaced was effectively 1/8th of what my present co-worker is now in terms of his ability to contribute to the team.

Such is life though, I'm happy to still have a job (I work for a real estate firm, not the best industry to be in yet) but it's still stressful. Even with the roadblocks though, it's still moving forward ever so slowly. I'd love to speed up the momentum a bit to wrap up a few more significant projects and experiences to get them under my belt as I keep an eye out for a different job. Having been here for 4 years now I'm eager to move up into something different and not risk growing stagnant by spending too long in in one place which doesn't keep up with technology very well.

RobertKaucher

The inability, or rather unwillingness, for people to think critically about why they fail is the greatest limitation on us as a species and as individuals. We all know the cliche about the so called definition of insanity. In trouble shooting your life, YOU are Layer One. I think the greatest step in maturity for a person is when something goes wrong, they first ask what did I do or could I have done to prevent this or what did I do to cause this. Just as the first step in troubleshooting in IT is always check Layer One (is it plugged in, is the cable bad, etc).

This guy might be able to ask himself what am I doing that is causing me to get all the crappy helpdesk calls? But he cannot see that the answer: my unwillingness to improve my knowledge at the expense of (place excuse here), is causing me to get the crappy helpdesk calls. It's easier to blame his boss/co-workers and clame favoritism or give any other excuse. Introspection is far too difficult for some people.

darkerosxx

Coddling is one of the worst things you can do for a person in the IT ecosystem. Do them a favor and make them work for their position. Assign tasks to people through a project management system. If they don't do them, it's pretty clear-cut who dropped the ball.

Mishra

msteinhilber

darkerosxx wrote: »

Coddling is one of the worst things you can do for a person in the IT ecosystem. Do them a favor and make them work for their position. Assign tasks to people through a project management system. If they don't do them, it's pretty clear-cut who dropped the ball.

They do end up working in a way. I've in the past shifted the responsibility of tasks for people whom I know would make a fit if they don't get good service to the individual in question at my job. I'm in the phase now where I'm starting to get more people call/email me directly rather than taking their chances with the helpdesk queue so I can't say it's working 100% to my advantage yet, but in the long haul if I keep it up I'm sure the problem will work itself out of the system one way or another.

But yea, that's a great point - under no circumstances would I keep giving someone chance after chance only for them to constantly achieve sub par results. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt for a while and genuinely try to help them get up to speed - but once I'm confident it's a lack of simply trying vs just not getting it, then I'm cutting them off and will give them a bit more leash to experience failure.

Paul Boz

There is no reason to protect people that are lazy, show no initiative, and push work on you. Those types of people get bounced out of my current work environment like swatting flies. It sounds to me like you're trying to protect your co workers because perhaps you're friends or you feel sympathy for their families, but in the end work is work, not a charity case. If you have a culture of laziness and lack of initiative it'll stay that way forever. They're actually holding you back, as well. Time spent cleaning up their mess is negative time because not only are they not using their time wisely, your time is being wasted fixing work that should have been done right in the first place.

gosh1976

Paul Boz wrote: »

There is no reason to protect people that are lazy, show no initiative, and push work on you. Those types of people get bounced out of my current work environment like swatting flies. It sounds to me like you're trying to protect your co workers because perhaps you're friends or you feel sympathy for their families, but in the end work is work, not a charity case. If you have a culture of laziness and lack of initiative it'll stay that way forever. They're actually holding you back, as well. Time spent cleaning up their mess is negative time because not only are they not using their time wisely, your time is being wasted fixing work that should have been done right in the first place.

I agree with this^^

I have two thoughts about threads like this that show the laziness and ineptness of so many in the IT industry. The first being that it frustrates the hell out of me that these people have jobs when i can't find one. I am willing to go above and beyond to do my job. I love working with IT and all different aspects of technology. I have a great base of knowledge to start in many different types of roles and I am willing to start back out making peanuts as a level 1 help desk tech. I would be willing to spend hours and hours of my own time to learn things that I might need to do my job at an above average level. ant yet folks like this have their jobs and i continue to put my resume out there.

I know I shouldn't think about what anybody else does but it is frustrating. I'll just keep on studying, learning, bettering myself, and plugging away and eventually i'll get a break.

The 2nd thing is that stuff like the OP talks about is no surprise. Dealing with vendor tech support can be very frustrating at times. Just recently I taught a tech support guy how to check event viewer for details on why the application he was supporting crashed. Also, years ago I was working as a team focal or level 2/3 tech. I did escalation call backs, answered calls when the que was backed up, helped the other techs and kept an eye on the call times for the techs so I could go check on them if their call time was going to long. This one tech had been on the phone way longer than we were supposed to be before escalating for a call back. So, I walked over to his cubicle and the guy had a customer on hold while he ate his lunch!!!! We were in a hire/fire freeze so there wasn't really anything we could do about it.

genXrcist

fogspark wrote: »

I work in a small but busy network team. I have a couple of coworkers that don't want to do anything. Trying to strong arm them into doing it is more work than just doing it, and if I don't clean up after them anyway their work makes the whole team and myself look bad.

I can't ask to have them fired for that, and that is not my goal anyway.

As people I like them, but as coworkers our team does not scale with me trying to do everything and we are growing beyond my capacity to keep up. We can't hire more people because we have enough people now. The only solution is to get them to help.

Sometimes I am kind of "I got it!" but if I don't nobody else does anyway, so this is not a legit excuse. I am always open to assist/help them with anything.

Any tips on getting them on board?

Honestly, this is management's problem and not yours. Managers get paid big bucks to lead people and if they do that poorly (e.g. allowing sub-par employees to remain on the team) then it reflects on them, not you.

You can't change other people and it's maddening to even try. Do your best to influence and encourage but don't put yourself in a position where you can be harmed. Document, document, document what you do on a daily basis so when the inevitable blow-up occurs, your butt is safely covered.

Be discerning when it comes to the people you allow yourself to be surrounded by and as long as you don't judge them, you'll be fine no matter what.

Pash

genXrcist wrote: »

Honestly, this is management's problem and not yours. Managers get paid big bucks to lead people and if they do that poorly (e.g. allowing sub-par employees to remain on the team) then it reflects on them, not you.

You can't change other people and it's maddening to even try. Do your best to influence and encourage but don't put yourself in a position where you can be harmed. Document, document, document what you do on a daily basis so when the inevitable blow-up occurs, your butt is safely covered.

Be discerning when it comes to the people you allow yourself to be surrounded by and as long as you don't judge them, you'll be fine no matter what.

Exactly this.

If things get so bad that you feel the work load isnt being evenly distributed, speak with your HR and explain that to them. You cant take slack for other co-workers when they arent doing their day to day duties.

Mojo_666

As much is I try to motivate people I will at the end of the day just say it how it is, if someone is being lazy I will say so, I will call them out and refer to them as lazy or idle, I see little point in pretending or humouring people, and if the management do nothing then that is their issue not mine. If they have an issue with me I offer up my willingness to leave to make things easier for them, I will call anyone out when I am fed up enough.

fogspark

msteinhilber wrote: »

So by default he's pretty much shafted with all of the helpdesk calls unless it's stuff he can't handle and spends his days complaining about being so busy with the easy stuff while I ignore the phones to get real work done so we can finish a project for once.

I think this is the answer