When you have demotivated people – make the impact of their work as visible as possible.

Let us show you how 👇

Two clear signals that you have a demotivated teammate:

• they don’t care
• they wonder what’s the point

It’s your job to make them stop wondering and start caring.

One of the best solutions: stories.

Let us tell you a story that we found in Adam Grant’s book Originals.

In 2008 the level of motivation of Skype’s employees was at a critical minimum after the boom of the company has stopped and the two founders left. Josh Silverman who then was named CEO of the company, had the difficult task of “steady the ship”.

His vision was to continue developing the service – moving forward from audio to high-quality video calls. The employees were quite pessimistic and unhappy with his vision. They thought it was impossible to implement the functionalities (and to be a user-friendly experience) within the set deadlines.

The idea wasn’t just to provide the opportunity of affordable calls, but for users to connect when apart. In order to back his vision, Josh Silverman presented Skype’s employees with a series of stories that were inspiring and gave meaning to their work and efforts.

There was the story of a husband and wife who saved/kept their marriage because of daily Skype video calls although they lived in different countries for a year. There was the story of a father who served his country in Iraq apart from his family but still got the chance to see his children open presents on Christmas Day and so on.