You are an employee who gives it your best shot every day at work. Despite all that, your efforts rarely get recognized and appreciated. Over time, your motivation level takes a downturn. For the final nail in the coffin, you see a co-worker who works half as much as you do but still gets promoted.

That is the reason why only a handful of employees are engaged on their jobs. According to a study conducted by Gallup, only 15% of employees feel engaged in their jobs globally. From a manager’s standpoint, you need to avoid making management mistakes that can put a huge dent on your employee motivation.

Here are six deadly management mistakes you need to steer clear of to keep employees invigorated.

6 Common Management Mistakes You Should Never Make

1. Micromanaging Employees

No one likes to be micromanaged. In fact, employees want freedom and aspire for a platform where they can showcase their skills and talent. They want to be empowered and managers should delegate tasks to them to hold them accountable instead of micromanaging them.

When managers micromanage, it sends a clear message to employees that they are not deemed reliable. No employee can perform to the best of their abilities with this perception. As a manager, you should have complete faith in your team members and their capabilities and should not hesitate to delegate even the most critical tasks to them to boost their confidence and keep their motivation level up.

2. Neglecting Your Employees Career Goals

Did you know why most people switch jobs? One of the main reasons for high employee turnover is because they don’t see career growth opportunity in their jobs. Most employees want to climb to the top of the ladder and look for employers who offer them a lucrative career path.

Employees value things like mentorship programs and leadership training, so if you are offering it, they will be more inclined to stay with you for longer. If you are not sure which type of training and learning you should introduce, you can conduct one-to-one meetings with your employees and ask where they see themselves in five years. Which skills are they interested in cultivating? Develop a plan with their coordination and help them grow.

3. Not Giving Credit Where It is Due

“A good leader takes a little more than his share of the blame, a little less than his share of the credit.”—Arnold H Glasow

How many times have you seen someone else taking the credit for your work? This happens with all of us. There is nothing more depressing than seeing someone else eat the fruit of the tree you have planted and nurtured with love. Good managers always recognize the efforts of their employees and give them due credit for their work to make them feel valued.

4. Being Neutral During Conflicts

Workplace conflicts are quite common, especially if you are managing a large team with diverse workforce coming from different backgrounds and disciplines. Keeping them on the same page to achieve a common goal can be a daunting challenge, especially when there exists friction between team members.

Instead of staying in the shadows and waiting to see where the wind blows, or staying neutral during conflicts, you need to identify the root cause of the conflicts and try to resolve them expediently, before they can wreak havoc on your team cohesion. You need to take a proactive approach instead of a reactive one to resolve conflicts before they cast a negative shadow on your team.

5. Controlling Where and When Employee Work

Whether you should allow your employees to work from home or remotely or force them to come to office is still a debatable topic. Some studies have shown that employees are much happier and more productive when you allow them to work from home. On the other hand, we have studies proving that the opposite is also true.

So, what should you do? It depends on the nature of your company and people working in the company. Avoid rigidity and offer employees flexibility. Let employees choose where they want to work, and you will see their productivity graph move in one direction: upward.

Jason Friedman, CEO of Basecamp thinks that managers should keep an eye on signs of employee burnout. Jason writes, “A manager’s natural instinct is to worry that their workers aren’t getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. The manager isn’t sitting across from her worker anymore, she can’t look in the person’s eyes and see burnout.”

6. Forcing People To Do Meaningless Work

You are paying your employees to work, and you want them to be productive, right? Despite this, most managers assign meaningless tasks to employees, which can easily be automated or handled in an efficient manner. This results in a wastage of time, money and resources, but more importantly, it negatively impacts employee motivation.

Use an online task management software to optimize resource utilization and maximize your productivity. It gives employees a signal that they are not important to the company and could not contribute towards value addition. That is why they are assigned mundane tasks.

Which are the biggest management mistakes you have ever made? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.