You won’t achieve perfection at the workplace and keep everyone satisfied and performing at their peak working condition all the time. What is expected of you, however, is to minimize their problems as far as is remotely possible and cut back your losses.

Here are the top 5 reasons why your employees could be facing bouts of decreased productivity;

1) Major upheavals in personal life

Your employees have a life outside of their work too even though you only see them at the office. They go through graduations (if they’re working while studying), marriages, divorces, deaths in the family and even losing their home to creditors. You need to cut them some slack when they’re going through personal problems since these will sort themselves out with the passage of time.

There’s only too much emotional trauma one can take before buckling under the pressure and just calling it quits. Empathize with them, who knows, they might be looking for a way to vent their emotional frustrations by consulting with you. You could very well be their last friend in this world. This is the perfect opportunity to secure the employee’s undying loyalty.

2)  They are facing harassment at the workplace

You know bullying is a permanent characteristic trait among some people, and they don’t necessarily grow out of it after they’ve done torturing kids in high school – they bring over their bad habits to the workplace too. This is something you have to keep strong tabs on.

If an employee is going through severe bullying by cruel employees, there is a strong chance they won’t bring their grievances over to you. They’ll silently suffer in misery, until the stress takes its toll on them and they call it quits. You should detect bullies and properly put them in their place before they ruin the office environment.

3) Not receiving enough praise

There’s nothing worse than feeling unimportant or unneeded. Workers want job satisfaction and they want it now, and the only best way for them to experience it is when you take out time from your busy schedule and call them in and praise their work. It has to be sincere, however, since employees have the innate ability to see through flattery. If they can see you’re pulling their legs, it might hurt them even more so than if they hadn’t been receiving ‘lavish’ praise.

4) Lack of opportunities

One of the key motivators at work, aside from the salary, is the prospect for growth. Your employees tend to leave when they detect that there is no way for them to climb up the corporate ladder, or if favoritism has tethered them to their undervalued position while an incompetent coworker has been promoted instead.

However we understand that firms can’t just hand over promotions that don’t exist due to organizational constraints within the company. You should make up for this constraint by raising their salary instead.

5) Terrible, terrible boss

Receiving horrible treatment from an inconsiderate, unempathetic boss at work tends to not only affect a worker’s professional life, but manages to seep into their personal lives which can stir the cauldron of negativity and make it spill over into the entire workplace.

Bosses that hammer down on their subordinates might satiate their own egos – but in the long run, they negatively impact the bottom line of the company resulting in bad retention rates and loss of good talent.