Motivating a mixed team in Seychelles when you cannot touch the salaries

In most Seychellois companies, salaries are set by the owner, by head office abroad or by a grid that nobody on site can change. Ask a supervisor what would motivate the team and the first answer is pay. Ask what they actually control, and the answer is: not pay.

That is not the end of the conversation. It is where the useful part starts.

Five levers you already hold

The rota. In a hotel, a restaurant or a plant working in shifts, the schedule decides a large part of people’s lives. A day off for a christening, a predictable week during the high season, not being put on every late shift: for many employees, these matter more than a small bonus. The rota is also where unfairness is felt fastest, and in a small team everyone compares.

Recognition. Being seen accurately, for the specific thing that was hard. “Good job, everyone” reaches nobody. “You handled that guest complaint on Saturday calmly, and the family booked again” reaches the person concerned.

Training. A course that leads to a recognised qualification has value outside the company. That is precisely why it retains people: it shows that the employer is investing in them, not only using them.

Responsibility. Leading a new project, training the new arrivals, being the contact for a supplier. Giving someone a visible piece of the work often does more than any speech about the company’s values.

Clarity about the future. What someone can expect in one or two years, what they need to show to get there, who decides. Saying it clearly costs nothing.

Why the same lever does not work for everyone

A typical Seychellois team combines Seychellois employees with colleagues from India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Kenya, Madagascar or the Philippines, most of them on work permits. The two groups are not in the same situation, and that changes what motivates them.

Seychellois employees are at home. Their family is here, and so is the rest of their career. They are often looking for a path: the next step, a qualification, the prospect of becoming a supervisor. A lack of perspective is what makes them look at the hotel down the road.

Colleagues on work permits are in a different position. Their permit is tied to the employer, part of their pay often goes home, and their horizon is the end of the contract. What weighs most for many of them is clarity: will the contract be renewed, when can they take leave to see their family, what will they leave with. Uncertainty on these points demotivates more than anything else.

These are tendencies, not rules. A Seychellois employee may be planning to emigrate; a colleague from Kerala may have been here for fifteen years and see no reason to leave. That is why the only reliable method is the next one. The differences between nationalities in a Seychellois team are covered in managing across nationalities in Seychelles, and the specific case of younger staff in keeping young Seychellois talent.

Ask, precisely

“Are you happy here?” produces a polite yes. Better questions:

• What does a good week at work look like for you?
• What would you like to do more of in the next six months?
• If you could change one thing about how your shift is organised, what would it be?

The answers are concrete, and concrete answers can be acted on. For managers who want a structure behind these conversations, the Enneagram is useful because it describes what a person is moving towards and away from, which is exactly what you are trying to learn.

The limit

If someone is clearly paid below what competitors offer, none of these levers will hold them for long. The mistake managers make is to treat a pay problem as a motivation problem, because motivation is what they can act on. Six months of effort later, the person leaves anyway.

Diagnose first. If the problem is pay, the manager’s job is to raise it with the people who decide, with figures, not to compensate for it with a better rota.

To start this week

Choose one person. Ask what a good week looks like. Change one thing in how their work is organised, based on what they said.

That is a smaller step than a motivation programme, and it works more often. The full method, including how to redesign a job without a budget, is the subject of Motivating without a budget.