Posts Tagged ‘performance management’

Stop Poor Employee Behavior from Damaging Your Workplace

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

“No one has ever been fired for a bad attitude. Sure, attitude may be the reason given, but the real reason was poor behavior. We cannot know another person’s attitude (whatever that is) but you can observe and act on behaviors,” Bruce Clarke, CAI’s president and CEO, says in the latest edition of his News & Observer column, “The View from HR.”

Some managers are quick to say that their poor performing employees have bad attitudes. However, if they observe the actions of their poor performers and offer suggestions for improvement, managers can turn employees with perceived bad attitudes into productive workers who positively affect the company’s bottom line.

Knowing how to correctly handle an employee with a behavior problem is invaluable for employers.  Threatening to fire or demote an employee the next time she displays poor behavior will do little to help improve her work performance. Use the information below to help resolve behavioral issues at your company:

Explain

Use specific examples of poor performance that you have witnessed when addressing these employees. Exaggeration and hearsay from others is not helpful and may cause employees to hold resentment or perform even worse. Communicate effectively by telling your poor performer what you expect from him and what the consequences are for not meeting expectations. Doing this gives him an opportunity to improve and also allows you to check his progress to see if further action is needed.

Retrain

Inadequate training can be the culprit of problem performance at your organization. Talk with your employees to make sure they are informed about the skills and experience needed for their positions. If poor training is the reason, retrain them correctly and give them time to adjust to their updated roles. Sometimes analyzing training reveals that an employee is actually not the best fit for her job. If this occurs, see if she has tasks that you can give to another employee or if you can reassign her to a new position.

Monitor

Employees with unsuitable workplace behavior should have increased supervision. Micromanaging is not necessary, but checking in with them frequently will help you determine if they can improve or if you need to let them go. Once you and your poor performer agree on an improvement plan, set up a weekly meeting to assess his progress and uncover any obstacles that he may be facing. Reward employees or take further disciplinary action based on the information you learn from these meetings. Keep these meetings documented so you and the employee have a record of his workplace behavior. Documenting these meetings also will be legally helpful if terminating an employee becomes an option.

Be swift when dealing with employees who display poor workplace behavior. Addressing the issue quickly will show your intolerance for unsatisfactory performance. Failing to do so will lower your team’s morale because productive staff members will be responsible for carrying the weight of their less productive colleagues. You are also in danger of wasting time, energy, resources and money when you accept poor employee performance. Call CAI’s Advice and Counsel Team at 919-878-9222 or 336-668-7746 for additional guidance on performance management issues.

Photo Source: National Assembly For Wales / Cynulliad Cymru’s photostream

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Addressing Poor Performance in the Workplace

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

sleep at jobEmployees can exhibit poor workplace performance in more than a few ways. Some consistently arrive late and leave early, others are busy updating their social media accounts, and a few frequently struggle with closing their sales. No matter the types of problem performers your business has, continuing to let them under produce will harm your organization’s success.

Acknowledging and confronting poor performers are often challenging tasks for managers to execute. Weak sales, unsatisfactory customer service and decreased employee morale are a few of the consequences of ignoring low achievers.  To strengthen your business’ credibility in hiring top talent, address a poor performance issue immediately.

First identify the underlying cause that is making an employee perform inadequately. Many managers automatically assume that employees are solely responsible for their less than stellar work ethics. When investigating the situation, you might conclude that the employee is overly stressed from his to-do list, one of his immediate family members is seriously ill or he received incorrect information when he was trained. Once you narrow down the reason, you can proceed with a tailored improvement plan.

Incorporate the following actions into your improvement plans to accelerate productivity in low-achieving employees:

  1. Use specific examples when discussing occurrences of poor performance. Do not exaggerate or use the opinions of others when confronting the employee.  Ex:  “Joe, I’d like to address your tardiness. I have witnessed you being late more than five times during the past two weeks.”
  2. Take care to ensure that you know the best communication method for approaching your problem performer. No one handles feedback in the same manner, especially negative feedback. Proper communication can alleviate emotional outbursts or feelings of resentment.
  3. Create an environment of constant feedback and clearly communicated expectations. Waiting around to give feedback can lessen an employee’s sense of urgency to correct a mistake. Feel free to ask employees to repeat their understanding of your feedback, as well as the goals you want them to attain.
  4. Document each conversation and review session that you have with problem personnel. Be exact with dates, goals, deadlines, expectations and feedback. Capture both positive and negative results from the improvement process. This will help you evaluate whether the employee can turn his work efforts around.

If you do not see favorable results after maintaining an employee improvement plan for several weeks, your organization could consider moving the employee to another position that suits his abilities better. If this is not an option and all other efforts to improve productivity have failed, termination could be an effective solution.

To explore additional methods for handling poor performers, please contact an account manager at 919-878-9222 or 336-668-7746 and inquire about CAI’s class called Managing Problem Performance.

Photo Source: hawken king

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Better Performance Management Starts with Better Hiring Decisions

Monday, July 12th, 2010

When people ask for guidance on designing their performance management programs, the main area of focus is invariably the employee evaluation process.  The question that seems to be on most people’s minds is, “What is the best way to design an effective evaluation form?”    While it is important to have an effective measurement instrument with which to evaluate your employees’ performance, it is only one part of a system for ensuring your organization hires, trains and keeps the best employees possible.  We should also spend time examining the hiring and selection process.

Hiring decisions are, in effect, problems.  By this, I mean you are making a decision with limited information involving doubt or uncertainty.  The best way to make a decision is to limit the amount of uncertainty involved in the process.  Through the use of applications, résumés, recommendations and interviews, you are hoping to decrease the uncertainty in the process and increase the probability that the choice you make will be the correct one.

However, we frequently make mistakes.  It is possible that we pass on a good applicant or hire a bad one.  These mistakes are bound to happen; we are not perfect.  A way to reduce the chance of error is to make a better system for collecting information for the hiring process—not just from the traditional means mentioned previously.

What may be the most important part of the entire performance management process is what can best be described as the control mechanism for the system.  Every organization has control systems that measure such things as defects, scarp, employee attendance, etc.   How many organizations have instituted a means to measure the effectiveness of their performance management systems?

When employees leave, some organizations do employee exit surveys.  But, how does that information serve the organization?  You know why they left, but how does that information help you improve the process?

Ideally, you would want to know information that would help you make better hiring decisions in the future.  Use turnover as a chance to collect information and diagnose where mistakes were made in the process.

When conducting the “autopsy” after an employee leaves the organization, some things to consider are:

  • Do you have a true understanding of what the job entails?
  • Are the job requirements— the knowledge, skills and abilities to do the job effectively—accurate?
  • Can you identify the mismatch between the applicant and the job?
  • Do we have the right people involved in the hiring process and making the final decisions?
  • What information may have led you to hiring that person in the first place?  Do we have any organizational biases in the hiring process?  (Educational level, for instance)

Effective managers and supervisors recognize that failure oftentimes can be useful in helping improve performance.  Use the information you collect from your “failures” to improve your hiring process.  Continuous improvement relies heavily on feedback, and this should apply to your hiring process as well.

Photo Source: J Wynia

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