Did you know that 10 minutes per day x 5 days x 52 weeks a year = 43 hours per year or over 2% of your payroll cost?
A productive, engaged employee will “gift” a lot more than 10 minutes of effort, and a Poor performing, disengaged employee will be wasting a lot more than 10 minutes per day.
Managing poor performing employees if critical to your on-going business viability for 3 key reasons:
- If that 2% of payroll spend (per 10 minutes!) was added to your net profit, how much difference would that make to your business?
- Poor performers “getting away with it” drag the rest of the team down.
- Are you “punishing” your good performers by loading more work onto them?
6 tips on assessing performance Issues
Every situation is unique and needs to be assessed on its own merits, but the following will help you assess if this is an Education issue, a Training issue or a Disciplinary issue?
- Attitude or Aptitude? Do they have the skills, but are choosing not to do the job? (Disciplinary issue?) or do they not have the skills to do the job? (Training issue?)
- Do they know what they are doing is wrong? This may seem obvious, but often it isn’t e.g. what does “start at 8.30am” mean? Walk in the door at 8.30am, make a coffee, chat to your colleagues etc, start productive work at 8.45am? OR “at your desk, ready to start productive work at 8.30am” (Education issue, but if they carry on after spoken too, possibly disciplinary issue?)
- Present or Productive? Don’t make the mistake of presuming that the person who is in the office last is the most productive, often they are the most inefficient. Consider the outputs of a person rather than being blinkered by presenteeism. (If they are not Productive look for the root cause which could Performance, Education or Training?)
- Have they previously performed to right standard? (Possibly disciplinary if they have previously demonstrated they can do the job, but look out for background reasons for the change in behaviour)
- Are your expectations reasonable?
- Are you being specific about what is wrong? (Education issue?)
Why don’t people just do a good job?
In nearly 30 years in HR I have yet to meet someone who is intentionally doing a bad job. They do a bad job because they don’t know better, or they know they will get away with it. As a result, simply having a formal discussion with people will often make them either correct their behaviour or decide to look elsewhere because they don’t like the pressure.
How we can help
HRtoolkit has many great tools to help you managing performance and defining your expectations. Including:
- Assessment Criteria Matrix for assessing performance
- Performance Improvement plan
- Understanding Miscommunication and Changing Behaviour
- Courageous conversation Webinar
In the next newsletter I will be talking more about how to address performance matters, but in the meantime sign-up for HRtoolkit, or give me a call on 021 741 544 if you need pointing in the right direction
Cheers
Lisa Mackay
Founder HRtoolkit