Managing Poor Employee Performance

Managing employee performance makes up a significant portion of a business owner, or managers job, and that means dealing with poor performers and mediocrity in the workplace. This could be one of these most difficult responsibilities of a manager because sometimes, the problems are either not totally quantifiable or there are too many other factors involved.

With an unsteady economy, this could be one of your best ROI tasks – optimizing your workforce.

Here’s some quick ideas to make it easier:

As a business owner or a manager, it’s important to understand poor employee performance that is not dealt with may be seen as acceptable. Consequently, the rest of your team pay attention to how you are handling certain situations and this can have a negative affect that can be infectious. Hard workers don’t want to see slackers get away with poor or mediocre performance because they will end up making up the slack, or could be themselves blamed for overall company performance.

A simple guideline for managing poor performance with your staff can be summarized in three basic steps:

1. Identify what behavior is causing the employee to underperform
2. Confront their employee and poor performance
3. Get an action plan in place to improve performance

 Identify why the employee is underperforming

When identifying the poor performance, it’s important to be able to quantify and describe the behavior or performance that is lacking. It’s also to try and identify any other factors that might be causing interference. Is it a procedure or system that needs correction? Does the employee need additional skills or resources? Don’t be too quick to place all the blame on the employee, make sure you are able to isolate the issue.

 Confront poor performance

There are six rules you should observe when confronting a poor performing employee. Undertake this process as soon as you have identified the issue at hand before it causes more problems:

1. Never confront in anger
2. Don’t let it become emotional
3. Take action as quickly as possible
4. Confront the employee in private
5. Be specific and factual
6. Be clear, don’t water anything down

 Redirect behavior to improve performance

Now that you have dealt with the what, how and why, you must also help the employee to find a path to solid performance or behavior. It’s important to give them clear guidance how to succeed, but this can be an interactive process by engaging them in their opinion of the situation and what they think needs to be done to correct it. Interactive engagement is also to ensure that they bought into the fact that they’ve been performing poorly and that a correction is necessary.

It might be necessary if you are unsure of their ability to improve, to put a Performance Action Plan (PAP) in place, in writing and have the employee agree to it and sign it. Put specific goalsRemember, we’re trying to either build the greatest employee on the planet, or set up a clean and quick termination.

Once you’ve agreed on the solution and the interaction is over, monitor future performance over the short term. As they progress to better performance, give positive reinforcement and make sure they know that their work performance has improved.

If their performance does not improve, hold another meeting quickly, reinforce what needs to be happen and be sure they are completely clear. Document this discussion and make sure they understand the seriousness of the problem.

Hopefully, if you’ve worn your coach/mentor hat well, you’ll see better employee performance.

If we can assist you at all in any particular HR situation, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our HR experts at info@infiniumhr.com.