Dealing with the poor performance of an employee could be very challenging for a manager since it requires confronting the employee, and possibly distressing them. This could affect the reputation of the manager, as well as the organisation.
So, as a manager, what can you do to effectively administer bad performers without looking like an ominous boss?
To manage employees with the poor performance the best way, you can use these steps to effectively improve organisational outcomes.
- Don’t neglect a poor performance
There are only a handful ways to handle underperforming employees and withdrawing from the confrontation is not one of them. If underachieving employees are left uninformed of their execution of work, or lack thereof, it’s likely that they’ll never attempt to address what’s amiss with their working methods, as well as never improve their performance.
- Acknowledge the problems
Even before you can fix a performance that is not able to meet the organisational criteria, you should deal with the situation more objectively and have an understanding of what might have caused it – lack of abilities, lack of inspiration or their organisational behaviour? This is the only way you can provide your employee with a helpful feedback that could make them work on their performance improvement.Based on the following reasons for below par performance, you can successfully identify the cause of inefficiency in an employee.
- Unclear instructions
This is one of the major reasons why an employee underperforms. There can be times when you fail in communicating the instructions to your employees which can lead to misinterpretation and confusion.
- Lack of skills
Employees lacking proper education and skills might not be able to perform their job efficiently.
- Lack of resources
If your employees do not have access to the relevant equipment and tools, or they just don’t have sufficient time to invest in their work, then their performance is going to be affected.
- Poor organisational attitude
A bad attitude can be detrimental for a worker’s productivity. Employees can have a bad attitude because of many variables, such as, unfair treatment, scarcity of support, office environment, etc. – all of which can lead to them losing motivation towards the fulfilment of their objective.While managing poor performance, you should take your time out to address these matters and create a balance between the actions of your employees and their corresponding consequences. Right judgement can improve an employee’s work manners and cause them to work towards the organisational goal.
- Confront the employee
The most challenging aspect of managing poor performance is confronting the employees. You should arrange a formal meeting to confront the employee of their shortcomings. While confronting your employee in a rational manner, you should be precise in articulating the problems and their outcomes, as well as understanding the view of the employee. After each meeting, you should document it to follow up on employee’s performance.
- Identify where they need to improve
You should act as a helping hand to fix what’s causing employees to underperform. It’s important that you sit down with your employee and set their personal and work goals, along with a deadline by which they should be accomplished.
- Provide them adequate training
After establishing their goals, you should provide them with a foundation for knowledge to grow, to help them meet the business norms and optimise their own strengths. This could be easily done by providing them with extra assistance and training.
- Evaluate their progress
To ensure that the employees are improving their performance to accomplish their work-related goals timely, you should periodically review their improvement by evaluating their efficiency and work attitude over the course of the monitoring period.
- Recognise the best course of action
As a good manager and leader, you should recognise performance issues when they first appear, so that you can assist the employees in performing better right from the beginning. Following up with a poor performance management, you must have an understanding of the areas where the employee performance has been improved and admire their efforts for successfully adapting to the business work standards. But if the performance has not yet been improved and their organisational behaviour is still the same, it would call for you to issue a notice and consider terminating the employee.Inadequate management of employee performance can leave an impression on other employees that there are no consequences to give a below-par performance, which could cause them to lose their involvement and consequently making business operations inefficient.