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Friday Sep 20, 2024
Wednesday, 20 July 2011 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Manager: “How do you expect me to give you a pay rise? You won’t deserve any until you do your work right!”
Subordinate: “But… Let me explain sir!”
Manager: “No more explanations, you delayed on all my reports, messed up a client visit last week and did many more that ruin the business. The only way you can explain is by proving that you can perform better… or I am afraid we shall have to fire you soon!”
For many of us, these are the everyday conversations between managers and employees, or may be true for some of us or our colleagues at least. High performers survive as they continue to get rewarded but poor performers may have sad ends. Such is the magnitude of poor performance in the world of work.
Whatever the reasons behind poor performance, it is important to identify the reasons that cause them as it the most fundamental outcome contributing to the success of an organisation. Performance can drive an organisation towards success while poor performance may slow down its growth.
Ask managers what their biggest problem is when it comes to work, many would undoubtedly claim that ‘poor or weak performance’ of subordinates rank the highest of all. Performance therefore is a decisive platform in the corporate world. It determines your career growth and secures stability in a firm.
If you fail to perform, you will fail to succeed. Certainly no individual will have a strategic intention of being a poor performer; 95% per cent of the time, it is the work environment itself that compels an employee to lag in their work.
Stressing more on performance, it refers to the activities that you do regularly in the work place. It is an extremely important criterion that relates to organisational outcomes and success. In the context of an individual, the performance at work depends how well the person accomplishes his/her given tasks and we see that highly performing employees go way beyond the responsibilities entrusted to them.
This is totally the opposite for a non-performing individual, for he/ she might fail to perform even the basic line of tasks under their control. We must however understand that poor performance is not a status that cannot be changed.
Awareness is the key
Become more aware of your current situation, more aware of what work actually means to you, of what constitutes performance and how performance can be improved whilst at the same time having some fun and enjoying the job that is done. Fun, enjoyment and performance improvement will follow once you have raised your own levels of awareness.
You need to understand the root of a performance problem before you can fully address it. Ability and motivation go together to impact performance and the most successful performance improvement efforts combine strategies for improving each. This creates a positive environment where people feel supported to reach their performance potential and feel valued, knowing that the organisation wants to find a good fit for their abilities.
Are individual members of your team performing less well than you’d hoped? If so, this proverb can take on great significance. To figure out what’s causing the performance issue, you have to get to the root of the problem. These types of solutions focus largely on the ability of the person performing the job. Performance, though, is a function of both ability and motivation.
Performance = Ability x Motivation
Where:
• Ability is the person’s aptitude, as well as the training and resources supplied by the organisation
• Motivation is the product of desire and commitment
Someone with 100% motivation and 75% ability can often achieve above-average performance. But a worker with only 25% ability won’t be able to achieve the type of performance you expect, regardless of his or her level of motivation.
This is why recruitment and job matching are such critical parts of performance management. Be sure to assess ability properly during the selection process. Minor deficiencies can certainly be improved through training – however, most organisations don’t have the time or resources needed to remedy significant gaps.
But because employee performance affects organisational performance, we tend to want to look for a quick fix. Poor performance may be defined as underperformance due to bad and negligent management of one’s work.
Poor work performance has a negative impact on productivity and workplace effectiveness and in severe cases could lead to an increase of workplace accidents. In addition, failure to address poor performance could cause resentment and have a negative impact on those employees who are performing satisfactorily.
Let us now try to understand what poor performance really is:
Awareness of what causes poor performance would enable you to take your management actions effectively. The factors causing a downgrade in performance may be for various reasons. Managing poor work performance should be part of an overall performance management process which also includes carrying out regular appraisals and identifying and meeting learning and development needs
Other ways to identify poor performance could be:
Do examine their skills: Many of us are doing jobs that are more complex than they used to be. Yet, many companies don’t recognise this and often don’t put effort and money into training to ensure that people have the necessary skills. Talk to the members of your team and arrange for training or tutoring to help them gain the required expertise.
Do examine their motivation: Absenteeism may be caused by the person not feeling part of the group or it may be caused by external factors that you aren’t fully aware of. Taking the time to find out what is causing the person to miss work just might turn a problem employee into a productive one.
Do examine if they have personal problems: Life happens. If the person has a good track record of doing the job you might want to see if something at home is distracting them. Offer a referral for professional help and/or temporarily reassign their duties. You also might see an increase in loyalty from other employees when they see you stand up for someone going through a difficult time.
Don’t just write them off: It’s important to give people the opportunity to work through procrastination. Working with the person to break the job down into manageable steps can often turn inactivity into productivity. One caution, there is a difference between making help available and doing the job for them. Most managers believe that a pay check should be motivation enough. But there are times when something more is needed. The important thing is for you to know what motivates each person and for you to give them a spark when they need it.
What are the most common causes of poor performance at work?
There are two main causes of performance problems. The first has to do with employee characteristics. Employee performance is based on the following: employee skill levels, motivation, ability, training and other factors that ‘belong,’ at least in part, to the employee.
The second type of cause has to do with the system in which work is done. In this category are included: managerial behaviour, allocation of resources, the effects of colleague behaviour and a wide range of variables that are, by and large, beyond the control of the individual employee.
When trying to identify the causes of poor employee performance it’s absolutely critical that both kinds of causes be examined. Even something like “poor employee motivation,” something that would appear on the surface to be related to employee characteristics, is heavily influenced by the work environment. A work environment can be frustrating or demoralising, so apparent poor employee motivation can itself be caused by a poor working environment.
The following also depict some of the reasons for poor performance among employees.
Bored at work: Nothing exciting happening at that data crunching job and no stimulants to perform better in your present job can make even a very well paying job just another task to be completed. And when the passion, excitement and enthusiasm for a task wane, performance at work goes on a downslide. Boredom has been associated with a range of negative outcomes including poor performance at work and accidents. When you are bored at work the job or the work environment (or both) does not appeal to you anymore. “Find something you love to do and you’ll never have to work a day in your life” – Harvey MacKay
Relations with superiors: Lack of open, honest communication is at the root of 80 per cent of problems at work. Nearly 75 per cent of employees who leave their jobs do so because of communication issues with their boss – not money. Likewise the number one factor that drives employees to be engaged in their job is their relationship with their boss.
Often the reason for poor performance at work is not a “bad boss” but poor communication with your team or the manager.
Mismatch of skills to present job: Your skills are not the latest and greatest and you have made no efforts to rise above the rest to polish your skills or acquire new ones. Interest in work dives to a new low when you find you are not adept at work. Or ponder on another related reason — though you are skilled at other jobs the one you are at now does not use those skills to the full potential or to your complete interest. Manager is to be blamed in the event this mismatch had not been realised. If the management is good, organisation culture is supportive and processes are in alignment with the requirements then it is usually due to individuals’ incapability.
Tough to meet expectations at work: At times even when your skills are up-to the mark, the expectations from your boss and team is too much to meet. This often results from poor performance management system within the company or the lack of doing so through your manager. Employees get accused of not being able to deliver on time or the poor quality of work because it was not defined well in the first place.
Poor health: A healthy mind resides in a healthy body – always true. Your health affects your mental state and your absenteeism from work at frequent intervals also affects your performance at work.
Attitude: And the most significant and bottom line of all is the attitude of employees one possess at work. A simple saying can say it all, “Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun”– Colleen C. Barrett
Unsupportive organisation culture: Performance can also be affected largely by unsupportive organisation culture. If the organisation culture is not supportive and consists of red-tapes, people would be attracted towards rationalising the matters and would not focus on getting things done.
Work-systems and processes: Processes should be flexible enough to adapt essential changes so that they can be instrumental in filling the gap between activities and results. Bad processes (or no processes!) are the fault of management and they must put it right.
Assessing poor performance
Investigating further on to its causes will help you assess whether there is something standing in the way of good performance, like an inflexible return policy, a phone system that can’t handle the volume of calls your business receives, or your failure to address missed deadline.
You can help employees with their journey to improve, but it’s up to them to change their behaviour. A performance improvement process that is specific, focuses on behaviour, and outlines consequences if improvement doesn’t occur, involves the employee and leaves little room for surprises if things don’t work out.
Diagnosing poor performance
People with low ability may have been poorly matched with jobs in the first place. They may have been promoted to a position that’s too demanding for them. Or maybe they no longer have the support that previously helped them to perform well.
Here are the seven steps to deal with that.
• Recognise a performance as a “poor” performance.
• Ascertain the basis of poor performance.
• Get buy-in on the essential actions needed.
• Ensure that poor-performer is supported by additional resources, training, coaching, mentoring etc.
• Inspect what you expect and provide as much feedback as you can.
• Ensure that the performer is equipped with additional guidance as an when required.
• If nothing works, invoke a disciplinary procedure like PIP (performance improvement plan)
So how do you do this in practice? This is where you need to develop a Performance Improvement Plan. First there is a need to evaluate performance from there, it’s important that you and the employee discuss and agree upon a plan for improving performance.
Write down what you’ve agreed, along with dates by which goals should be achieved. Then monitor progress with the team member, and use the techniques we’ve discussed above for increasing motivation and dealing with ability-related issues.
Once enjoyment and learning are in place, performance improvement will occur almost without any effort, remembering at all times that there is no improvement without change and no change can occur without learning. Therefore it is high time to think, get your feet on the ground and focus more on achieving the work goals, because “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”.
(The writer is the Managing Director and CEO, McQuire Rens Group of Companies. He has held regional responsibilities of two multinational companies of which one was a Fortune 500 company. He carries out consultancy assignments and management training in Dubai, India, Maldives, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. He is a much sought-after business consultant and corporate management trainer in Sri Lanka.)
