Dear Dan: Our business has expanded, and some employees aren’t quite pulling their weight. I’d like to help everyone meet our standards before I consider firing them. Any suggestions? – Not Ready to Fire
Dear Not Ready: Most business owners have had employees who deliver below standard performance. Sometimes the most vexing employees are those who aren’t terrible, but aren’t fully doing their job either. You’re not ready to fire them – not yet anyway. But if you don’t do something soon the problems could escalate.
“Many business owners are hesitant to deal with performance issues, so they send indirect messages and subtle signals, or avoid the situation, hoping it will go away,” says Jennifer Forgie, managing partner at OnPoint Consulting.
Rather than firing “below-standard” employees, it might be better to help them improve. But it is clearly best to intervene with “pre-problem” employees, as Forgie calls them.
Using some type of performance management system can help, if it’s done right. Such systems formalize the employee review process, providing a way to evaluate and rate performance, set goals and facilitate comments and discussion. But such systems can backfire, too, if managers check the “meets expectations” box year after year, even if an employee is not meeting them. Forgie says this is common.
So what can you do right now to keep an employee’s below standard performance from reaching the firing stage? Here are six steps that can help boost performance:
1. Paint a clear picture of what “good” performance looks like.
2. Relay your expectations in plain English. Some employees, and especially newer ones, might not understand the jargon and “presumed” standards of your business.
3. Don’t let expertise or revenue production be a free ride. Arrogant or condescending behavior with co-workers, for example, could poison your business.
4. Raise concerns while they are fresh. Most of us dislike confrontation, but it’s the only way to prevent performance issues from becoming a problem employee.
5. Offer coaching and feedback, both scheduled and on the spot.
6. Celebrate small victories. A key to reversing performance problems is to recognize progress toward improvement.
These resources can help in your quest to build an effective employee performance system:
n SuccessFactors, www.successfactors.com, offers a variety of web-based employee performance management solutions for companies of all sizes.
n TrakStar, www.promantek.com, is a popular employee evaluation software package. •
Daniel Kehrer can be reached at
editor@business.com.
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