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Employees are the lifeblood of an organization. It’s their consolidated work and their individual and collective performances that shape the company’s success and aid it in reaching its goals. When a project manager chooses their team members, they tend to select people who each contribute to the project’s goals in a collaborative and productive manner.
In such a situation, even if the employee performance of one individual is below par, the whole team might feel the effects of that. This in turn might end up having an impact on other areas of work in the organization. As such, it’s imperative to create an effective system to manage poor performance and improve it. Let’s look at some reasons why managing poor performance in the workplace is so important.
Importance of Managing Poor Performance in the Workplace
The team and the organization reap several benefits when efforts to manage performance pay off. These benefits become apparent when all team members carry out their allotted tasks in an efficient manner. Every single employee plays a pivotal role in ensuring that the environment at the workplace remains productive and upbeat. One way to ensure consistently good performance is to put in place a performance management cycle, without which employees could lose focus. What are some of the other ways in which team leaders can manage poor performance on the part of one or more of their employees? Let’s take a look.
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Highlight Team Expectations
It’s important to outline expectations for the entire team. The collective must have a clear idea of what their project manager expects of them, including their best efforts and the excellence of their work.
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Formulate A Discipline Module
Creating a disciplinary process is the next step of working as team lead. After laying out expectations for the team, it’s important to put in place a step-by-step module to refer to and follow in case employee performance is consistently not up to the mark or if one or more team members aren’t being cooperative. Disciplinary steps aren’t always punitive; in fact, they’re usually just cautionary. Their purpose is to give employees a gentle nudge and ensure they have a clear idea of the fallout of consistent non-performance. Most importantly, it drives home the importance of the work they do as individuals and as a team and teaches them how to prioritize tasks at work.
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Boost Trust And Communication
This is a crucial measure, as the success of teams and entire organizations depends heavily on goodwill, transparency, happiness and camaraderie among employees. It’s important to focus on improving communication and trust. Once a manager is able to manage employee performance during a bad phase, the team member in question grows to trust their leader, thereby also boosting the faith of the other members of the team. The act of addressing the poor employee performance of one individual communicates an important message to the entire team: that their leader is concerned about their growth, and that their hard work doesn’t go unnoticed.
Now that we’ve discussed the need to manage performance at the workplace, it would be helpful to look at the ways in which such poor performance can be contained. Let’s take a look.
Methods to Manage Poor Work Performance
There are several ways in which a group leader can manage performance within their team. Let’s dive into some of them.
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Address the Problem Promptly
In several cases, an employee whose work is suffering isn’t even aware that their work output isn’t up to the mark. As such, the earlier they’re told that there’s a problem, the faster they can set about fixing it. A clear, honest and supportive conversation about their performance can go a long way in ensuring they can realign themselves, begin improving their work and also remain happy at the workplace. If the individual in question is able to take stock and manage performance quickly, it will have a positive impact on their colleagues, the workplace environment and everyone’s productivity levels.
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Identify the Root Cause
There are several questions to consider before sitting down with an employee about their poor performance. Are they the right person for the task? Do they possess the required skills? Do they have a clear idea of what is expected of them in the role they’re in? It’s often been found that there’s a level of misunderstanding between managers and their team members regarding what’s considered important in terms of performance. Moreover, as Jean-François Manzoni, the co-author of The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome: How Good Managers Cause Great People to Fail, says, “it’s rare that it’s all the subordinate’s fault just as it’s rare that it’s all the boss’s.” As such, as a team leader, it’s important for you to not just focus on what the underperformer needs to do to fix the problem; evaluate yourself as well to see if there are any changes you need to make.
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Give Clear Feedback
This is one of the most important methods to manage poor work performance. Honesty is a key factor when you sit down with your employee to discuss their performance. Talk about areas where you’ve noticed them underperforming and explain how this has a negative impact on the productivity of the team as a whole. Be prepared to give the employee a few examples so that they harbor no confusion. This is equally important, as miscommunication and misunderstandings have just as much of a negative impact on work performance and trust.
The team leader should re-outline their expectations and suggest steps that the employee can take to get back on track and manage performance. Alongside this, the team lead should be open to, and even ask for, feedback in return. Doing so gives them a clear insight into anything that might be bothering the employee. For instance, it might come to light that the employee feels they lack the adequate training required for the task, or they feel overwhelmed by certain additional responsibilities.
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Ensure the Person is Willing To Improve
There’s little point in trying to help someone who doesn’t want to put in the work. During any conversation about improving performance, it’s important for the employee to voluntarily acknowledge that a problem exists. If the person is keen to turn things around, it’ll be easier to find a solution to the problem.
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Uphold Accountability
A sense of responsibility drives most people in a team. They’re far more likely to work efficiently and stay on top of things if they’re aware that their colleagues are depending on their contribution to meet work targets. As such, it helps to encourage all team members to support and motivate each other, ask for help when needed, and have open conversations if someone is struggling. To this end, holding regular meetings where everyone discusses their roles and projects they’re working on. In terms of communicating with a single employee on a one-on-one basis, the importance of a performance review and feedback can’t be overstated.
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Create a Performance Improvement Plan
Underperforming employees often need some guidance in the form of an actionable plan to address the problem. This is where a performance improvement plan comes in handy. On the basis of the conversation with the employee, the manager should write a plan outlining new targets for improvement, a timeline for seeing the results of improvement efforts, and an intention to meet at regular intervals to discuss the progress made. Having a performance improvement plan in place will also help tackle any other issues that might pop up in the interim.
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Keep Following Up
A big part of managing poor employee performance involves supporting the floundering employee and giving them a fair chance to prove themselves. An underperforming employee is usually low on confidence and might feel unworthy. If they perceive you as being encouraging and supportive, it’ll have a significant impact on their confidence levels and boost their loyalty to you and to the organization. As a result, their efforts to improve their work will also receive a boost. Make it a point to follow up with the individual and prevent them from falling back into their old patterns. Following up consistently shows the employee that their growth and progress are important to you, and that they’re not defined by their bad performance.
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Appreciate Their Strengths
Often, there might be nothing lacking in an employee’s abilities or qualifications; they could just be going through a rough phase and feeling unmotivated. In such cases, if a manager makes them feel seen, heard and appreciated for the good work they’ve done in the past, they’ll regain the will to do better. Moreover, keeping an employee’s strengths in mind helps managers give them responsibilities which they would be able to carry out with aplomb.
Managing poor performance at the workplace is a crucial skill to have, whether you’re a manager or an employee struggling to meet targets. Harappa’s Be More Productive pathway is designed especially to help ambitious professionals in this regard. With the help of Thrive Skills like Efficient Prioritization and Optimistic Outlook, you can learn to focus on high contribution activities and exhibit confidence. Under the guidance of an outstanding faculty and with the help of techniques like the Eisenhower Matrix and Pomodoro, learners get to recognize their skill strengths, find their purpose and prioritize effectively. Sign up for the Be More Productive pathway to stay focused, work efficiently and maximize your output!
