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My Employee Isn’t Performing Well; What Can I Do?

January 22, 2013, by Corina Sibley | Dealing with Difficult Employees

providing employee feedback on performance

If you’re a manager you will inevitably run into the situation of having to work with an employee who just isn’t cutting the mustard.  The reasons are as numerous as there are employees.  That being the case, there is no one cookie cutter way of handling them.  However, there is a simple framework you can follow that will help you to handle these types of situations much more effectively and reach a conclusion much faster, which will in turn help your business productivity overall.

Step 1:  Determine the root cause

This is such an important step that managers often overlook.  (Many tend to want to just get rid of the person right away!)  Ask yourself if the issue is any of the following, or a combination:

  • Skill
  • Training
  • Behaviour
  • Attitude
  • Unclear expectations

This will help you determine your approach with the employee.  If it’s a skill issue, perhaps the employee is in the wrong job altogether and will never improve because there is a skills mismatch.  If it’s a training issue, the fix will be to get the employee trained ASAP.  Behaviour and attitude issues are tougher to deal with and will require bringing it to the attention of the employee to start with as they may not even be aware of their inappropriate behaviours and/or attitude.  (Check out our article on Bad Apples in the Workplace for more information.)  Unclear expectations?  Make them clear!

Step 2: Have a conversation with the employee

Bring up your concerns with the employee.  Be ready to provide specific examples of where their performance has been lacking along with how it impacts the team and the organization.  Ask the employee for their perspective and input into what actions they can put in place themselves to improve their performance.  Also ask them how you can help; is there anything that you as their manager can be doing to better support them in their efforts.

Step 3:  Document the conversation in writing

This can be as simple as following up the conversation with an email summarizing the points you discussed and what you have both agreed to as the action items going forward. 

Step 4:  Follow up

Make sure you do follow up with your employee afterwards to see how things are going, or to give them further feedback on their progress.  If things are progressing well, tell them so.  If not, give them specific examples again of where things may be going off the rails. 

If your employee just isn’t getting it or pays lip service agreeing to your feedback but then goes about doing their own thing again after your meeting, it’s time to up the ante and place them on a formal Performance Improvement Plan (PIP).  We’ll talk about PIPs in future blogs.

Coaching your employees to do a better job for you is not difficult; it does take time and effort on your part.  However, the longer you wait to address the situation, the more difficult, time consuming and costly it will be to resolve it.

Tell us what you think.  Have you had a poor performer reporting to you?  How did you handle it?

Related Articles

Bad Apples in the Workplace Part I

Bad Apples in the Workplace Part II

Strategies for Dealing with Difficult Employees

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