It happens. After all the care you spent recruiting someone bright and talented, sometimes they just don’t hit the high marks you expect of them.
But before you show an underperformer the door, there can be a multitude of factors affecting their ability to achieve. Team dynamics might be affecting their productivity. They may feel unsupported and unrewarded. They may need coaching or more training.
In this blog, we look at employee productivity and areas employers and managers can focus on to better understand employee underperformance and how to turn it around. We also explore rewarding people in the right way, and how development pathways can help engage and incentivise staff.
Playing the blame game can backfire
Tread carefully before pinning all the responsibility for underperformance on your employee without understanding how they see it. It can look like it’s the person’s fault that they’re not performing to their potential, but this may not be the case as far as they’re concerned.
They might attribute their underperformance to the employer, manager, or the workplace. They might not clearly understand what performance is or how well they’re doing in relation to expectations. They may feel they don’t have adequate resources to perform, or control over their performance, or that their co-workers are undependable or unskilled.
All of these issues will sap motivation, because their efforts can’t lead to decent performance.
How is the team affecting individual productivity?
Sometimes, a worker’s underperformance might be about relationships in the team and the way the organisation rewards employees. As a boss or manager, take a step back and ask whether you want to reward team performance or improve individual performance?
For a team to work, you need to align rewards with the performance and behaviour you want to see. If you distribute pay raises evenly to avoid conflict, then high-performing team members might feel unmotivated because their outstanding efforts could be offset by those who underperform.
On the other hand, if you give raises solely based on individual sales or performance, then people may see no reason to collaborate. You need to be very clear about what you want from your team members and work on creating the right rewards to encourage collaboration and/or competition.
Do people value the rewards they’re getting?
Rewards also need to be things that actually motivate staff, so talk to employees to really understand what they care about.
If someone performs well, does that mean they'll just be given more work? They could well perceive that as a punishment and feel unmotivated to perform better.
Alternatively, does a salesperson care about a 1% commission? It may be too little to motivate them.
When an employee doesn’t see the financial benefits of their efforts, the only thing they can use is internal motivation. For example, how meaningful do they think their role is? Do they have autonomy? Do they have control over a task from beginning to end and have a sense of achievement when they finish?
As a manager, you might be able to do things to increase this internal motivation.
Learn more about the best employee benefits and perks.
Do employees have development pathways?
If your employee is a good hard-working individual but isn’t delivering as highly as you’d hoped, have you offered ways for them to grow and take on newer, more challenging work that fits the growth of the business?
Sometimes in smaller businesses, the ability to offer development into more complex work can be limited. A lot of people in industries like retail, wholesale, and hospitality leave because they get bored, feel they’ve learned everything there is to learn, and there are no obvious pathways for progression.
If the team member isn’t contributing as much as you’d like, it’s time to have a conversation and a good question to start with can be: “Tell me how you feel about work”.
The conversation might involve an incentive, for example: “We’d like your productivity to be 20% better, and then we have a role with new responsibility and a higher rate of pay.”
These have to be real, rather than empty promises. If you haven’t got other roles for them to develop into, you’ll probably have to live with higher staff turnover.
Learn from the best: The “sitting by Nelly” approach
Another question to ask yourself is whether an underperforming employee has been onboarded and trained well.
Smaller businesses don’t always have the time to properly set a person up for success, due to the frantic pace and nature of the work. But from the get-go, the best coaching and on-the-job training you can offer is getting new employees alongside your most-talented people.
It’s never too late to utilise the “sit by Nelly” approach. Look to put employees who aren’t performing alongside your best worker or most-experienced staff member, so they can follow what they do.
This high-performing “Nelly” also has to be a good coach, which isn’t necessarily a given. Helping managers and top performers develop interpersonal “soft skills” like leadership, communication, and teamwork can pay real dividends across the business.
Find out more about effective leadership skills.
Top tip: Employ people who are better than you
It’s important to build a team with people who have different but complementary skill sets.
This means that you should also employ people who are better than you in their area of expertise. Because while you may be able to do all or some aspects of your employees’ jobs, you might not be able to do them as well as they can (and it’s unlikely you can do all of them at once!).
High-performing people and teams typically want to have ownership of their work, so it’s important to give talented people plenty of scope to make the job their own, while still checking in regularly to see if you can offer any support.
Don’t overlook other attributes that can be just as important, such as honesty, people taking responsibility for their work, understanding the role, and contributing to the team. These all contribute to the person’s and business’s overall success.
Remember, too, that the work and work culture should be enjoyable, as much as possible!
Read our post on boosting employee productivity and engagement.
