In an organization, there are all types of employees: who has quick grasping power; who works really hard; who works smartly; and an under-performer.
The HR Manager must focus on every single one of them. Addressing poor performers can be difficult, but with some basic planning the HR can handle it.
There can be many reasons for an employee’s poor performance, few of them being the following ones:
- Less Capability: Here, the employee may not deliver what the company excepts from them due to lack of desired resources, less knowledge set and skills.
- Lack of Motivation: This can be caused if the employee feels they are not getting enough recognition for their work, or when they are stressed enough, or when they are not satisfied with the job.
- Personal Issues: Few employees can separate their professional lives and personal lives. But others cannot help but let their personal issues affect their jobs. Issues with families, financial arrears, relationship complications are few reasons that disturb many workers.
The first two root causes are major issues than the third issue, however, it shouldn’t be overlooked. The HR manager who takes care of the workforce must handle this from the employee’s point of view.
Enhancing Employee Performance
Be Specific
Ideally, all employees should understand what is expected of them, and indeed if you feel this isn’t clear, then they may not even realize they are under-performing.
So, it is important to have a rundown with your employees to convince them about their withdrawal of lack of interest. But in order to do that, you need to have specific facts in your hand; instances that back you up and records that help you to put your point further.
But while doing that, make sure you do not exaggerate the situation or do not make use of strong language which might decrease your employee’s self-esteem.
Ensure Your Employees are Willing to Put an Effort
As they say, you can only bring the horse to the lake; drinking water from the lake depends on the horse itself.
The point is that enhancing their performance can only come with employee buy-in. In other words, they need to be willing to make certain adjustments. Ask the person if they’re willing to change, and if you don’t get the sense they’re open to trying, it may be worth re-evaluating.
Once you have buy-in, however, continue to show empathy by getting them involved in the brainstorming process. Engage them by asking what they think might help them improve in their problem areas.
Tell them you don’t require an immediate response. Instead schedule a follow-up for a few days later and ask them to come prepared with some meaningful solutions. Building the process around them increases how motivated they’ll likely be in seeing it through.
Avoid Emotional Confrontation
If you find your employee is under-performing continuously, there are cases where you might blow up.
To make it clear, it doesn’t work that way. You will only be making the situation worse. Do not be the victim of your emotions, be as calm as you can possibly be.
An emotional argument helps nobody. Neither you nor the under-performing employee will benefit from loaded accusatory questioning, or threatening behavior.
To avoid such situations where it leads to emotional blowout, take steps to give feedback to your employees periodically so they could improve their performance.
Set Clear Goals
The path to helping an employee turn around their performance is most easily taken in shorter, measurable steps. In addition to corrective feedback, work with the team member to set expectations for whatever timeframe best applies.
Get their input, set attainable goals and priorities, and make sure you’ve done your best to provide the resources and support you or they have suggested to help them improve. Plan to meet again at a defined date to measure progress and talk through their experience.
Offer Rewards and Recognition
Whenever you see your employees performing poorly, it is always better to adopt carrot and stick approach to gain instant and consistent improvement.
It is a combination of rewards and punishment that you may induce for best and worst performer of weekly or monthly basis. This has proved to be one of the best ways to combat poor performance issues in companies of all types since ages.
Performance Management Software in the Market
1) SAP SuccessFactors Performance
SAP Performance Management Module allows you to give team members the direction, feedback, and recognition they need to succeed today. And accurately evaluate past performance to improve results going forward.
The SAP SuccessFactors Performance offers the following features to enhance employee performance.
- Cloud deployment
- Employee goals aligned with business targets
- Continuous feedback and coaching
- Objective and accurate performance reviews
2) Sage Performance Management
Sage Performance Management is designed for mid-size and multinational companies. It is an innovative and scalable HR software which will help you manage your people.
It provides many features that include: single interface, instant visibility into your workforce with a single source of truth, reporting and interactive dashboards.
Sage software also streamlines your core HR and people processes by automating key tasks and workflows, all in a single system across your entire organization.
3) UltiPro Performance Management
UltiPro’s performance management solution enables you to understand your employees’ competencies, identify and reduce gaps, and plan for future workforce needs.
Furthermore, the goals they aim to, are:
- Gain complete visibility into your talent pool, including goals and performance.
- Track and analyze key metrics in order to assess workforce progress
- Assign or recommend goals to employees
- Recognize and rate employee achievements and identify areas for improvement
- Proactively impact an employee’s success and retention, with Leadership Actions—a library of suggested activities to help managers coach and engage employees.
