Performance Management:
Veteran Employee
Problems
Back to Part 1:
Dealing with Problem Employees
For veteran employees, the manager’s approach may be a little different.
If you see performance slipping
in a veteran employee in a
familiar role, your first step
must be a frank conversation
with that employee. Start
by describing what you are
seeing. Depending on the
job content itself, you may be
able to ask specific questions
about quality issues, botched or
missed assignments, or even
observed behavior. Again,
you need to confirm that there
are not outside problems
contributing to the situation.
If you find that the employee is
dealing with a divorce or
serious illness in the family,
make sure he is fully conversant
with what resources the work
place has to offer.
Confirm your commitment to
confidentiality regarding these
matters. Ask the employee
what support he needs from you.
He may simply need to work a
different shift for 2 weeks; or
he may need to schedule some
vacation time to sort things out
at home or to get some personal
business accomplished. Be
as supportive as you can of
these needs.
If you do have a veteran employee who is not having any personal issues which are contributing to a performance lag, first make sure he completely understands that you see a performance lag, that you know he has done good work in the past, and that you want to discuss what’s going on.
Sometimes people are actually
not aware that their performance
is falling off. This
wake-up-call from you may be all
the employee needs to get off
track. But if there is a
genuine decline in performance,
and the employee knows there is,
the two of you need to work
together to figure out what’s
going on. This
collaborative approach is far
more likely to produce a
non-defensive and cooperative
attitude from your employee,
too.
Sometimes veteran employees simply become bored with their jobs and may even become sloppy in how they do their jobs.
If you see this pattern, do your
best to talk to the employee
about the need for their quality
contributions. Ask him how
he could make the job work out
better. Listen to his
suggestions. You may be
surprised at the good ideas you
hear. Implement the ones
that make sense, and that you
have the power to implement.
Explain why you are unable to
implement the others. Ask
the employee what other tasks
he’d like to learn, if you have
the ability to make that happen
for him. Sometimes the
work rut gets sort of numbing,
and performance falls off.
If you have tried all these
tactics and performance is still
sub-standard, you must move into
a disciplinary mode as
distasteful as that may be with
an employee you’ve had in your
department for a long time.
Your approach needs to be matter-of-fact and factual.
Recount your efforts at
determining what is causing the
lag. Talk about the
suggestions you made. Talk
about what the employee’s
responses were. And come
back to the fact that the job
still has to be done
effectively, and that despite
your best efforts, you are still
not seeing that it is being done
effectively. Follow your
company’s progressive discipline
process and make it clear to the
employee that you are doing so.
Again reiterate that you know he
is capable of doing the job,
that you are there to support
him, and that you do expect that
his performance will once again
get back on track. Be
frank about what the next steps
will be should he not turn his
performance around. You
may be surprised at his
reaction. He may be sort
of shaken out of his lethargy by
your insistence that he
performs.
Obviously, dealing with different performance shortfalls will not all turn out the same way. In fact, no two such issues will ever be exactly the same either in content or outcome. This would suggest that you, as the manager, need to react individually to each individual situation. That is true to some extent. But it’s also true that your goal in each situation is to work with the employee to solve the performance problem.
Back to Part 1:
Dealing with Problem Employees
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