August 13, 4:31 pm
Poor Performance Management Can Lead to Tragedy
If you’ve ever worked with weasels (a favorite term of podcaster Wayne Turmel), you’ve probably encountered the results of poor performance management. Most people want to contribute, be productive, and accomplish the tasks before them with a sense of professionalism.
Others don’t.
Unfortunately, the two types of workers don’t mix well, and when poor performance is mismanaged, undesired results can occur.
I recently heard a tragic story of several very competent workers getting fired because of a stupid mistake—looking at the personnel record of a slacking employee. The slacker was known for lying, manipulating, and poor quality work. Coworkers were tired of it, and tired of management not doing anything about it, despite their complaints.
Temptation bit hard when one of the competent workers saw the slacker’s personnel file out in the open. A few quiet “hey – look at this” comments were whispered across the room. These several otherwise professional workers skimmed through the file to see what, if anything, had been documented.
Big mistake. Someone saw them and that was all it took. These workers were terminated for violating company privacy policies.
A whole lot could be written here, but I’ll touch on just a couple of things:
1. Companies could do a better job of educating employees to document their observations when they see other employees slacking off or performing substandard work.
PROBLEM: Most of the time this kind of activity is seen as ‘being a snitch.’ People want to fit in. They will rarely document such observations.
2. Companies need to keep personnel files sacrosanct. Leaving employee files out in the open and unattended is irresponsible – and inviting trouble.
ISSUE: Regardless of messy work practices by HR, it’s still incumbent upon employees to adhere to company rules. The competent employees in the story above clearly violated policy—and knew they were doing it. Sloppy records handing by HR does not excuse these employees’ behaviors.
3. Companies need to be more attentive when coworkers bring complaints about other coworkers. Wisdom is needed to beware of frivolous issues and private spats. But a complaint—or in the example above, a series of complaints—should be attended to quickly. Taking too long or waiving off a complaint sets the stage for the kind of trouble described above.
SOLUTION: Identify specific behavioral issues and clarify specific behaviors expected—with timelines and consequences for non-achievement clearly spelled out.
Dealing with complaints in a fuzzy manner only leads to fuzzy solutions. Or, as in the case described above, tragic ones.
Other thoughts?
Filed in Work, Business, Opinion, Motivation, Management, Workplace, Corporate Culture
There is more than one issue in this story. We are not told how the the management inaction was addressed.
Two effective alternative forms of feedback. 360 degree feedback, or building a system of peer feedback would have brought these issues into the light sooner
Hi Barb — Yes, many issues here.
In an effort not to create an e-book, I kept it rather short, but here are a few more facts:
- This slacker openly bragged about suing her boyfriend plus a few others. She regularly made comments that she “should sue” the employer whenever some policy seemed not right to her.
- A peer feedback system is in place. Employees who observe “areas for improvement” in others are supposed to fill out a “performance improvement memo”.
- Originally, the workers were filling out PIMs on this slacker, but the supervisors were spineless in that they showed the slacker each actual PIM — which revealed the name of whoever wrote it. Instant result? Passive aggressive behavior and veiled threats from the slacker to whoever filled out a PIM on her.
It didn’t take long for employees to stop filling out PIMs.
- Management was afraid of a lawsuit, so they were taking their sweet time “collecting data” and “building a case” to fire the slacker.
If I could wave a magic wand, management would have known how to be managers. As mentioned in the orig. post, I think they should have laid down clear expectations, including “by when” and “by how much” as soon any sign of trouble was noted.
They should NOT have shown the PIMs to the slacker — to do so was weak. It added to the tension and made matters worse.
There’s more, but I’ll stop here. It’s really a sad, tragic story resulting from managers who’ve not learned to be managers. The company is rather large, so their ineptness continues to go unnoticed under the radar.
Management is not a popularity contest. We’re hired to meet targets and expand markets—and that includes cracking down on inefficiencies and making sure standards, deadlines, and budgets are kept.
Work has become exacting and has taken most of the time supposedly devoted to personal and social life. The reasons are varied, but the glaring ones are the increasing materialism in this day and age, and the pressures in the workplace in pursuit of increased productivity, efficiency and competitiveness.