In every business, productivity is crucial for growth. Business owners and managers must measure employee performance and help them become productive. As a business owner or manager, you must help your employees perform well by giving them a chance to improve to maintain a quality team. When employees are underperforming, they cannot execute their roles to meet expectations. Some may also depict negative and disruptive behaviour and fail to comply with rules and company policies. You need to spot such employees and find a way to help them from the root cause. The following are ways you can help your low-performing employees.
Before we look at these tips, it is vital to understand the causes of underperforming. This way, you will understand why your employee is not performing as they should and find effective ways of helping them to improve productivity. Low-performance causes include a lack of enough skills, a stressful workplace, a lack of supportive work culture, job dissatisfaction, personal issues, etc. When you understand these causes, applying the following tips to improve performance will be easy.
Spot the Issues
Before anything else, you need to know there is underperformance. There are many ways underperformance can manifest itself. Such include absenteeism, disassociation with responsibilities, unprofessional behaviour, reduced quality of work, reduced interaction, missed meetings, etc. once you notice any or some of these signs, it will be time to take action.
Conduct a Meeting to Understand the Causes
Don’t assume you know the root cause of these issues. Therefore, you should hear from the employees themselves. Call for meetings to ask questions about these behaviours. It could be an unhealthy work environment, personal issues, or anything you might not think of. Therefore, knowing the things affecting the employees will help you find the right solutions.
Offer Proper Training
Part of improving employee performance is offering appropriate training based on their departments. Ongoing training gives your workers new knowledge and skills they can use in their work to do better. Offer training to all, like basic computer skills and how to beat burnout. Computer skills are essential in this era. With them, an employee will know solutions to issues like computer hanging, copy paste not working, shortcuts, etc. Basic skills improve how workers do their work and remove the barriers that hinder them from doing a satisfactory job.
Clarify Expectations
Sometimes employees underperform because they don’t understand what is expected of them and where they want improvement. Therefore, part of supporting them is setting realistic expectations. You need to state what they need to accomplish within their job so that they can focus. The new hires are always the most underperforming at the beginning when roles are not clarified to them. So, clarify expectations. While setting these expectations, don’t set them too high. They should be realistic and achievable to help employees know they are doing their job.
Provide Work-Life Balance
When underperformance is because of personal factors, you can find a way to help by giving them enough time to look after their personal life. Sometimes employees spend too much time and work and lack space to look at other issues in their life, including their families. So, help them balance work and life to ensure they are not drained.
Conclusion
These are five actionable tips you can take to help your low-performing workers. Recognize the issues and find the best solutions for improved productivity.
If you’re a business owner, HR professional or someone tasked to improve your company’s employee engagement, you can rest assured that StrengthsAsia has the necessary tools to transform your workplace culture. From leadership development training in Singapore to a team building workshop, we have helped many organisations to build more effective leaders and managers and make teams more cohesive. To find out more about our programs and workshops, feel free to reach out to us here.
