SickChicken

Why Don't People Perform

The first thing to look at when someone isn't performing is whether they can do the job we expect. Having someone in a position where they can't perform the job is not only bad for the company, it is also frustrating, demoralizing, and destructive to the person in that position. Try as they might, no matter the effort they put forward, they just can't do the job. Now amount of training, no amount of coaching and encouragement, and no amount of enthusiasm will ever enable them to do it. When someone is stuck in this position, whether due to their own efforts such as a bad career choice, or because management put them their, the only choices are to change the position to where the person can do the job, or to move the person to a job they can do.

Sometimes it's obvious when someone is unable to perform in a job, for example if the job is lifting 100 pound bags of material 8 feet high, and the person is only five foot two. More often, however, there are more subtle problems. For example, in one company, we were operating a 24 hour network management center. One of the employees was a single parent with a young child and no local support system of grandparents, family, or helpful friends. When the child required doctor visits, or there were babysitting issues, the person was late into work, often without notice. As their was a minimum staffing requirement, the person from the previous shift was then forced to stay and provide coverage. The result was that neither employee was happy, nor was the manager.

After multiple issues, I sat down with the employee. We discussed the child's health issues, and the frustrations of living away from a family support system. I was facing some of the same issues as we were only recently arrived in the area ourselves, although I did have the advantage of not being a single parent. After that we spent some time talking about the kinds of jobs and professions that offered flexibility and didn't require strictly fixed hours. Nothing was ever said about anyone being fired, or quitting.

A week later, the employee gave notice. A month after that, I received a card from my former employee thanking me. She said that no one had ever taken the time before to help her figure out what kind of work she really wanted to do, but now she was in a sales position with flexible hours, was making a good commission and was extremely happy with her position. That made both of us feel better.

There are many other reasons why a person may not be able to perform a job. Not everyone has a personality suited to every job. Not everyone has the dexterity to be a watchmaker. I for example could never be a nurse or a doctor. I can't stand to see blood, and feel queasy every time I go into a hospital, even if it's just to pick up my wife after her shift as a nurse.

There are also jobs that just can't be done. I once came into an organization which had a person assigned as an organizational designer. Her job was to decide what positions were needed in the organization, to write the job descriptions, and to assign responsibilities to the positions. The person in the job wasn't a manager, and reported to a manager who had responsibility for only about a third of the positions covered by the organizational designer. The position worked as long as the managers didn't want to take responsibility for making decisions about how their departments functioned. Once the managers were held responsible for the functioning of their departments, the position could never work.

The solution was to find another position for the former organizational designer. Since we needed product managers, and since the organizational designer had many of the attributes of a good product manager - organized, persistent, focused, etc., we trained her to become a product manager. Although it took some efforts and was frustrating in the end she ended up a very good product manager, really happy and productive in her position.

Imagine the feelings of the organizational designer had she been left in her original position. There would have been a great deal of frustration that nothing she did would be implemented, or perhaps even considered. There would have been more frustration as she worked at cross purposes with managers who had other perceptions of how their departments should get their jobs done. And then there would have been the utter futility of not being backed by upper management, who needed to make the managers responsible for the work done in their departments. It is easy to see that this could have quickly become an embittered employee.

Not every employee has a position that is so clearly dysfunctional within an organization. But yet we often make changes to our process and procedures without considering the effects that this has on the ability of our employees to actually perform the jobs to which they've been assigned. Sometimes what we need to do is "fire" the employee from their current job and "hire" them back into another. We can do this by clearly stating what we expect of them in the new position, and by just as clearly what we expect them not to do.

Defining expectations of what not to do is important as, all too often, when an employee moves within a company they take a part of their old position with them. Taking their part of their old position with them happens because employees want to do the right thing. Often there is some special task that they have done for many years, which either nobody else did, or which they were told, at some point, was important to do. Either way, they feel that they cannot stop doing the task, or there will be serious consequences.

Sometime they are right, and the task they have been performing is a "lost" piece of a process that needs to be picked up and assigned to the correct person. It usually isn't documented because no one else ever needed to be sure it was done, and through all reorganizations and changes, the task was never left undone. As a result, no one in authority was ever alerted to the role the task played in the business. With this kind of a task, the only way it can ever become a part of the regular business processes is for the person who was secretly doing it to give it up and allow someone else to handle it. It may even mean a bit of stumbling for the company, but the result can mean avoiding a later disaster.

Most often, the tasks people carry with them across the company are not vital to the function of the company. They may even work at cross purposes to the efforts of the rest of the organization. Not only that, but the time spent by the employee on the "ghost" tasks is taken directly from time that could be spent on meaningful contributions to the success of the company.

For example, one employee used to file copies of delivery orders. When moved to a new position, she continued, without her new supervisors knowledge, to spend time filing the delivery orders. However her system was to file the orders alphabetically rather than by delivery date. As a result, the company had issues with making timely deliveries. The delivery crew didn't notice the problem, as they had always looked through the orders filed alphabetically and picked out the day's deliveries (usually missing a few). Only when the persons new manager noted that she was spending time on the delivery orders and had her quit, did the build up of delivery orders cause the deliveries manager to look at the filing system and rebuild it by due date.

In other areas, I've seen programmers that continued to provide support for outdated systems; network technicians who continued to wire and install 3270 terminals (old mainframe hardware) for users who had better access through their PC's; customer service representatives who continued to contact clients and waive charges on billable services; and more. People don't like letting go of things they have always done unless someone gives them permission, or specifically takes away the responsibility. Once that is done, they now have time to do the job they've been hired for.

There are many more reasons why people can't do their job. Few of them are actually the fault of a lack of intellectual capacity on the part of the employee. Most of the reasons are the fault of the way management has structured the position, or chosen the person to place in that position. The solution is to look carefully to discover just what the problem is, and fix it. Most often the discovery process requires nothing more than sitting down and listening to the employees and their co-workers to their thoughts about the position.

The bottom line is that we need to recognize when the reason our employees aren't performing is due to their inability to do the job. We need to understand whether that inability is due to their inherent issues, or due to the nature of the job and the environment we have established around the job. We then need to immediately correct the problem by removing the employee from the untenable position, whether that means fixing the job, fixing the job environment, or separating the employee from the job. While we do this we need to keep the needs of the employee in mind, remembering that, in general, it was not the employee that put themselves into a job that they cannot do.

If employees can do the jobs their assigned, the next issue to look at is whether they know how to do the job. This appears to be an easy and straight forward issue with a simple solution: train the employee. Unfortunately this is a problem that employers bring on themselves all to often. They do this because the assume that their employees know what they are supposed to do, and because they understand or see the immediate impact that training has on the bottom line.

Knowing how to do the job begins with knowing what the job is. This starts from the time they are hired and placed in the job, right up through the latest demands that changes in the company have placed on the position. Most often, if you go up to an employee and ask where they learned how to do their job they will tell you they learned it either from their immediate supervisor telling them what to do, or from their co-workers. If you go to the supervisor and ask where they learned what their employees are supposed to be doing, they'll tell you either that they learned it from their predecessor, their supervisor, or just through doing the job. Ask how many people have ever described their job to their boss, and almost universally you'll get a blank stare.

Lately, it has been a fad to have job descriptions for every position in a company. These descriptions always seem to be good at describing the core portion of the job. These are things like assemble components into a complete assembly. Of the ones I've seen, they describe exactly what the employee knew about the job before they were even hired into the position. What they don't do is describe what the employee is really going to do on a day by day, or hourly by hourly basis, nor do they describe how the employee is actually going to do the job. As a result these job descriptions make excellent executive fluff (they are useless to the manager who should know, without having to read about it, what each of their direct reports is supposed to be doing). I also always love to read the parts that many companies include about the attributes of the ideal in the position: caring, concerned, etc. as if the employee is suddenly going to change personality because of a piece of paper.

It would be a real nightmare to see a description of what an employee would do in a position: "Stand in a three by three foot box for extended periods of time twisting left and right to locate and retrieve parts A, B, and C ... Answer inane questions from wandering interns and upper managers while trying to retain fingers intact ..." . Of course, the description would be valid for only a short time before the requirements of the job would change. Which brings us back to where we began with the only viable sources coming from supervisors, co-workers, and predecessors. The issue with this is then "How do you know the employees really know what they are supposed to be doing?" The answer is, of course: "You ask."

Asking seems so simple, but yet we seldom do it. Instead we wander around in ignorant bliss thinking our employees know what they are supposed to do, until the one day when we start to wonder "Why aren't they doing their job?" Of course, most often they are doing exactly what they thing their job is. If we were the ones who told them what their job was, all to often, it is a one way process. Instead, we should get feedback from them on what their understanding is. That way we can both correct them where we've been misunderstood, or misinterpreted, and correct ourselves where we've been vague, imprecise, or contradictory. By doing this on a periodic basis we can capture the changes that either we, or the employee have brought to the job.

Asking also works extremely well when the employee has learned what the job is from their co-workers or predecessors. We learn a lot of things. First, we learn what the job is ourselves. That can be really revealing. Second, we can learn what the co-workers, or predecessor thinks the job is. This gives us the opportunity to learn whether we have communicated well with them about what the job should be, and often offers insight into whether they know what their jobs really are supposed to be.

So what do we do now about all of those wandering executives without job descriptions to read. Well, we let them ask. As for the executives who aren't wandering around asking who would rather sit and read the job descriptions, well, their job is to wander around. They'll get much more accomplished if they wander around and ask than if they just sit hidden in their office reading boring uninformative job descriptions. They might even, gasp, learn what's really going on.

Having the executives wander about asking people what their jobs are does more than just help the executive understand the company. It also ensures that the employees really do know what their jobs are. One of the shortest times in business is the time between when the employee says the wrong thing to the executive and when their supervisor tells them what was right! If the executives are asking, the supervisors have to.

Now that I've stated the heresy of knocking job descriptions, and have put myself on the hit list of every HR department which is looking for job security, what are we going to give the employees to help them know what their jobs are? Well, if we continue to communicate well with them their may not be a need for anything. But, it can be helpful to give them reminders to help them keep focused. Two ways of doing this are through ensuring each employee has a mission statement - a simple sentence of how they contribute to the goal of the organization, or by having an essential task list - a short list of critical tasks that helps the employee focus. There are other possible options, such as a rotating or periodic focus task, or other such device. However, the important thing to remember is that these are all just tools for communication and do not replace the real objective of ensuring that there is a genuine feedback process to ensure the employee is getting the message.

Once you know what a job is, the second part of knowing how to do a job, is having the knowledge to enable the completion of the job. This is the realm of training. Simply said, no one can ever be trained enough! Training needs to be continuous. Without it, people will train themselves, and that kind of training usually moves the employee off in another direction than the desired one. This is because people who train themselves train in how to do short cuts, how to do the same project over and over when something new ought to be done (if you only have a hammer, every job is a hammer job), or how to pass the work to someone else. This is not because people are trying to be bad, on the contrary, they are trying to be more and more efficient at their work. It is just that the focus on the end is not there.

In addition to focusing learning on methods and tasks that are important to the company, training reinforces in the employee that the company values them. Employees who don't receive training are being taught that there is nothing more of value they can contribute to the company than what they already know or do.

Often training is one of the first things cut when cash gets tight. This is wrong for many reasons. First, a lot of training can be done with little or no money. Second, it sends a bad signal to employees when training is cut. Third, it becomes a part of a downward spiral of untrained employees helping the company to perform more poorly and and introduce more cuts.

Buying expense training packages and bringing in high cost trainers is not the answer to keeping training active, especially in struggling, dysfunctional organizations. Most often, the training most needed is not touchy-feely how do I find my inner self on the production line, but rather training to help the employees understand the operations, cash flow, and issues facing the company. This is real information which allows them to meaningfully contribute to the success of the organization. It is also material that can best be trained by the people who are right there in the company.

Companies also have other resources for training in other areas, even when the training needed is highly technical or specialized. For example, I always like to start a series of brown bag lunches in technical departments. For each of these brown bags an employee is tasked with researching and putting together a presentation on a technical topic, such as a particular programming technique, a new microprocessor, or some other appropriate item. This serves two purposes. One, it gives the employee a reason and a focus to study independently a topic of importance to their job, with reinforcement of that importance, and two, it keeps the rest of the employees abreast of current topics.

The brown bag also accomplishes a number of other things. It builds a degree of esprit within the organization. It gets the group meeting and talking in a forum other than day to day work. It reinforces the value of the group by showing that they are worth training, and it gives the employees a chance to show off their skills. Technical departments are not the only place that brown bags can be used.

There are also numerous community training resources available to every organization. Sometimes it just takes a little creativity and effort to discover it and put it to use. Organizations that can do this are the same ones that in the long run will do better than those where the leadership merely sits back and moans that there just aren't enough training dollars available. It is our responsibility to make sure that our employees are trained. Sure they come to use with an education, but that is really only preparation for them to be able to learn what they really need to know.

If the employee can do the job, and knows how to, do they want to? This is perhaps the area which receives the most focus. There are numerous incentive programs, programs for increasing employee motivation, and programs for generating enthusiasm for the workplace, available. The key ingredient that all of these programs tend to miss however is getting the employee to make the decision that they will commit to the job. Without this one small key ingredient all of the other programs are meaning less.

Some people will argue that their programs create the encouraging atmosphere where employees will make that choice, and then keep them involved and committed. Often they are correct, however, in the dysfunctional organization we often find that this is not enough. Beyond the unmotivated employees, we find those who are more actively uncommitted to the organization. These are the ones who have decided that they will not support management.

Of the people that have decided not to support management, we can find a group that feels they are concerned for and committed to the future of the company. This group, perhaps, began to base their refusal to support management on a very solid ground. They saw that the previous management team was incompetent, did not watch out for their employees, and was not genuinely concerned for the future of the company rather than for a short term feathering of their nest. Perhaps they have also seen groups of management come and go, and have watched as nothing "got better". With this group, the only thing that will bring about a change in their attitude is a personal, in depth talk. At that point they either need to make the decision that they will trust and support management, or they need to be put on the fast path to an exit. Keeping them about only prolongs problems for everyone else.

Another group to watch for is the disenchanted employee who has decided to extract a price from the company. They will often even appear to go along with changes and new ways of doing things, but all along they are looking for, and grabbing, opportunities to harm the company, or to obtain what they have "earned". This may mean an increase in petty theft, or it may turn into something more sinister. At the extreme, it may mean that you have an employee actively chasing away customers through deliberate bad service, missed deliveries, or other means, or even an employee engaged in fraud, deceit and embezzling. This kind of problem is something that everyone in the dysfunctional organization needs to be aware of, and stay on the alert for.

There are many other reasons as well that employees have decided they don't want to do the job. In almost all but the most extreme, taking time to sit down with the employee can help us to discover just what those reasons are, and will most often give us clues on how to deal with them. The important thing to remember though is that if our employees don't want to do their jobs, they won't, and if they won't we need to find someone who will.

Though we sometimes are suspicious that our employees are just not doing their jobs, if we just look carefully enough we usually discover that there are good sound reasons that they are not. This could be because they can't do the job, either because we placed a person in a job that they couldn't do, or because we made the job undoable. It could be a matter of their not knowing how to do the job - perhaps no one has even told them what the job is (that kind of has a way of making it hard to do the job). Perhaps the company has decided to save money by cutting training instead of tuning training to their financial capabilities. And then there are the people who won't do the job. For these people, we need to quickly decide if it is a motivation issue we can fix, or else rapidly remove those people from the position.