subject: Why do our employees not do what they are supposed to? Part 3 [print this page] Author: jose leonardo Author: jose leonardo
Hello dear readers.
This is the third part of the article Why do our employees not do what they are supposed to? this is an article inspired on my experience working with employees for over 10 years. You should know that employees fail to do the tasks we assign to them for several reasons and the most of the time it is because of our own mistakes when managing them. In the last two parts we have seen that sometimes employees fail because they dont know why they should do what you are asking them to do. The thing here is to talk to them instead of giving them a cold order you need to explain yourself and let them know the objectives that you or the organization have. Also let them know what bad things will happen to the company and to him if things are not done as they are meant to be done. Another reason is that sometimes they think that your methods wont bring the expected results and you will need to give them the background of your considerations to get them committed to doing as you say. Usually this happens when the employee is new to the organization and need more knowledge base to follow the flow of things and other times it is because you are introducing a new way of doing certain things and this employee have been doing it the old way and has resistance to the change. Now in this article we are going over a third reason (for this article) which is: Employees doing thing the wrong way get rewarded! Or get punished by doing things the right way! Amazing ah! As strange as it sounds this happens a lot and every day, the thing is that we dont see it. Think about it, what you usually do when a lazy employee takes too long to get things done you place him or her somewhere else doing chores that are not urgent, at that moment you are rewarding him. And if it is the opposite, and you have a good employee that is always on top of situations you place him to do the more difficult chores so things get done the right way, at that moment you are punishing him. What happens when you have an assistant who is not capable to organize his or her office/desk and is always looking for loosed documents, do you end up archiving your self important documents? Think that you would be rewarding that poor performance. Or maybe you will give this archiving chore to the department other assistant, in which case you will be punishing this other person. As a team leader you know that you need to place your team members where their skills allow them to do a better job for the organization, but that is different to allow inefficiency or laziness. All team members have to meet the company working standard and if not so, you will need to let some people go. Now how can we avoid doing this? You will need to think more of your actions from the employee point of view. Is my action a reward to a bad performance or a punishment to a good employee? Now that you see that change the way you are acting. For example, stop inviting poor performance employees to have a conversation where you will be playing the psychology roll looking for a nice and easy solution. With this people you need to keep conversation straightly professional. Talk to them about things that are relative to his or her performance and what expected from him or her is. When this poor performance employees mess things up dont do it yourself, ask those to correct it and follow (teach them) step by step to make sure they will not fail again. If it is necessary, help them learn how to do it if happens that they have poor knowledge of a particular task. If poor performance employee is complaining too much over some task or chore, dont listen. Instead give verbal rewards when they get things done. Reward the good performance employee, pay attention and congratulate them for a job well done. To those good employees: Dont return reports only correcting errors, make also rewarding comments. When they make contact voluntarily (calling or presenting them self to your office) dont seize the opportunity to reprimand them for something else. Stop using sarcasm at meetings. If an employee expresses his opinion about some topic in the middle of a meeting, it is a good thing doesnt make fun of them if they are wrong or dont have all the details. When you know that their job is hard, try to make it easier to go through. You should consider a verbal reward, free time or if it is appropriate- a dinner (or drink) invitation. This are just some suggestions but I would prefer that you put in place your own creativity. As I said at the beginning of this article, it seems strange to reward a bad employee or to punish a good one but after you read this article I am sure you are thinking different.About the Author:
Actually I am working for a mass products manufacturer that is the leader in the market and also exporting to several countries including the USA. I work at the marketing department managing a part of the Promotion and trade Area at the Dominican Republic.
Also, I have a two web sites, one for digital products and the other for consumer products and I am trying to push them up with big plans for this year 2010.
