Stop The Cycle: How To Manage An Underperforming Employee
By Matt Youens, Director & Founder, Human Elements Canada Ltd.
Follow-up blog post for November 10 webinar
CCVO Capacity Building webinars offer participants the opportunity to submit questions to the presenter, for consideration to include in a follow-up blog post. Participants are encouraged to ask questions via the comment box. Please note that speakers address questions submitted up to three days after the webinar launch date.
Thank you to the listeners of the recent webinar “Stop the Cycle: How to manage an underperforming employee”. Below is the presenter’s response to a question from one of the webinar attendees.
Question from attendee:
How do you keep track of performance management to identify potential performance issues especially in times of remote work? For some organizations who don’t have offices and wouldn’t have the issues of people being late to work, if there are larger projects and such, how would you know if progress is being made, or isn’t?
Response from presenter:
If you’re reading this, chances are you fall into one of two categories of people. You’ve watched the webinar, and you:
have given specific performance feedback to an employee, and it was not well received, or
are about to give performance feedback for the first time, and you don’t want it to be ugly.
Building on top of what we discussed in the webinar itself, let’s look at handling remote work performance issues during the Work From Home (WFH) movement - a movement that I certainly recognize as a privileged one, one that office workers have been able to leverage.
2020, a Post-Privacy Society?
If you’re looking for assurance that tracking the keystrokes, mouse movements, and even the eye movements of your employees is a good idea, you should probably stop reading right now.
When #WFH first made a big appearance in early 2020, there were several articles detailing how some US companies were tracking their employees (Washington Post, NPR), much to the chagrin of many employees, privacy wonks, and HR professionals like myself.
Don’t misunderstand me, employee scale is certainly an issue. If you suddenly shift 500 employees to work from home rather than an office environment, a good management team will need to implement a system. But for small to medium-sized organizations, especially in the nonprofit sector, those organizations are usually dealing with employee numbers much lower than 500.
And yes, employers may legally be allowed to monitor the digital doings of their staff, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best – or right thing to do – from a human level.
With that all out of the way, I wanted to share some practical, effective, and achievable tips for digital leaders in this new WFH world.
Five Tips for Digital Leaders - Addressing Remote Performance Issues
1) Trust
Building and maintaining trust is a key part to effective employee relations and management. And even more so now that the team is working from home. The Harvard Business Review has a great article, “Do You Really Trust Your Team? (And Do They Trust You?)”, and I would encourage you to read it, absorb it, and put it into action.
But, here is a question I would ask a leader who is worried about their employee goofing off and binge-watching a new series, or scrolling Facebook, all on company time – if you don’t generally trust your employee, why are they working for you?
To me, no matter the answer, this shows a poor fit. It’s either the employee is a poor fit for the role/team/organization, or the leader is a poor fit in their role/team/organization.
2) Get on the Same Page
What are the deliverables that you are expecting the employee to complete? What are the measurements that can let both leader and employee know how well the employee is performing? Is the employee aware of your expectations?
If it’s important to performance, then track it. Yes, this is where we talk about dreaded KPIs… otherwise known as Key Performance Indicators. KPIs can be as simple or as complex as you want, and for our purposes, they can be simplified to tracking the employee’s performance with their deliverables.
Was Gaurav (your organization’s Communication Coordinator and someone I just made up) supposed to have the monthly e-newsletter out by the 18th? Did it go out on time? Did it include all necessary components?
3) Check-Ins
We’re no longer sharing the same physical space in the office, which means less intra-team collisions, less chit chat, less spontaneous catch-ups, and less connections on a personal level.
Therefore we need to figure out how can we achieve the same level of communication and knowledge-sharing in this WFH landscape, both at a team-wide level and a leader-employee level. Importantly, our solutions need to also be embraced by the culture of the team.
As an example, if you were having a monthly check-in with your employee back in the good ol’ days of January 2020, then perhaps you should consider changing that cycle to once every two weeks instead.
Perhaps these check-ins were rather informal, with no set agenda. Consider putting into place a routine agenda, so both leader and employee know what is expected every single time. Ensuring action items are captured for both the employee and the leader is valuable as well - action items which get revisited at the following meeting.
Once you and the employee are in a groove with your check-ins, there should be less miscommunication and less misunderstanding by both parties with respect to expectations and deliverables.
4) Monitoring Performance - It Doesn’t Have to Be Fancy
Tracking an employee’s performance (whether you call them KPIs or not) doesn’t have to be a big deal or something that requires a fancy solution.
Yes, there are tools out there to help you track productivity and projects (Monday and ClickUp are two examples), but your system can be as simple as a cloud-based spreadsheet or document that is accessible by both leader and employee.
For such simple tracking systems, a green deliverable can mean the item is going well or is complete, yellow can mean it is in progress, and red can mean there has been a critical failure, or there is a critical block for progress.
These tools, if kept up-to-date, can be a quick way to see how an employee is doing in terms of the key deliverables they are responsible for – both for the leader, and the employee.
5) Use the PCA System
The Progressive Corrective Action (PCA) system outlined in the webinar is a proven method for leaders to clearly identify the performance deviation and the impact it is having on the workplace. This system allows both leader and employee to explore the root causes, actions both employee and leader need to take in order to correct the issue, and what the next steps will be.
If used with genuine intent by the leader to help correct the behaviour, and not to punish the employee, it can be a powerful tool to help bring the employee’s performance back to one where all are pleased with the contributions to the team.
Stop the Cycle: How to manage an underperforming employee is a CCVO Capacity Building webinar. These webinars cover topics of interest to nonprofit professionals, and will include presentations on public policy, leadership, human resources, and technology - all at no cost. Listen in to learn, and build your capacity in the areas you’d like to know more about in order to be more effective in your job, for your clients, and the community. Please visit the CCVO website for more information and registration details.
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