Employees can be a company's greatest asset in achieving its corporate goals. That being said, achievements depend entirely on how the team handles its primary responsibilities. As such, it's the employees who demonstrate poor performance that should be the main focus of HR professionals.
But what’s to be done if the company as a whole is experiencing a decline in performance across the board, but there isn’t enough time for micromanagement?
There is a solution to this problem. You need to apply tools that optimize the daily work of your specialists to alleviate their routine issues and ensure that you are doing everything possible to safeguard the effectiveness of your team.
Underperformance in the workplace occurs when the quality and speed of an employee's work decreases below the required level. The characteristics and severity of these situations may vary, but underperformance is often characterized by the following indicators:
Productive employees are necessary for any organization to sustain its growth, however employees who don't perform their duties can have an undesirable impact in several ways:
Every employer inevitably faces periods of fluctuating performance, but it should be taken seriously if poor performance turns into a trend. Managers need to be able to identify workers who are struggling and address the root causes of the blockers.
There are many reasons why employees do not perform their duties properly:
Methods used to fix a team's underperformance can vary from case to case, however, universal methods include the use of tools to automate or optimize a work routine. They help the team to:
Let's look at examples of specific HRM-systems functions that can help correct poor performance.
As soon as you notice that an employee is not doing a job well, you need to act. Change in behaviour could represent the daily marks on the mood tracker, a feature that prompts employees to choose the emoticon that corresponds to their mood today. If you see that a particular employee has begun to signal a decline in mood, see if it's an indicator of burnout and find out if all is well.
As soon as you notice that an employee is not doing his or her job well, you need to act. To identify performance issues, start by analyzing the employee's performance over a particular period and assess the employee's performance and compliance with their stated competencies.
You can do this with Performance Review assessment tools. This is a method whereby the manager and the employee (and involving additional stakeholders if necessary) share data-driven employee assessments. These are based on the use of specific competencies and will highlight in detail where the employee can improve.
Also available to the manager is the n-box matrix, a tool that helps compare the manifestation of various competencies in any given workplace. This is necessary to understand how the employee deals with different situations, and the result usually allows you to compare the assessment of the employee with other members of the team, and see whether the employee is productive or not, and analyze the reasons for this performance.
If you discover an unproductive employee, do not jump to conclusions. Each case should be dealt with separately; after all, it is possible that the reasons are objective, and not related to the office.
First of all, you need to hear feedback from the employee so use 1-on-1 meetings whose tools allow you to discuss not only the reasons and manifestations of unproductivity, but also to develop a plan of further action.
A well-designed HRM system also allows you to assign a person responsible for the action plan steps, so you can distinguish the tasks that need to be prepared by you or the subordinate whose activity is under consideration.
If you notice that you need feedback not just from one employee, but from the team as a whole, you can use surveys to understand in greater detail why underperformance is a problem.
You can use the following questions for surveys:
Use the OKR tool to set goals for the employee that they can realistically achieve within a certain period of time. It’s important to ensure these goals are reasonable as unfulfilled goals can lead to lower morale.
OKRs also allow you to work through an employee's development plan, activity and performance over a certain period of time. This will help ensure that they can achieve their stated goals.
It’s understandable that even if a company understands the need for work optimization, and even has some ideas on hand as to what exactly it needs for its employees, it may take time before management wants to take a serious interest.
The HR professional's job at this point is to demonstrate ready-made solutions that can quickly help improve the employee's workplace experience and increase their interest in completing tasks.
Are you interested in using HRM tools to identify the causes of staff unproductivity? Seek help from our experts who can help you identify features in the PeopleForce system to solve your problem. Book a demo presentation, where an expert will demonstrate all the benefits of our system so that you can pump up your team and increase its level of efficiency.
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