What Are You Doing About Underperforming Staff In Your Business?

Solutions to poor motivationand performance at work are widespread, and all organisations have people in them who are under performing. These people constitute a very serious challenge - in the first instance, to the effectiveness of management, and in the second to the survival of the organisation.

One underperforming person is a problem; several constitute a crisis; and a critical mass can produce that situation in which fire-fighting is so endemic that the real source of danger is no longer evident to the participants, as they face wave upon wave crashing upon them.

An under performing person - in varying degrees of severity - places a strain on the organisation by failing to achieve targets. But worse than this are the parallel costs which spiral upwards alongside the person's failure to achieve targets. Their failure puts more direct pressure on achievers and performers to compensate, which they are increasingly compelled to do.

This can eventually drain high achievers and lead to their underperformance as well. Think of it as a cancer in one part of the body - the rest of the body works harder, but some organs come under so much strain that they too fail.

Furthermore, somebody has to 'deal with' the underperformance - more time, money and resources taken away from direct productivity. Thus, one under performing person isn't simply a question of losing one salary's worth of production - it goes much deeper than that.

In fact, if allowed to continue, the under performing person can start replicating him or herself - again like cancer cells - within the organisation. Others see their behaviour, and think - 'I'm working my socks off, what for? ... when Sam over there is doing so little but getting paid what I am!'

The larger the organisation, the more likely there is to be a significant number of under performing people. This despite all the beliefs of management that because they employ the latest 'NLTQ Performance Review system' (with extra vitamin QA enhancements that proves everyone is on board and on target - and hey, bonus, there's an audit trail) they are immune from under performing people. This is usually a smug delusion or simple groupthink.

The key issue with the numbers is the Pareto Principle. Basically, if you accept that 20% of your customers produce 80% of your turnover - and having gone into hundreds of companies we have yet to find one where this is not the case - then you are duty bound to reflect on the corollary: 20% of your staff are producing 80% of your results. So... 80% are producing 20%!

This is a staggering notion. In fact, the truth of it - anecdotally - came home just the other day. A friend recently took over a business in Cardiff employing 40 people - it was barely breaking even. After analysing its methods and structure, the friend reduced staff to a core of 8 - and 8 turned the whole business into substantial profit.

As a side bar to the main thrust of this paper, the implications for Government should not be lost - we do not need more doctors, nurses, teachers etc - we need less - substantially less. The constant recruitment of under performing people into the system produces exactly the results we have outlined above: it is impossible for the NHS and schools to produce excellent results because they are always focused on dealing with the problems of incorporating their own burgeoning staff.

What are you going to do about under performing people?

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