Tag Archives: behaviour

What’s the Best Way to Deal with Underperforming Staff?

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In a recent blog post I introduced you to Heather, who was receiving poor performance feedback. Click here to read about Heather . Did you have any solutions for her?

Here are our suggestions.

While Heather has a lot of experience developing training courses, she’s not getting good feedback from delivering them. The cause of this could be that she:

  • Only likes writing courses and not the delivery
  • Has been given the delivery, when it wasn’t originally part of her job
  • She doesn’t have the confidence in delivery of the information when asked questioned
  • She thinks she’s being challenged when someone asks her a question.

How can we help Heather?

First it is important to acknowledge Heather’s strengths – her knowledge and ability to write training courses. Then we need to find out what she thinks about the feedback she’s getting and how she feels about the delivery of the courses. Does she enjoy that part of the job? If so, we can help her build up her confidence. Has she had any training in presentation skills? If not and she wants to continue with the delivery, we can look at the right training to help her.

In situations like this, it’s important to hear all the sides of the story, before rushing to any conclusions or imposing a solution. Work with your members of staff to find the best outcome for both of you.

How do you deal with issues of under performance in your business? Leave a comment here to share your views and ideas.

Preventative HR – Keep Your Staff Happy Through Feedback

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One of the best ways you can keep your staff happy and working productively is by giving them regular feedback. Tell them how they’re doing against the standards you’ve set for them and your business.

We all like receiving praise, so make sure that you regularly praise your employees for a job well done. Depending on the size of your team, you can write down one positive comment for each of your team, every day or every week – and share this with them on a regular basis. When you see someone doing something well, praise them for it – you don’t need to wait for a formal meeting to deliver praise. In fact, praising someone as soon as you see them doing something well will have a far greater impact.

If you have members of staff who are doing really well, you can move them on in your business. If you have staff that are not doing so well, you need to tell them about it. And you need to do this promptly. Don’t leave it too long if there’s a performance issue, because it could get worse. Address it promptly rather than waiting for an annual appraisal. When someone is underperforming, they need you to tell them about it. You can’t make improvements if your boss doesn’t tell you that you’re not meeting their standards, or doing something the way they want it done.

Feedback can be delivered on an ad hoc basis, in team meetings and at appraisals, which should be done at least once a year ? more frequently with new members of staff. Use feedback and reviews to look at how you can help your employees improve their performance and you’ll be able to keep them happy and work hard for your business for longer.

To find out more about giving feedback, take a look at the short video on my website ? click here to watch it.

What’s the Best Way to Deal with Underperforming Staff?

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Heather works in the training department of a large IT organisation. She is responsible for designing and delivering interpersonal skills training, including communication skills, networking, and new management training classes.

Heather has excellent knowledge of how to design a training class. She includes behaviour modelling and practice into all her classes. She has also done research on what good communication consists of, how to network and what new managers need to know to be successful.

Sounds good so far!

However, people who attend Heather’s training classes often give her low ratings, saying that she has a hard time answering specific question. They say that she doesn’t seem approachable after the classes or when individuals want to ask questions.

What do you think may be causing Heather’s under performance?

How do you think a manager should address the problem of poor performance?

We’ll give you our opinion on this blog in a few week’s time. Leave a comment here to give us your suggestions!

How to Be a Great Boss

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It can be tough at the top. Here are some top tips to improve your personal success as well as the success of the people working for you.

  • Lead by example. Provide guidance and support and set the benchmark for team cohesiveness and performance.
  • Understand yourself and work on bettering yourself. What are the things you do well and what can you improve? How effective is your management style? By investing time in developing your individual skills you will drive your business forward and reap the rewards in terms of how successfully you lead your team.
  • Be a good all-rounder and play to all your strengths. Technical skills are important but so are soft skills such as people management skills. Do not neglect one in favour of the other.
  • Learn to delegate effectively. You can’t do it all! By relinquishing responsibility to others you are not only ensuring that your efforts are always directed to best effect but also that the people around you feel empowered to make decisions and improve the business.
  • Build a team that can work without you. A team that falls apart when you are on leave or away from the office is not good business.
  • Maintain boundaries: Whilst it is good to develop a good personal relationship with your colleagues, you must establish appropriate boundaries. This will be important during times when you have to make tough decisions that may not always be welcome by others.

What do you do to make sure that you’re a good boss? Share your tips (or mistakes!) with us by leaving a comment here.

5 Tips for Managing Performance with Your Team

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As a boss, manager or supervisor, you play an important role in promoting employee commitment, motivation and retention. You are responsible for developing and nurturing your staff.

Here are 5 tips to help you look after your staff and improve their performance, which will lead to improvements in the overall performance of your organisation.

  1. Set meaningful, attainable expectations aligned with the mission and objectives of your business. Be clear about employee expectations and explain any measurements that will be used.
  2. Approach this process as a collaborative effort, engaging staff in the process. Work with your employees to develop appropriate outcomes that support your work and lead to the achievement of organizational goals. Don’t just impose objectives on your staff without first talking to them.
  3. Provide employee access to the necessary tools and resources needed for performance enhancement. Ask about relevant technology, available literature or other materials they need to improve their performance. Provide them with the coaching and mentoring they need and allow time for employees to learn improved methods and procedures.
  4. Continually asses and communicate progress regarding performance. Don’t save all your feedback until the end of the year. Provide employees with mid-year progress reviews and final evaluation feedback. Face-to-face progress reviews and final evaluations should be scheduled in advance. Engage your employees in discussions about the best ways to meet their future goals.
  5. Show appreciation of employee performance through the use of one of the many forms of recognition and reward available to you.

If you need specific help on managing and improving the performance of your staff, to improve the performance of your business, why come to our next free workshop on 22 November? Being held at The Old Post Office in Wargrave, near Henley in Oxfordshire, this is your chance to get some expert advice on your own issues. Click here for more details and to book your place.

How to Boost Profitability in Your Business

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Here are 10 ideas to help you improve the profitability of your business through your people.

  1. Build a stimulating and vibrant working environment. A diverse workplace is a profitable workplace. Embrace the many different skills, backgrounds, experiences and attitudes of your staff and direct these to best effect
  2. Focus on training and personal improvement. Make sure every member of you team is given the opportunity to reach their full potential by offering them the training and development they need, in technical and soft skills.
  3. Reward and recognise. By recognising and incentivising staff that reach targets or produce a consistently high quality of work, you will encourage them to strive even harder.
  4. Handle difficult situations quickly. Do not let disciplinary or incapability issues turn into problems. Deal with them in a responsive and positive way to reduce the chances of them happening again.
  5. Have a good recruitment and induction process. Make sure that you always recruit the best person for the job and that they perform to the level you require from day one.
  6. Keep up to date with legislation. This is a key aspect in treating your employees fairly and also a way to constantly building best practice into your people management procedures.
  7. Communicate, communicate, communicate.   Keep your staff informed about how the business is doing. What can they do to help? How does their job fit into the bigger picture of the organisation? This will ensure your employees feel valued, engaged and focussed on the success of the company.
  8. Carry out succession planning. Don’t just rely on the skills and experience of long-standing members of staff but put time and effort into training and mentoring programmes that develop the skills and abilities of younger members of the team. This way you ensure success for the long term and continuity of service for your customers.
  9. Look closely at team dynamics. What teams are working well and how can this be replicated across the business? Look for gaps in team dynamics and skills sets that can affect morale development and work to actively improve them.
  10. Be a good boss. Your behaviour sets the tone for how you expect others to behave. Invest time in working on your own management style and take a top-down approach to improving performance rather than relying on the skills of those around you.

We’ll talk more about how to be a great boss in this blog in a couple of week’s time.

In the meantime, what do you do to improve profitability of your business through your people? Leave a comment here to share your tips.

How Do You Get More From Your Staff? Part Two

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In a recent blog we looked at the importance of managing performance as a way of getting more from your staff, without dramatically increasing your costs.

Here are some top tips you can actually put into action, to get more from your people:

  • Provide a stimulating working environment that encourages members of staff to contribute to the progress of your business.
  • Encourage your staff to reach their full potential by providing opportunities to develop their skills through training and development, as well as coaching in the soft skills needed to be an excellent team member.
  • Carry out formal performance reviews on a regular basis, setting clear objectives and achievable targets; don’t wait for annual appraisals.
  • Build good relationships by providing regular informal feedback and guidance; allow your staff to air their concerns within an environment of trust and honesty.
  • Deal with issues as soon as they arise – don’t wait for them to become problems.
  • Offer a clear career path, to encourage employees to be the best they can be and stay with you for the long term.

How do you get more from your people? What have you done that has worked – or not worked? Leave a reply below.

If you still have questions about how to improve the performance of your team, come to our next workshop on 22 November 2012 near Henley. Places are free but limited, so click here for full details.

How Do You Get More From Your Staff?

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The key to getting the best, and more, from your staff is through performance management. What is this and how can it benefit your business?

Performance management is a strategic and integrated approach to increasing the effectiveness of your business by improving the performance of the people who work for you. Put simply, the better the people you employ and the better the investment you make in them, the easier it will be get the best from them and to ask more from them, when you need it.

Research shows that a high proportion of businesses struggle with underperforming members of staff. They spend too much time dealing with issues of absence, sickness, poor attitudes and behaviour, failure to meet objectives and poor standards of work. Then they look to solve them through formal disciplinary procedures. Reacting to issues can be time consuming and costly, as well as very negative. Managing performance focuses on the more positive, preventative aspects of working with people.

Good performance management is about regularly assessing the performance of every individual in your team, providing regular feedback, guidance and support to reinforce good performance and highlight areas for improvement before they become a major issue.

You should also make sure that you have proper disciplinary procedures in place to deal with poor performance. In next week’s blog we’ll share some tips which, if you follow, you will only need disciplinary procedures as a last resort, when informal and positive measures have not worked.

Learn how to get more from your people at our next workshop, in November 2012 at Hennerton Golf Club, in Wargrave, near Henley. This is your chance to really get to grips with improving performance, ask all the questions you have and get some professional support. Places are free but limited. Click here to book online.

Why Bother with HR?

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What’s the point of HR?  Do you really need someone to spend time (and money) looking at the people in your business? Surely it’s quite simple and something you can do for yourself?

Here are a few ideas to help you decide whether or not to bother with HR.

The cost of getting it wrong.  Without the right HR systems in place, you could end up on the wrong side of the law, with a hefty bill to pay. A majority of employers believe that claims to Employment Tribunals will increase following the increase in the qualifying period of service to claim unfair dismissal from 1 year to 2 years. Part of the reason for the anticipated increase is that there is no system to prevent spurious claims being made to a tribunal. There is no potential downside for a claimant and potential for a financial windfall.  No win no fee solicitors support the disgruntled employee to have a go on the basis that the business will make a settlement to avoid legal costs. The figures of employment tribunal awards in the year 2011/12 have now been released and show that the median of all wards was £4560, the average award was £9133 and the maximum award was £173408. Keeping up to date with the legal issues is vital if you want to avoid unnecessary problems and payments.

The benefits of getting it right.  In order to avoid further claims businesses are making changes to their policies and procedures and making sure their managers are well trained in these procedures because a majority of employers believe that the most important factor behind a decision going against them at tribunal has been the role played by the line manager. In most cases the decision concerns the managers failure to follow their own company’s procedure!  On a far more positive note, good HR can really help to boost the profitability of your business. By putting HR management practices into your organisation, studies have shown that you can reduce employee turnover by 7%, increase sales per employee by 5.2% and increase overall financial performance by 6%.

Do you bother with HR? Do you do it yourself, or bring someone in to help with HR issues? Is it worth it, or just another business expense? Leave a reply below and let us know what you think.

Absence Management

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It is estimated that unauthorised absence costs the UK economy around £10bn-£12bn every year with employees failing to come to work for no good reason an average of 8 days each.   With the Olympics just a few short weeks away, and an expected rise is unauthorised absence predicted it important that you plan ahead to avoid unauthorised absence.

To stay on top of unauthorised absence you must put in place thorough absence policy that includes how absence will be managed; states clearly what absence is and is not permitted; details of how absence will be recorded and monitored; reporting lines and disciplinary procedures.

When you suspect an employee is taking an unauthorised day off you should:

  • Make contact on day 1 to establish the reason for the absence
  • If you are not satisfied that the reason for absence is genuine follow up with a letter on day 2
  • If the employee does not make contact and remains absent from work without notice you may have cause to assume resignation and formalise the appropriate procedures
  • If the employee returns to work you should always conduct further investigation in order to prevent a similar absence from occurring in the future and where necessary invoke a formal disciplinary process
  • If an employee takes annual leave despite being previously refused you must contact them immediately in writing and again invoke a formal disciplinary process.

Having in place a robust absence management policy will reap long term rewards by: –

  • Identifying the causes of poor attendance.
  • Providing support.
  • Increasing loyalty and motivation.
  • Deterring casual absence.
  • Identifying problems at work.
  • Improving morale and motivation.
  • Leading to reduction in absence.
  • Improving productivity.