How do you manage poor performance issues in your workplace? This expert guide explains how you should approach dealing with an underperforming employee.
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How to Address Poor Performance in the Workplace
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HR management outsourcing is when a team of experts manage your HR by looking after your contracts, policies, and procedures.
These are the HR essentials every business needs. Without them, your staff could bring successful claims against you, you could lose thousands in legal fines, and even face prosecution. Never underestimate the benefits of HR support for a small business.
We have years of experience in providing HR for SMEs and HR management outsourcing. Contact us to see how we can support you, including HR advice for small businesses - as well as medium and large companies.
Good human resource management is having round the clock support when you need it the most.
Whenever there’s a staff challenge or an important legal update, you just pick up the phone and get the help you need – no matter the time or place.
The main benefits of HR outsourcing are:
- Cost saving: Reduces the expenses for such things are hiring, training and employing an in-house HR team.
- Time saving: Saves time for staff members away from HR tasks.
- Improves expertise and compliance: Provides ongoing advice and support to ensure complete and total compliance.
- Reduces risk: Reduces the risk of any payroll and compliance failures.
Outsourcing HR is cheaper than hiring internal staff and saves you money overall when it comes to your HR service. Plus, you avoid making mistakes that could cost you heavily in claims and legal fines down the line. Every business should consider HR support as a way to avoid claims.
Peninsula is one of the leading HR outsourcing services in the UK, and by working with us you get access to our HR advisory service. Contact us for your outsourced SME HR today.
The key functions of HR outsourcing services are:
- Payroll and benefits: Helps a business to manage employee wages, tax processing, and employee enrolment.
- Recruitment and onboarding: Helps with job descriptions, sourcing new candidates, interviewing, and ensuring a smooth onboarding process.
- Compliance with employment law: Helps to ensure compliance with ever-changing employment legislation.
- Employee relations: Helps to manage grievance and disciplinary procedures, and any ongoing support that's required.
- HR admin: Helps to handle and manage daily tasks, such as employee records, sorting employment contracts, and processing any leave requests.
- Training and development: Helps to create and deliver staff training programs to improve employees' skills.
In this guide, we'll discuss what employee engagement is, why it's important, and ways to improve it in your business.
Peninsula Team
Performance & Appraisals
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Performance management is essential to ensure your employees are working to a high standard.
But the process isn’t easy and there’s rarely a quick answer if you find a staff member who is either struggling or lacking enthusiasm.
This guide explains the steps you can take to improve any productivity issues with your workforce.
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How can you tell if a staff member is underperforming? Well, there are common types of problems that you can keep an eye out for. These include:
Ongoing bad management skills.
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Excessive time wasting (smartphone use, break time etc.)
Lowering standards of work quality.
Having preventable accidents.
Conflict with other employees.
Slow working speeds.
Managing poor performance
There are many ways you can deal with a staff member who isn’t delivering to their best standards.
Employee performance management can take many forms, whether it’s through a business mentor or line managers—the right approach depends on a variety of circumstances. It’s a complicated area for you to explore.
But you should ensure you have detailed capability and in place for approaching the task. Poor staff producvity and engagement in a role can have a significantly detrimental effect on workplace productivity.
It can even affect overall worker morale, if not appropriately responded to. As such, you should make managing underperformance a regular part of your business procedures.
Employee evaluations
One of the most important steps in your process is to identify the productivty gap.
You should take steps to gather clear evidence of your team member's underperformance through the holding of regular work reviews.
You can also provide a self-appraisal form for insights into their working mentality. Involving your staff in the is one way of encouraging greater employee engagement, which can stamp out issues.
But a manager performance review is often one of the best approaches to take. This can be on an individual basis, or through team management. These can help to set targets for the worker to meet and assist in identifying specific examples where they’ve not done what their role demands.
By scheduling staff member reviews often, employers can keep themselves fully up to date on the progress and activities of specific workers and clearly identify areas that have caused concern over their abilities.
Executive coaching can help to justify a later decision to dismiss them on grounds of capability.
Before taking action
When it’s clear an employee’s performance is causing concern, you should take steps to determine what the problem is before taking any further action. A staff member may have poor productivty for a variety of reasons. As a result, it’s important to approach the issue carefully.
For example, they may have ongoing health issues, or a recent . So, keep such issues in mind as your employee may be struggling with these issues and require your support.
This means it’s important not to accuse them of deliberately underperforming in any communications you have with them. In these situations, you should consider providing further support to assist them in their roles, such as extra training or supervision.
The employee should receive reasonable time to demonstrate an improvement in their overall performance. If, at the end of that period, they’re continuing to show no signs of improvement, you should issue a capability warning.
If improvement still does not occur, the formal process may continue, ultimately resulting in dismissal on the grounds of capability.
Addressing employee issues
If it appears your staff member is wilfully approaching their role with a negative attitude, and the employer cannot ascertain any apparent reason for this, they can consider implementing a formal conduct procedure against them, rather than capability.
It’s important to identify the real reasons for the underperformance and this is why an is a key element to the process.
Performance management tools
Your business can turn to technology to monitor trends and ensure that productivity remains at a high standard. Some of the techniques you can use are:
One-on-one check-ins: These involve talks with your staff to build employee engagement. They can boost morale and support your staff members in their respective roles.
Real-time feedback: You can use BrightHR software to provide advice and support to your staff across their various devices, ensuring they can stay on target with their KPIs.
Personal Development Plans: PDPs are a way to provide members of your team with a sense of direction—a target to aim for to develop their careers. Download our free now.
Reward and recognition schemes: Providing something for your staff to work towards is a great incentive. If they have the opportunity for a bonus, pay raise, or various rewards then it can ensure they maintain their focus on doing a great job for you.
Need further help?
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Want to find out more? Contact us on 0800 028 2420 and book a free consultation with an HR consultant today.
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