Improving Employee Performance

Introduction

Employees are most probably the most important part of a company. In fact, they hold the entire foundation of the company. Underperforming employees can be disastrous to a company. Mistakes like chronic lateness, careless handling of customers etc. can simply bring the company on its knees. With that in mind, it is imperative for managers and supervisors to enact a number of tactics to turn around the performance of such employees.

Every single manager will inevitably have to deal with employees that miss a company’s established performance standards. It is therefore imperative to have skills in coaching, mentoring and educating employees for desired results.

Coaching employees

As a manager it is important to understand that employees want their opinions to matter, they need information, they want to be involved in creating change and finally they need acknowledgement for their hard work (stone, 1999). To address, these needs, the following steps are effective when coaching employees.

1. Explain

Here, a clear and precise description of the needed changes is given. What is the destination? The strategy for the changes answers this question. What are the employees to do to get there? What can each employee do to contribute? What is the reward for each employee?

• Ask

Before proceeding, every employee should understand every aspect of the explanation. The only way to this is asking for areas where the explanation was not clear. In fact, talking 20 percent and listening 80 percent is a better way of doing it.

• Involve

Managers should involve employees by discussing potential solutions to problems. If improvements are not visible, a manager should discuss the ability of employees keeping commitments.

• Appreciate

It is an encouragement to employees whenever the management recognizes a positive improvement.

Mentoring employees

By definition, mentoring is a professional relationship involving an experienced individual (mentor) and a less experienced person (mentee) in which the latter is helped in developing necessary professional and personal skills. Through passing down valuable knowledge and insight, an employee with low performance standards will escalate up the ladder. A good mentor will:

1. Develop, manage and maintain the mentoring relationship

The process begins with getting to know the mentee. Over time, the manager has to work on improving trust and building the mentoring relationship.

• Be watchful

This involves being on a constant lookout on negative forces in the organization that will be a threat to the mentee. It also entails helping the mentee utilize positive opportunities.

• Guide and counsel

With a developed mentor-mentee relationship, a manager can be the confidant of an employee. It will be fit to warn them about behavior that is fowl for the organization.

• Teach

A good mentor will instill knowledge, experiences in their mentees. Recommending assignments is a good teaching method.

• Model

As employees work in a company, they will inevitably pick up certain attitudes, ethics, values, styles, beliefs and standards (Stack, 2013). To improve the achievement of non-performing employees, a mentor should adapt their approach to the style of the employee while ensuring that the employee is modelled into an effective person.

• Inspire and motivate

The power of motivation and inspiration can never be overstated. A manager should show employees the need to set goals and light the flame in them of achieving the set goals.

Educating employees

In some cases, poor employee performance results from luck of necessary skills to handle specific situations (Lloyd, 2002) There is only one way of solving this chronic problem. That is, educating the employees. Below are some ways to handle employee education.

1. Workshops

Workshops are the best avenues for employees to learn and share their problems. For effectiveness, they can be broken down to departmental levels or in accordance to seniority of employees.

• On-demand content

The world is constantly changing in every single facet of the human life. Trends are set on a daily basis. Depending with the scope of an organization, employees should be accessible to information every time they want to. Content can range from technology, best practices, tactical tips etc.

Approaching employees and leadership skills

The first logical step to fit a non-performing employee into the standards of a company is to set precise and clear expectations. Secondly, a manager should make sure the employee understands they are accountable for their results. If this simple directional process fails, then the manager needs to hold a formal, objective conversation with the employee. The conversation should be void of threats and should highlight the role of the employee, what is expected from the employee and what good performance looks like.

Such a process will only succeed if the manager or supervisor has good leadership qualities such as (Cadwell, 2004):

• Know their weakness and strength and make use of them.
• Have confidence and stay calm even under pressure.
• Be able to control their emotions.
• Be flexible during changes.
• Have conflict management skills.

Conclusion

Since employees determine the overall performance of a company, under-performance is undesirable. Nevertheless, people are talented differently and have dissimilar mindsets. With that, low performance by employees is inevitable in any organization. For better performance, acquiring good leadership skills that will aid in enacting employee coaching, mentoring and education is the only choice.

References

Stone, F. M. (1999). Coaching, counseling & mentoring: How to choose & use the right technique to

boost employee performance. New York: AMACOM

Stack, L. (2013). Coaching and mentoring employees: Helping others achieve their very best. S.l.: Productivity Pro.

Lloyd, K. L. (2002). Be the boss your employees deserve. Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press.

Cadwell, C. M. (2004). Leadership skills for managers. New York: American Management Association.