Organizations often face a lack of productivity due to poor performance. There may be several factors that cause this, but employees are often blamed for it, although there may be reasons beyond the employee’s control that lead to their poor performance.
It is possible that you will find one of the team members has weaknesses in his performance, and in this case, you must identify the weaknesses, know their causes, review the possible solutions to improve the employee’s performance, start applying these solutions, and then evaluate his performance after a while to see the effectiveness of the applied solutions.
But in general, there are three possibilities that we can attribute poor employee performance to and how it can be dealt with, as we shall see.
What are the causes of poor employee performance?
In general, three main possibilities for poor employee performance in the organization can be identified.
Poor Leadership
Poor leadership may be the cause of poor employee performance. Because it is the manager’s responsibility to determine the expected results of the work and the level of skill and merit required, He is also the one who must explain this to the employees in his administration, in case he does not understand what is expected.
Problems in the work system
Performance may also be affected by the work system. If the system suffers from problems of poor planning and organization, we cannot blame the employees for their poor performance and business results, because this is considered a management error, which must be resolved to begin with, and then follow up on the performance of employees.
Poor employee performance
Poor performance may be due to the employee and the way he performs tasks. In this case, the reason for poor performance is the following:
Weakness in abilities
This means the employee’s inability to carry out the tasks required of him due to a weakness in his abilities. If the work requires, for example, physical strength to lift heavy materials, and the worker with a weak intention cannot do this work, there is no doubt that his performance will be weak.
Lack of skill
One of the leading causes of poor performance is a lack of skill. The employee who lacks skills does not know how to carry out the tasks. For example, an employee was asked to write an advertisement for a new product. The employee does not have the skill to write advertisements, so do not expect him to write the advertisement well. Most likely, it will take a lot of effort and a long time, and the results will not be satisfactory.
Employee’s Attitude
Perhaps the reason is in the employee’s attitude and belief that he does not want to do this work because it does not correspond to his personal trends. For example, if an employee is asked to join a work team consisting of some of his female colleagues, but he does not want to mix or work with women,
Failure to understand the management’s expectations of the employee means that the employee did not understand what was required of him to do in the first place, so you may find him floundering in his work, which negatively affects his performance.
But what if we can not determine the cause of poor performance? Was it because of the managers, the system, or the employee? In this case, the following steps can be followed in an attempt to identify and solve the problem of poor performance.
Steps to identifying and treating the causes of poor employee performance
- Accurately identify the problem by studying the expected and achieved results in order to determine the kinks of deficiencies.
- Develop an agreed action plan between all parties related to performance (manager-employees-departments).
- Ensure that the requirements for implementing the plan are available from additional resources, decisions that must be made, training, coaching, or policies that must be modified.
- Monitor progress and get information periodically to make sure the plan is on track.
- Add additional directions and modifications as required.
- If the poor performance is due to negligence or willful negligence, it may require disciplinary measures or informally alert the need to improve performance.