7 Practical Proven Actions To Improve Your Worst Employee Quickly
Every team has a worst employee. When you improve your worst employee, you increase overall team performance, usually by a lot more than the contribution of one person.
Your worst employee might be doing okay relative to other team members all the way through to being a nightmare employee. These proven actions will help you improve the situation for you, for your team, for your business and often the individual as well.
Your worst employee sets the level of expectations for the rest of the team. Your worst employee performs or behaves at the lowest level your team perceives is acceptable to you IF YOU DON’T take action as a manager. Ask yourself – are you happy with this level?
7 practical proven actions to improve your worst employee quickly
- Don’t Ignore The Problems Your Worst Employee Creates
- Understand What Makes Them Your Worst team member
- Ask Yourself Is Their Potential Worth Developing
- Set Out Your Expectations And Create Clear Goals
- Give Your Worst Staff Member A Lot Of Direct Honest Feedback
Do You Want To Improve Team Performance?
If you want to improve team performance, you must improve the level of expectations you set and demand from the whole team, which means improving your worst team member.
I have transformed the worst team into one of the best teams, in multiple different companies. I have won Best Team prizes with these teams too and I have worked in many amazing companies in 20+ years of managing teams. Early in my career, I have learnt exactly how to handle low performers in a team.
To improve team performance, work on improving the worst employee in the team, no matter if they are worst by a little bit or a lot.
One other important fact. As a manager, you are very much on your own for how to handle your worst team member. You are the one having the difficult conversations, deciding on what action to take and taking that action. Your manager, HR and official procedures usually offer limited support to you. They won’t do this work for you. So learn what to do about low performers in your team.
For each of the 7 actions, I share practical tips and actions that will make improving your worst employee pretty straight forward. There is no need to risk damaging relationships or damaging trust with the rest of the team. Nor should you let them off the hook for improvement at any point.
Can I ask that you put into practice as many of the actions and tips we talk about today as you can. Start small if need be but keep at it. You will see improvements in weeks, if not days. The most important thing you can do is take action to get a different result.
Watch on YouTube
Listen on Podcast
1 – don’t ignore the problems your worst employee creates
Even if the problems your worst employee creates are relatively minor, you can’t ignore them. For example making mistakes, annoying team members, undermining others, doing less work than other team members etc. These all have an impact on the performance and behaviour of the whole team.
Remember the lowest level of performance or behaviour that you accept in the team sets the expectations for the rest of your team. Actions or lack of actions speak a lot louder than words when setting expectations.
The further below the team average your worst employee’s behaviour or performance is, the harder it will be to ignore. Other team members and your boss will pressurise or demand you take action.
Finally, human behaviour is pattern based. Once those patterns become established, they are a lot harder to change. Acting quickly, before patterns become established makes creating change and improvement a LOT easier.
Always take action with your worst employee quickly to make your life better as a manager and to increase team performance.
The second action is to understand what makes them your worst employee
If you don’t know what the problems are, finding the best or even a good solution will be extremely hard. In private, talk to your worst employee. Tell them your concerns and ask them what the issues are making them the worst team member for performance, behaviour or attitude.
Keep asking questions and listening until you feel you understand their situation. Be nice. Show you care. Demonstrate your empathy. Put yourself in their shoes. These are important for how to handle your worst employee.
Some of the common problems that your worse employee might be facing:
- They are unsure or confused as to what is expected from them
- Boredom or lack of challenge or lack of development
- Your employee is incapable of actually doing a better the job
- They night lack vital skills or knowledge to do a better job
- Their attitude or approach to work might be poor
- They might have personal issues outside work which is distracting them
- They may be having problems with you their manager – or other staff members
- They may lack vital resources to do their role properly
Find out what the underlying problems are that are making them your worst team member.
The third action to take is Ask Yourself Is their potential worth developing
This is a really important step to take early on in this process. For example there is little point in trying to improve a low performing team member who is slow to learn and doesn’t have the appetite to improve. You should transfer them into a more appropriate job or remove them from your team at this point.
It is really important to work hard to really understand the problems causing them to be your worst team member. This will enable you to make a good decision at this point.
Lastly, sometimes your worst employee has a lot of potential to get better, BUT this may not always be apparent. When in doubt, give them a chance. I have had my worst team member transform into a team star in 3-6 months, and in the process helped smash team targets.
The fourth action is to set out your expectations and create clear goals
You must be very clear what you want from your team member. Tell them directly. Put it in writing via email. Keep repeating the communication of your expectations again and again. Most importantly, demonstrate your expectations through your own actions and behaviours in front of the whole team.
Next, set measurable clear goals together. I prefer to set out the rough level I expect and then ask my worst team member to work with me to come up with clear, specific goals for them to achieve. I actively want them to participate because then the goals are theirs as much as mine and they are a lot more likely to try to reach them.
Setting clear goals and expectations enables you to track their performance against those goals and assess their progress fairly. Clear goals enables you to hold them to account and encourages ownership from your worst performer.
The fifth action is to give your worst team member a lot of direct honest feedback
Useful feedback is NOT “good job” or “well done” or “work harder”. The feedback has to be specific and detailed to be useful to the other person. You should be educating them on what their gap is between where they are performing or behaving right now and your expectations.
If you don’t give them clear direct honest feedback, expecting them to improve is unfair. It is like asking your worst employee to drive down a windy mountainous road in the dark and rain and NOT turn their car lights on. They are very unlikely to reach the destination you want them to reach.
Give a lot of clear detailed feedback to your worst employee.
The sixth action is to Help your worst employee with how to improve
In nearly every team I have taken on as a manager, there are several team members who don’t know how to do their jobs well. Teach them what they need to do better and suddenly their performance jumps up. Not by 5 or 10%. It can literally double in terms of the value of their output. This has a huge impact on team performance.
Teach and mentor those that don’t know what to do i.e. tell them what to do. Use a coaching approach for those that do know what to do but lack the confidence or experience to do it well.
Don’t assume that your worst team member knows exactly what to do. Understand their capability level and help them improve it. You are in the manager position for many reasons – some of which are that your people skills, organisational skills, communication skills etc are better than theirs. Pass on what you know.
To increase the capability of a team, you need to teach and coach as a manager OR you have to hire more skilled people into the team. Teaching and coaching is a lot quicker, a lot cheaper and a lot more motivating than hiring in lots of new staff to try to increase team performance.
7 – No improvement = take formal action to improve or Remove your worst employee
When you are working to help improve your worst employee and they are not putting in much effort to improve, you need to change what you are doing to get a different result.
Do not carry on trying to help them if they don’t want to help themselves.
Increase the pressure on your worst team member to improve by making the process more formal with more serious consequences. A great option is to start a Performance Improvement Plan. This is doing everything we have talked about but in more structured and documented way. This also means your worst employee is closer to losing their job.
If all this effort still doesn’t improve your worst employee enough, then take action to remove them from the team and hire a more talented and motivated person to lift the performance and behaviour standards of the whole team.
In summary
To improve the performance of any team, you need to improve the performance of your worst employee. Your worst employee anchors the expectations for the whole team IF you don’t take action to improve or remove them.
As a reminder, here are the 7 practical proven actions to improve your worst employee quickly are:
- Don’t Ignore The Problems Your Worst Employee Creates
- Understand What Makes Them Your Worst Employee
- Ask Yourself Is Their Potential Worth Developing
- Set Out Your Expectations And Create Clear Goals
- Give Them A Lot Of Direct Honest Feedback
- Help Your Worst Employee With How To Improve
- Take Formal Action To Improve Or Remove Your Worst Employee
Don’t forget if you want to learn exactly how to resolve the people problems in any team – difficult behaviour, underperformance or just to increase team performance in a fair and effective way, do click here to learn more for you or click here to learn more for managers in your team to be a lot more successful with the worst employee in the team.
If you have any questions on “7 Practical Proven Actions To Improve Your Worst Employee Quickly”, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Build Management Expertise Quickly
Access all our prize winning management expertise to stand out from your peers, increase your confidence and credibility and take years off your future promotions.
We share a ton of content, e-books, help sheets and more to save you a ton of time and move your next pay rise much closer. Click the link to find out more about the Management Skills Hub
Navigation
