4 Key Reasons That Stops Staff Performing at Work & What To Do About It
There are 4 key reasons that stop staff performing at work. Most of the time, the manager of a team can influence or remove the reasons that stop staff performing.
9 out of 10 employees want to do a good job. They want to pull their weight, contribute to the team and feel valued by their colleagues. One or more of these four key reasons stops them performing as they want to.
4 Key Reasons That Stop Staff Performing at work (And What To Do About It)
1. A lack of direction and expectations
2. Too few resources to do a good enough job
3. Lack of skills
4. The will is missing
On paper it should be easy to remove these blockers to employees performing. In practice it is a lot harder. Managing teams involves balancing a ton of conflicting demands in the best way possible, i.e. managing others is not an easy job.
For each reason that stops staff performing, I will share suggestions of what to do about it which I have gained in 20+ years working in top companies and at all management levels from junior manager to board director.
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a lack of direction and expectations – The first key reason that stop employees performing
A lack of direction or more likely confusion about direction and expectations is a performance killer – literally.
In a team with poor direction, employees work on what they think is needed and you get plenty of conflicts where one person hinders another. Without clear and reinforced expectations, those with lower energy levels or lower motivation will do less. Both leads to lower team performance which often carries on dropping.
There are plenty of managers that set direction and expectations with their teams and then forget about it for a few weeks or even months. This, in practice, is almost as bad as not setting direction in the first place. It is so easy for employees to get distracted with day-to-day pressures, new requests or the latest project and forget about exactly what is needed when.
Managers need to invest a lot of time constantly reminding the team of expectations on a day to day, or at worst, week to week basis. Managers also have to live the expectations they have set and show the team the goals are important by constantly keeping team goals in everyone minds.
Work hard to ensure the team direction and goals are clear and everyone knows what they need to do each week to help achieve them. Clear direction significantly increases team and individual performance.
The second key reason that stops staff performing at work are too few resources to do a good enough job
Staff rarely have all the resources they would like to really perform. Every business operates with resource constraints, and this feeds down to teams and individuals. Problems occur when precious resources are not allocated in a sensible way or are hoarded by individuals or teams. Problems also occur when the expectations set are unrealistic, and staff members don’t or can’t negotiate more realistic expectations.
Resources that we rarely have enough of are:
- Time
- Capacity – i.e. enough staff members to do the work needed
- Support from colleagues, managers and other stakeholders
- Cash or budgets
When staff have too few resources, it is very hard for them to do a good enough job.
As a manager, fight hard to get a reasonable level of resources for each staff member and also help them negotiate realistic expectations with their stakeholders – including you. Being realistic with what can be delivered with the resources available helps everyone, increases motivation and generally increase performance as you have less of a stop start working pattern.
a lack of skills – The third key reason that stop employees performing
Getting the skill range and depth right in a team is really hard, particularly as business needs keep changing.
Who the manager recruits into their team is the first step. Too many managers only think about the now, or they don’t fight hard enough to get the right budget levels to get employees that have a track record of learning and improving.
Too many managers are not equipped to teach, mentor and coach their team members effectively to increase the skills in the team or adapt team skills to what is needed. This is a core job of the manager and companies should invest in helping the manager gain these skills.
Creating a learning environment needs good feedback skills and the right behavioural approach from the manager. Practice giving praise to reinforce desired behaviours and results and give corrective feedback to help staff get better.
Openly share information and knowledge within the team. This is brilliant for building trust and it is also good for increasing the team members understanding of the context of their work, which allows them to successfully work autonomously, make more decisions and solve a greater range of problems. These all lead to higher performance at individual and team levels.
Work to develop the skills in your team.
The last key reason that stops staff performing is a lack of will which we will talk about in a sec. A lack of will could have many causes, some of which you can rectify.
The fourth key reason that stops staff performing at work is a Lack of will
There are so many reasons that staff suffer drops in motivation – some are within a manager’s control to rectify, others are not.
If a good employee develops a lack of will, immediately find out what is driving the lack of motivation. Just asking and showing you care as a manager in itself helps the other person. The more they trust you the more likely they will tell you what is happening. If they don’t tell you, reflect carefully and consider if decisions or actions you have taken are the problem.
Find out if a drop in motivation has happened because the staff member is angry, fearful, uncertain, being put down by others or even bullied. As a manager, you are in a very good position to help them.
There are employees that have personal problems or character flaws such as being lazy that stop them performing at work. Helping the employee improve is the quickest, cheapest and best solution so it is well worth investing your time to see if you can get them to improve.
If you have genuinely tried to help them, or organised other experts to help and the employee doesn’t try or doesn’t help themselves, then you should consider removing them from the team. Keeping a poorly behaving or performing employee on the team is only going to damage morale, the working culture and team performance. This doesn’t help anyone.
In summary
As a manager there is a lot you can do to reduce the reasons that stops staff performing at work. There will always be some level of people problems in the team, especially is you have a big team.
Investing time and effort to remove as many problems as possible that stop staff performing is a key role of a manager. This is a great way to use your time and leverage your time and efforts through the team to create a lot of value for the business in which you work.
To quickly recap, the 4 key reasons that stops staff performing at work are:
- A lack of direction and expectations
- Too few resources to do a good enough job
- Lack of skills
- The will is missing
If you have any questions, please email me at support@enhance.training and I will get back to you.
Most employees want to do a good job and not let their boss and colleagues down. I know from personal experience that there is a lot you can do as a manager to help team member overcome these 4 main reasons for underperformance. Improving an employee is by far the quickest, easiest, cheapest and least risky way to improve team performance so making the effort to help employees overcome their barriers to performing better is a no-brainer.
Take a look at our in depth course teaching you exactly how to improve employees quickly.
