One of the most common issues I am faced with in my consulting work is that of performance analysis-employees or team members that aren't producing according to company standards or goals. What follows is a quick and pragmatic way to change any under-performer into a super producer, without wasted time and effort.
- Figure out the desired performance behavior
If you are going to change anyone's on-the-job behaviors, you have to first come up with an ideal performance set, or a way of behaving that brings about the desired performance outcomes. This may mean spending more time with customers to ensure their orders are correct, or it may mean making sure your employees cross-sell company products.
Figure out the ideal behavior for the employee or group of employees, then move to Step 2.
- Determine the current behaviors
Once you know what you want, you have to figure out where you are at. How far is the individual from the desired behavior? Are they close? In the ballpark even? You need to know exactly where your employee(s) is/are if you want to be able to improve their performance upwards. For example, you might find that an employee's customer service scores are at 80%, and you want them to be in the mid to high 90's. Or you may find that your employees are consistently cross-selling only two of the companies fifteen financial services and products.
Now you have a baseline.
- Find out what maintains the current behaviors
Behaviors exist because they are reinforced for being. They also are maintained by a failure to punish undesirable behavior sets. Therefore, once you know where your employees are, and where you want them to be with regards to their performance, you must figure out why they are under-performing. To do this, you'll need to assess two areas:
- Attitude-Do they WANT to perform better? Do they want to move up the ranks of the corporation? If you find that you have an attitude problem, you need to show employees that it is in their best interest to perform closer to the ideal behavior set than to their current behavioral habits.
- Aptitude-CAN they do the job you expect of them? If not, you have a skills deficit, and skills training is prescribed.
Sometimes you will find that performance problems are a combination of attitudinal AND aptitude. So, not only do they NOT want to perform better, but they DON"T have the skills to do so if they wanted to. In extreme cases like this, it can be more effective to cut your losses than to try to train the "untrainable."
- Change the consequences for these behaviors
Simply put, stop rewarding those behaviors that aren't in the ideal behavior set you established in step 1 above. Add consequences when employees fail to take that little extra time to ensure accuracy of the customer's order. Reinforce employees for accuracy of order taking. Get the idea? The old behavior existed because the environment supported it. Either there were rewards for underperforming (perhaps your incentive plan rewarded employees for number of orders rather than accuracy of orders, for example) or there were simply not enough adverse consequences for failure to produce ideal company behaviors.
