Great talent is crucial for success, it’s up to HR to deal with the not-so-great talent.
If an organization is going to constantly raise the bar on employee performance it is inevitable some people won’t be able to clear it — the problem for HR is what to do about those employees.
There are essentially two options. Train employees so they improve and can clear that bar along with everybody else, or ask them to leave and bring in new people who can reach those heights.
Some companies have readily embraced the latter approach as a strategy. The logic is simple: systematically remove x number of your poorest performers each year, hire better performers and raise the quality of the workforce. After all, aren’t the companies with the best workforces going to be the winners in the knowledge economy?
Earlier this year, Sun Microsystems introduced a program that each year identifies 10 per cent of its workforce as poor performers. Those employees are given 90 days to improve and if they don’t they are given a severance package and told to leave. GE introduced a similar program some time ago.
Nobody likes layoffs and it may seem a little hard-hearted to a lot of people in HR, but companies exist to make a profit not to provide jobs for people, says Paul Wilson, an HR consultant with Toronto-based Mintz and Partners.
To have any hope of success in the knowledge economy, companies need to become very serious about their intellectual capital, says Wilson. Companies need to take a hard look at what they need to succeed and then figure out which employees can meet those needs.
Then the employer needs to methodically remove employees who are not able to contribute to the future, he says. They should be given an opportunity to improve but if they can’t make the grade they should be offered a good package and factors like length of service should not enter into the equation. When the survival of the organization is at stake — and that is often what it boils down to — decisions need to be made with the head and not the heart, adds Wilson. Employers have an obligation to the rest of the employees to remove those who not only are not contributing, but could actually be impeding the progress of the company.
“I don’t like layoffs,” says Wilson. “But it is not unlike medicine; sometimes you have to do surgery.”
But Wilson also adds an important caveat to the notion that programs designed to remove underperforming employees can help an organization. “It depends if good theory is put into practice in a thoughtful way.”
Employees need to know exactly what is expected of them and given the opportunity to meet those expectations. There has to be consistency in applying those standards. And most of all employees need to be treated with respect. If they are treated in a “brutal” fashion the negative response from the rest of the organization will outweigh the benefits of removing the poor performers.
Whose fault is it
Miki Lane, a director with the International Society for Performance Improvement, an association dedicated to improving productivity and performance in the workplace, believes Canadian companies need to do a better job of improving employee performance but that programs designed to weed out a predetermined number of underperformers are not a good idea. “The problem that I have is how are you measuring performance?” he says.
Most organizations don’t have documented performance standards to use as a guide, he says. They have job descriptions, but not standards and it is impossible to know if an employee is performing well or not when the company hasn’t put down on paper what it means to perform well in that job.
Once clear performance standards are established, the organization can then see what the position needs and what the employee has. “There always will be a gap,” he says. “If the cause of that gap is lack of knowledge and skills then you train them.”
However, in a large majority of cases, he says, it isn’t the employees fault if they seem to be performing poorly. “More likely than not you have environmental problem. All the training in the world is not going to fix it if you have environmental issues.” Employees could be lacking resources or else feel they are in an unsafe working environment.
Most Canadian companies also do a poor job of communicating with staff and consequently employees often aren’t even aware their performance is deemed sub-par.
“We find that 80 per cent of problems on the job are a result of a feedback problem,” says Lane. “They (employees) don’t know the standards or else they don’t know the consequences or else there are no consequences.”
There is little value in firing an employee if something in the organization will cause the same performance problems to arise with the replacement.
Help first
Lane, who works with companies across North America to improve performance, cites Montreal-based Pfizer as one organization that has done a good job of isolating competencies and making sure they understand what it is they have to improve performance.
Stanley Schmidt, director of leadership and performance development at Pfizer says he doesn’t like programs designed to identify underperforming employees with the accompanying warning of improve or else.
The default position for an organization should always be to help employees improve first. “I feel so uncomfortable with this ‘the bottom 10 per cent has got to go,’” he says.
HR wants to appear to the rest of the corporate decision-makers that they are prepared to make the tough decisions and fire people but the cons far outweigh the pros when letting go large numbers of employees rather than training them and creating programs to help them improve their performance.
Several HR professionals contacted through Canadian HR Reporter’s Doing HR forum expressed similar concerns about such programs. In particular, they seemed uncomfortable with the simplicity and sweeping nature of such programs.
Fred Alaggia at St. Boniface General Hospital in Winnipeg, says they do not weed out underperforming employees and that programs intended to do so would not be an effective way to raise the level of employee performance. These are essentially quick fix solutions, but as everyone in HR knows, there is no such thing as a quick fix solutions, he adds.
Echoing Lane’s sentiments, Alaggia also says “a program of this nature would likely not address any systemic issues that may affect employee productivity, resorting to finding fault in the individual where it may be an employer or organizational element that is at the root of the issue.”
Alaggia says he is guided by the philosophy that organizations will be judged on how well they treat poor performers. All employees go through difficult times and for a number of reasons. If top employees see others being fired instead of helped to improve they may start to think the same thing could happen to them if they start to struggle.
Joan Kathol of the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, also says she would be concerned about how other employees would feel. “From the employees point of view, I think it can leave a very bad taste in their mouths and send a very negative message to them and those they come in contact with. I also think if the employee is given the opportunity to improve their performance with coaching, this is a fair method. If the person is just not up to the task, they will recognize this themselves and ‘weeding out’ becomes much simpler.”
She admits there is a good business case to be made for removing underperforming employees. In cases where good employees are working side-by-side with sub-par workers and being treated and rewarded the same, if they are removed it would improve morale.
But overall, the onus is on HR to install a good performance measurement system to weed out performers after giving them every opportunity to improve. The evaluation process has to be very well documented with clear expectations, she says. If employees are not improving, or if their job changes, they should be placed on probation and given a chance to improve.
HR needs to train supervisors on how to help employees improve performance since most supervisors are not good at this, Kathol says.
Like Alaggia, she has reservations about the sweeping nature of programs designed to systematically remove poor performers since every employee is going to have different issues to resolve.
There are essentially two options. Train employees so they improve and can clear that bar along with everybody else, or ask them to leave and bring in new people who can reach those heights.
Some companies have readily embraced the latter approach as a strategy. The logic is simple: systematically remove x number of your poorest performers each year, hire better performers and raise the quality of the workforce. After all, aren’t the companies with the best workforces going to be the winners in the knowledge economy?
Earlier this year, Sun Microsystems introduced a program that each year identifies 10 per cent of its workforce as poor performers. Those employees are given 90 days to improve and if they don’t they are given a severance package and told to leave. GE introduced a similar program some time ago.
Nobody likes layoffs and it may seem a little hard-hearted to a lot of people in HR, but companies exist to make a profit not to provide jobs for people, says Paul Wilson, an HR consultant with Toronto-based Mintz and Partners.
To have any hope of success in the knowledge economy, companies need to become very serious about their intellectual capital, says Wilson. Companies need to take a hard look at what they need to succeed and then figure out which employees can meet those needs.
Then the employer needs to methodically remove employees who are not able to contribute to the future, he says. They should be given an opportunity to improve but if they can’t make the grade they should be offered a good package and factors like length of service should not enter into the equation. When the survival of the organization is at stake — and that is often what it boils down to — decisions need to be made with the head and not the heart, adds Wilson. Employers have an obligation to the rest of the employees to remove those who not only are not contributing, but could actually be impeding the progress of the company.
“I don’t like layoffs,” says Wilson. “But it is not unlike medicine; sometimes you have to do surgery.”
But Wilson also adds an important caveat to the notion that programs designed to remove underperforming employees can help an organization. “It depends if good theory is put into practice in a thoughtful way.”
Employees need to know exactly what is expected of them and given the opportunity to meet those expectations. There has to be consistency in applying those standards. And most of all employees need to be treated with respect. If they are treated in a “brutal” fashion the negative response from the rest of the organization will outweigh the benefits of removing the poor performers.
Whose fault is it
Miki Lane, a director with the International Society for Performance Improvement, an association dedicated to improving productivity and performance in the workplace, believes Canadian companies need to do a better job of improving employee performance but that programs designed to weed out a predetermined number of underperformers are not a good idea. “The problem that I have is how are you measuring performance?” he says.
Most organizations don’t have documented performance standards to use as a guide, he says. They have job descriptions, but not standards and it is impossible to know if an employee is performing well or not when the company hasn’t put down on paper what it means to perform well in that job.
Once clear performance standards are established, the organization can then see what the position needs and what the employee has. “There always will be a gap,” he says. “If the cause of that gap is lack of knowledge and skills then you train them.”
However, in a large majority of cases, he says, it isn’t the employees fault if they seem to be performing poorly. “More likely than not you have environmental problem. All the training in the world is not going to fix it if you have environmental issues.” Employees could be lacking resources or else feel they are in an unsafe working environment.
Most Canadian companies also do a poor job of communicating with staff and consequently employees often aren’t even aware their performance is deemed sub-par.
“We find that 80 per cent of problems on the job are a result of a feedback problem,” says Lane. “They (employees) don’t know the standards or else they don’t know the consequences or else there are no consequences.”
There is little value in firing an employee if something in the organization will cause the same performance problems to arise with the replacement.
Help first
Lane, who works with companies across North America to improve performance, cites Montreal-based Pfizer as one organization that has done a good job of isolating competencies and making sure they understand what it is they have to improve performance.
Stanley Schmidt, director of leadership and performance development at Pfizer says he doesn’t like programs designed to identify underperforming employees with the accompanying warning of improve or else.
The default position for an organization should always be to help employees improve first. “I feel so uncomfortable with this ‘the bottom 10 per cent has got to go,’” he says.
HR wants to appear to the rest of the corporate decision-makers that they are prepared to make the tough decisions and fire people but the cons far outweigh the pros when letting go large numbers of employees rather than training them and creating programs to help them improve their performance.
Several HR professionals contacted through Canadian HR Reporter’s Doing HR forum expressed similar concerns about such programs. In particular, they seemed uncomfortable with the simplicity and sweeping nature of such programs.
Fred Alaggia at St. Boniface General Hospital in Winnipeg, says they do not weed out underperforming employees and that programs intended to do so would not be an effective way to raise the level of employee performance. These are essentially quick fix solutions, but as everyone in HR knows, there is no such thing as a quick fix solutions, he adds.
Echoing Lane’s sentiments, Alaggia also says “a program of this nature would likely not address any systemic issues that may affect employee productivity, resorting to finding fault in the individual where it may be an employer or organizational element that is at the root of the issue.”
Alaggia says he is guided by the philosophy that organizations will be judged on how well they treat poor performers. All employees go through difficult times and for a number of reasons. If top employees see others being fired instead of helped to improve they may start to think the same thing could happen to them if they start to struggle.
Joan Kathol of the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, also says she would be concerned about how other employees would feel. “From the employees point of view, I think it can leave a very bad taste in their mouths and send a very negative message to them and those they come in contact with. I also think if the employee is given the opportunity to improve their performance with coaching, this is a fair method. If the person is just not up to the task, they will recognize this themselves and ‘weeding out’ becomes much simpler.”
She admits there is a good business case to be made for removing underperforming employees. In cases where good employees are working side-by-side with sub-par workers and being treated and rewarded the same, if they are removed it would improve morale.
But overall, the onus is on HR to install a good performance measurement system to weed out performers after giving them every opportunity to improve. The evaluation process has to be very well documented with clear expectations, she says. If employees are not improving, or if their job changes, they should be placed on probation and given a chance to improve.
HR needs to train supervisors on how to help employees improve performance since most supervisors are not good at this, Kathol says.
Like Alaggia, she has reservations about the sweeping nature of programs designed to systematically remove poor performers since every employee is going to have different issues to resolve.
