Changing your team from ‘WON’T’ do to ‘CAN’ do
It is people that make successful businesses, so why is it that companies with teams put the pursuit of Sales, Marketing & Profitability before HR? I believe it is because dodging the issue and focusing on the ‘doing’ is easier than managing underperforming employees.
The biggest challenge in business is getting people to perform 100% every day and replacing those that ‘won’t’ with those that ‘can’ and ‘will’!
Managing and getting the best out of people can be hard, because Management may not know what to do, or don’t like to do, or don’t want to do. The more you focus on your people, the better they will perform. The people that work for you will determine where your business will be in 3, 5 and 10 years time!
Did you know?
In the average company, there are 3 types of people:
- Disengaged: on average 66% of your workforce
- Highly disengaged: on average 20% of your workforce
- Highly engaged: 14% of your workforce
This means that only 34% of salary is in engaged work! Frightening that so little of the salary you pay is in productive work.
So what is your choice? Carry on as you did before and get the same result, or complete a team performance check to ensure you are getting more engaged work for the salary you pay.
There is a top 24 list of Gross Misconduct offences and the list is non-exhaustive! These offences have an affect on you, your team, your business and your profits.
Because staff that ‘won’t’ are often disengaged and will:
- Lose you money
- Waste time and increase your workload
- Demotivate your team and reduce productivity
- Cause Customer complaints & loss of business
- Help your competitors get ahead and stay ahead of you
- Creates chaos which causes you to have a leaky financial bucket in your business
- May make you and your business liable
….and of course, this list is non-exhaustive!
So what do you do?
- Face the problem
- Complete some internal fact finding
- Arrange an initial investigation meeting
- Introduce Performance Improvement Plans
- If the evidence leads to a Disciplinary or Gross Misconduct Hearing….include a HR company like us, to help you achieve the right outcome.
When it comes to thinking about your team performance, Human Resources should be your No1 focus because when you get that right, growing your business, Sales & Marketing becomes so much easier, productive and fun to do.
How to Make the Most of Your Team
The first thing I recommend is that you review your team roles.
- Revisit their job roles and contracts of employment
- Create an organisational chart to ensure every job is relevant to the success of your business
- Where a job role is not performing, understand what would happen if you either redeployed or exited the job role from your business
- Go through each team member and decide if they were applying again, would you give them a job?
- Introduce some performance improvement plans to your employees and further training.
- Conduct staff appraisals
- Reintroduce the Company rules of the game and Operational procedures.
- And if you have tried everything and they are still disengaged, exit them from your business correctly, for which I can help you do.
In every team, there are often the ‘won’t’ do negative players who reduce the performance of the ‘can do’ positive players, which is why only 34% of the salary you pay is in engaged work.
I recommend that you take time out and draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper. On the left write Positive Action & on the right; Negative Distraction
Left
‘Positive Action’
List those members of your team who you can rely on to provide a solution to a problem, overcome obstacles, take the initiative, own the challenge, and lead by example.
These people need to be kept and receive encouragement, support & recognition.
Right
’Negative Distraction’
List those that deflect onto others the blame for not doing what is required of them.
They blame management, team, customers, training, the system, tools, suppliers and anything else rather than accept responsibility themselves.
These people need fast track training or exiting from the business.
The people on both sides of the page, now need an HR Action Plan.
If you want to discuss further with me on how to build and develop the good, deal with the underperforming and implement our Tree Solution into your business:
Train
Recruit
Empower
Exit
