How do you address unproductive employees?

I just read an article by Scott Reeves at Forbes on this subject. He made a lot of salient points and the article is worth reading (click here to see article) but he missed a basic point: how do you make employees accountable?

Many employees confuse accountability with micromanagement. As Scott says in his article, micromanagement will never succeed. Employees resent micromanagement. Your team needs to understand that it is you job to produce predictable results. Your team needs to understand it is your job to get measurable status on a regular basis for all employees. Sounds like micromanagement right? Well the difference between accountability and micromanagement is in the process of getting the information and what you do with it.

Here are the signs of a micromanager:

• Ignoring pre-agreed to reporting points and asking status more frequently
• Getting mad at people for missing status
• Constantly changing working assignment
• Dictating implementation instead of requirements

You have to give people a chance to do their job in a positive environment. You need to look at problems as just things to be solved. You need to engender trust so you can get the truth when you ask for status.

Without an environment where there is accountability and trust, you will never help employees improve and you will never manage problem employees out of your organization. Every employee should know what tasks they should be doing. Every employee should know if they can go home at the end of the day or if they need to work harder. Every employee should have a schedule.

Employees should be involved in making their own schedules. Managers need to work with them where appropriate. Some employees are not experienced enough to develop schedules on their own but they should be involved in the process. Dictated dates are artificial and you will not get buy-in. You need employee buy-in to have reasonable accountability.

Once everyone has a schedule, you need to track it. At the beginning of a schedule, weekly meetings can suffice. At the end of a schedule during integration periods, daily meetings are often required. Do not expect everyone to be making their schedules on time.

From here the process of objectively identifying unproductive employees is easy. They are the ones who chronically miss their schedules.

Your number one goal should be to make them productive. Managing employees out and finding new ones to replace them is costly and it is worth some effort to try and turn them around. This requires a positive attitude on both the employee's and manager's part. If this fails, then the accountability based on real schedules will be an important piece of documentation in taking further or final steps. If it reaches this point, you need to follow your company?s policies carefully.

More later ...