Grow & Improve: Managing Employees

In this context, we consider “managing” when you’re working with an employee with behaviors that you think should be changed. Managing could be to support an employee to take on additional responsibility to get a promotion or coach them when they’re not performing well and need to improve.

We won’t go into too much detail in this Course – as there are plenty of resources available for you with “how to manage” tips. We do, however, want to highlight that it is important TO manage.

Performance Evaluation & Reviews

We strongly recommend you meet with each employee individually at least every 6-months. It is unfair to the employee and unproductive for you to have someone who needs constructive feedback about working better – to wait to hear during their performance review/salary discussion. Additionally, for employees doing a good job, being told more than once a year they are performing well is not enough.

Manager Evaluation

We recommend meeting with each employee at least once per year to compare how they are performing their job to the job description.

Co-Worker Evaluations

We recommend you ask for feedback from peers who work with the employee you are reviewing to get their perspective. A co-worker may see behaviors and performance different from what you observe.

Employee Personal Evaluation

Ask the employee to fill out the same evaluation form that you will complete and a co-worker may complete. It is very helpful to let the employee grade their performance. Often an employee may be harsher on themselves than you. Additionally, it is useful to see where there is a difference of expectation when you may say someone is performing poorly, but they rate themselves as doing an excellent job.

Managing the Good Performers

As we mentioned in the recognize and reward section, let the good employees know you think they are doing well. Perhaps they’re doing so well; they’re able to take on additional responsibility and provide more support.

Managing The Poor Performers

Sometimes managers choose to ignore problems hoping they resolve themselves. To avoid having to confront a challenging situation or have a difficult discussion, the manager waits it out, hoping the problem employee will quit.

We have seen this happen very often.

The problem with waiting is that the troubled employee isn’t just a bother to you, but to the rest of your staff as well. It can be extremely frustrating and demotivating for good employees to see a bad performer “getting away” with being bad. A bad employee can be like a virus, infecting other employees with bad habits and attitude, creating more bad employees.

Address the problem employees. If they don’t or won’t respond to your critical feedback for improvement, you should dismiss the employee.