#388 Improving employee performance
Improving employee performance
When and how Performance Improvement Programmes work
Work expectations regarding other people's work results are not always met.
As much as you may wish it, it is a constant part of leadership work that certain people do not fulfil the requirements you set. Whether quantitative, qualitative or both, these situations go unaddressed for too long. Employees start to talk about each other rather than with each other, and the manager shies away from conflict. Under these circumstances, escalation is guaranteed.
How can you avoid such escalations and improve the performance of employees who do not (yet) fulfil the requirements?
Initial situation
The first steps in the event of non-fulfilment of requirements are often familiar and are applied with some regularity. Offer help, be available as a contact person, and always give people several chances to fulfil requirements. The situation in the labour market, particularly regarding talent and labour shortages, should also be considered. Always consider the context of the person and situation. The educational vita, in particular, must be taken into account. If one person is already proficient in a task three months after being hired and another is not, the answer may lie in the person's social background. One person attended a private university; the other studied, cared for parents at home and had two part-time jobs in the catering industry. Comparing unfairly unequal situations is not expedient and jeopardises your social legitimacy as a manager.
However, if problems persist despite all attempts, it is important to take more comprehensive action.
Performance improvement programmes
If requirements are continually not being met, a Performance Improvement Programme (PIP) should be launched. HR always prepares this process to act promptly in these situations. The manager is responsible for applying that PIP will take place. The PIP itself consists of eight phases.
In the first phase, a root cause analysis is carried out. Without precisely determining the respective causes, no PIP is possible efficiently and effectively. Subsequently, precise goals are set in phase two. This step utilises the SMART+ method and a RACI matrix for responsibilities and accountabilities (these methods have been discussed extensively in previous articles and podcasts). Phase three individualises this plan to the person's exact needs so that precise checkpoints and milestones can be defined in phase four. Checkpoints are more minor aspects achieved, while milestones represent comprehensive goals. The leader must give specific, well-prepared, and binding feedback at the respective milestones and, above all, at the checkpoints. All feedback must be based on factors that are as measurable as possible. Arbitrariness, unsubstantiated claims, or similar cannot be used to provide feedback under any circumstances. The fifth phase is the support and resources that are required. 'My door is always open' is not sufficient here. Persons and resources must be specifically named, and their availability must be firmly agreed upon. In phase six, implementation takes place in a structured and documented process. A general document can be viewed by all those involved, i.e. HR, the manager and the person taking part in the PIP. Certain areas are either only accessible to HR and the manager or only to HR or only to the manager. Appropriate software or tools must be provided. Phase seven focuses on the results. Only verifiable aspects are assessed. These are evaluated comprehensibly and transparently so that a decision is made at the end. This decision is binary and ends with accepting or rejecting further collaboration. Phase eight then builds a positive future. Even in the event of a rejection, it is possible to check whether other internal positions would suit the person in question. Separation or the release of someone from their contract should only be carried out as a last resort, as it involves a lot of effort in recruiting, replacement, and onboarding. A positive, supportive approach should also be taken in the event of a separation. You can learn more about this process in this week's podcast; see the links below.
Implementation
Managers must offer particular empathy and support in this process. It is essential that managers are aware of and reflect on their own empathy. Clarity and fairness must also be demonstrated. Judgements based on alleged impressions, feelings, or hearsay are neither expedient nor acceptable. It is important to be clear, predictable, transparent, and fair throughout the entire process. This issue often poses major challenges for experienced managers. Work on this aspect proactively in advance.
Conclusion: excellent PIPs ensure a strong organisational culture, especially regarding development opportunities for individuals and the organisation as a whole.
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More on this topic in this week's podcast: Apple Podcasts / Spotify
See below for the Podcast Transcript.
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Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn
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Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.
Niels Brabandt: Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, Project & Interim Management. Event host, MC, moderator.
Podcast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
When you work together with someone, you expect that they are up to the game. You expect that they do the work as agreed, and you hope that they are going to deliver excellent quality and quantity. However, we know that sometimes that is not the case. Our topic of today, our today's topic is when do we need to take care that employees deliver a better performance and how can we make them do it? As we all know, sometimes we disagree because sometimes our expectations are just not met either. It's the quantity, so how much they've done or the quality that they do it well or not so well. Or it's both sometimes.
And often, this gets dragged on for way too long. You probably know these moments where people know that something's not going well and then usually people start to talk amongst each other. They don't talk with the leader of the department. They don't talk with the HR department or anyone else who's in charge and could change something. And they even don't talk with the with the person that is these that that causes the situation that we have there. They just start to chat. And one thing is guaranteed here.
One aspect is guaranteed. It's a there there will be massive escalation. You then need to implement countermeasures. There's a huge conflict. Sometimes you end up in court, and that's, of course, the worst case. The question is, how can you make people deliver a better performance, especially when employees, members of your team do not live up to the expectation that you have towards them? Of course, first, we have to talk about where do we start.
So first, of course, and this is the general stuff, which I'm not going to get into too much. There are a couple of things, you know, that you do in the beginning. You help people, you explain again, you are available, you give them multiple chances to, but to to deliver a better result. Very important is always see the context. Always see the situation in which these people are. So, for example, when you say, hey. We hired someone from university and after 3 months, they able they were able to do x y z.
And then you have someone else and after 3 months they were not able to do x y z. And you can't make this comparison without knowing the educational history that people bring with them. So for example, when someone says, hey, this person was able to do x y z after 3 months, just after straight from university after 3 months was able to do the task. Why wasn't the other person not able to do so? And the reason might be very simple. Maybe one person went to a private university where maybe work experience was part of the private university experience while the other person had sick parents at home to take care of, 2 jobs at hospitality at the same time and had to go to a less prestigious public university where work experience was not part of what you get at university. So always look at the context where do people come from because that massively influences their performance at work.
Don't be don't don't practice injustice here towards people because no one can change how they grew up and in which family situation they were born into. Of course, you also have to consider because some people say, hey, when they're not up to the expectation, why not just fire them? Well, look at the talent and workforce shortage we have. Firing people, getting rid of them in whatever way or just releasing them from from from their contract usually doesn't solve anything because then you have to find someone else. And that is time consuming, that is expensive, and you don't know if that person's any better. And only finding someone can take months. Onboarding them can take more months.
So it will take forever until they are productive. So you're not really saving money. So when you do all of that, but then you realize, okay, the problems here, the situation, the issues, the challenges are ongoing. Despite all the help you offer and all the talks you had, then you need to act. You really need to act. And that's where the PIP comes in.
PIP stands for Performance Improvement Program. Performance Improvement Program is a formal step where you plan and then put in place certain measures where you hope that the employee is going to perform better regarding their work results. Very important here in the beginning is the PIP always gets requested by the leader. It's your job as a leader to request the PIP from HR department. And HR department is prepared to do that. Of course, it's a bit of paperwork usually connected with that. And there's an 8 step process that you need to put in place to have a proper PIP in place.
Step number 1 is you need to identify the issue. And the issue is not, oh, I just don't like the result.
That's not an issue. You have to do an RCA root cause analysis. What is, in your opinion, the root cause? Why does this happen? So for example, you can say, hey, I'm not really happy with the reporting. I can give you these couple of examples where the numbers were wrong and I told you to be proactive, you are very reactive, you don't get to the numbers without me asking you or even pushing you. So you have to be very specific.
Very important here is identifying the issue is your job. You can't go by arbitrary aspects. You can't say, oh, we had someone here before and they just performed better. Or, yeah, someone else just had a different mindset towards the whole thing.
I don't like your mindset. This is all general chamber 1, but unfortunately, we hear that way too often. So identify the issue properly to then go to the step number 2, you have to set unambiguously clear goals. You use 2 methods here. The first method to set goals is, of course, smart, which is a bit outdated. So we use smart plus. We talked about that in previous podcast.
And in addition to that, you need to set up a system where you clearly document every responsibility and accountability in the process. You use the RACI model for that when we talked about that in previous podcast as well. The leader cannot do what some leaders actually expect. Some people say, oh, I'm a leader, so I'm just initiating the PIPM out, pass over the employee and then I'm out of that game. No, you're not. You're part of that. Of course, you're part of that and you need to be available because in step number 3, we get to what is called an individual plan.
The plan needs to be highly tailored towards the person and their situation. What is the customized support they get? What is the collaborative input they get? From where do they get it? It's an iterative process that always goes step by step. Because in this step by step iterative process, in then step number 4, you have a dedicated plan with timelines, checkpoints and milestones. I give you the definition here.
A checkpoint usually is a smaller achievement where you say well done here. So you now master this. A milestone is something bigger where you say, oh, so you you did actually task 1, 2, and 3 very well. So for the overall project plan, that is something you generated very well and you didn't do that in the past. So well done here. So you always have checkpoints, the smaller steps and the milestones are the bigger ones. Very important here, you need to put into the plan when do people get a measurable feedback.
And by the way, they must get feedback. What is not appropriate is that people join the PIP. Maybe you start the PIP, the performance improvement program, and say, yeah. It's going on for 6 months. And after about 4 5 and a half month, you say, yeah. I just expected more.
Can't we tell you why? It's just, you know, it's just not yeah.
I just expected more. You know? And that is what unfortunately, maybe you aren't used to this kind of management talk that you sometimes hear. You need to be specific. You need to be specific. The checkpoints and milestones including measurable feedback that must be provided by the leader. Because in step number 5 you define the support and resources.
What is not sufficient and maybe you heard that phrase as well is when some leader tells you you know what my doors always open for you. So first, the doors not always open as we know and second people are very tied up in daily business. And when they are tied up in daily business it simply means that they are not available for the development plan for the PIP that you just put in place. So you need to be able to make sure that the skills people need are given by professional training, coaching, mentoring, name it as you like. It needs to be delivered to the people by professionally qualified staff. It's not enough to just throw information at people and say, look here you are. Just find the information and take it from there.
I give you a very simple example. Maybe you heard back in the days when people said, yeah, you know some people are just a bit not so smart because there's no access to information for them. That's what they said before the Internet. Now the Internet is there and we found out, well, it wasn't the availability of information. But the problem is the availability of information isn't enough. When you'd never learned how to learn, how to fact check, how to be able to get structure into a huge chunk of information, you, and that's your job to deliver it. Either deliver it by yourself or you have someone who does it.
However, the person training, coaching, mentoring someone must be fully qualified to do so. Either professionally by their CV or by their experience, preferably by both or formal qualification, all of that is very helpful. You cannot simply say here's a bunch of information. Here's a folder, 300 PDFs. You find it somewhere in there and it's your job to find that.
That is not a PIP. That is just leaving people alone and then being surprised that nothing has actually changed. Be aware that just putting information in front of people doesn't change anything. You have to professionally qualify them. And by the way, usually they have either with younger people a qualification. Pedagogy and then when you are when when you have more mature and adult people you have andragogy which means, dealing with adults. Most people aren't even aware of that difference when they say, oh, I'm pedagogically qualified.
Pedagogist is for, as the name says, when you know a bit Latin. And I I didn't even have Latin in school but I know that much. Pedagogues hovering around the child. Andragogy is hovering around adult. And you need to be qualified according to your target audience you're working with. In step number 6, then you have a documented process. And here is very important.
There are different levels of documentation and accessibility of that documentation. You have a document which is an overall document and that is that is accessible for HR, for the leader of the department, and for the employee that is part of the PIP. There are certain aspects which can only be seen by HR or only be seen by the leader or only be seen by HR and the leader when they have to do something together, but it's not visible for the employee. However, you need to make the document available. You cannot say, hey, dear employee, we have the secret document you're never gonna see before the end of the program, so good luck from here. You need to document that you need to be fully transparent because in step number 7, we focus on the outcomes and the outcomes need to be measurable. There needs to be an unambiguously clear assessment on the results.
You need to tell people this has done this was done well. This was done, let's say, not so well maybe. And then you need to compare what was the expectation and how did you deliver. At the end of the outcomes in step number 7, there is a decision. And the decision is yes or no. Because in step number 8, we need to focus on building a positive future. And of course, now some people might say, when we get to the conclusion it's a no. You will not have a positive future. Wrong. I can give you an example.
This year I was, part of the company. The company did consulting there on a pip. 3 people were part of the pip. 3 people did not meet the expectations. 2 people at the end of the pip, which lasted 6 months, got a yes. They said your performance improved, welcome back to the team and here we go, and everyone worked happily ever after. One person got a no. And that person that got a no was told, okay, look, this what we do here is clearly not for you.
Even with all the help, you do not meet the expectations. However, within our organization, we have that other job for you as an a as a personal assistant, a PA. And that person was transferred to a completely different apart to a completely different department and suddenly performed brilliantly well, just in a different context with different tasks. So you see, getting a no doesn't mean you have to to leave the organization. However, sometimes you need to say no and then people need to leave the organization. However, always support them on the way to their next job because people will be thankful for that. Also, sometimes, due course of the PIP, you get to know from the person itself.
That happened last year where I was consulting on a PIP, a performance improvement program, and it was set up for 6 months plus 2 months additional time in case they need it. And after not even 2 months, the person said, look, I I I just see this is not for me. This it's nothing against the organization, nothing against the leader. This job is just not what what what I'm looking for and that's why I'm not very good at it because I don't enjoy it. I'm not very good at it. You get frustrated. I get frustrated.
I think we just part ways here. And then they did and that again was a positive future. So very important is step number 8 is build the positive future. Keep them in the in the organization as long as you can. And as long as you see any kind of positive future, you can probably switch those within the organization. Only very last option, then you have to say, sorry we we part ways here. But don't do it in bad standing.
Find a solution that is suitable for anyone. When you now implement the whole thing, there are couple of aspects you need to have to take care of. 1st, it's empathy and support. I know that some people come from different backgrounds and especially when you come from a privileged background. Sometimes you cannot understand how people cannot get the knowledge and fulfill the task because you think the task is very easy, you don't get how someone's unable to do it, and you wanna know how are people so unable to do this simple task. Never start from your point of view. Because when you rely on yourself, then when you when you take everything from from your position, you miss out on a lot of gaps you probably do not see.
Self referential leadership is called. Everything you do, you reference to yourself. Oh, I have done that. I was able to do that at the age of 18. Why are you unable to do so? Empathy means you can put yourself in the other person's shoes. And very important here, always reflect on what's your empathy level because maybe it's not as high as you think.
And by the way, support means more that my door is always open for you. We talked about that there needs to be professional support. 2nd aspect is clarity. Always be delivering on the numbers, on the facts. You cannot go by anything which is just your feeling and especially when a couple of words come together and these words usually are feelings together with experience. Oh, in my experience, I think I couldn't expect something else and I I I can't really put it into words but I just expect something else than you do. And that's nothing people can deal with.
No one can improve their their performance based on that statement. So be specific. The burden of evidence here is with you. Step number 3 is fairness. So you put up a very clear goal and then you of course expect that the goal is met. However, there is no and that there are certain tricks here. We're not in procurement here.
It's a it's a it's a performance improvement program. The PIP means when you meet the goal, you meet it. Don't start with, oh, you you met the goal early. So let's have a stretch goal. And let's have a super stretch goal. People just get frustrated because you they they think you're pulling things out of thin air and making things up. So fairness means when people meet the goal they meet the goal.
At the end of that, the follow through the last aspect here is the follow through. Always be very clear. Always be predictable, transparent, and fair. Because then the PIP will massively improve everything in your organization. Wrapping all that together, good PIPs always create a strong organizational culture especially regarding your personal development opportunities and the organizational development opportunities. And also about responsibilities and accountabilities. Getting things done for the best result.
And I wish you all the best implementing that in your organization. And when you now say, that's something you come up just before Christmas. Yeah. I had to because I just received too many emails. And exactly that is the point here. When you now say, hey. I think I have a lot of question marks here and I just need to clarify how this can be put in my organization.
Feel free to email me. Nbnbhyphennetworks. com. Just email me and then we take it from there. I put the email address in the show notes of this podcast together with a LinkedIn. You will also find my LinkedIn down there and you can also go on my website nbhyphennetworks.biz, which you will also find in the show notes of this podcast. By the way, on the website, you also find the transcript in case you prefer to read.
The second aspect of a would you be you prefer to read over listening because some people just do. The second aspect here, if you now say, hey, do you have live sessions?
Yes, we do. We just had one last week, which was the most visited that we ever had since we started the live sessions. Feel free to join. When you go to expert.nbhyphennetworks.com, you can put your email address in there. You only receive one email every Wednesday morning. It's a 100% content at free guarantee. What you find in there is first, access to all the articles I published because sometimes people like to read over listening to a podcast or you might have leaders who say, hey, can you put it in writing? Yes. There you are.
A second aspect, you get access to the full archive of all the podcast we've done so far. And third you get access to the newest link when we have the next live session date, time and the link is always mentioned in exactly that leadership letter. However, the most important aspect is the third one. Apply apply apply what you heard because only when you apply what you heard, you will see the positive change that you obviously want to see in your organization. I wish you all the best doing so. If you need any kind of help, contact me.
I'm available 247. I answer every message within 24 hours or less. I'm looking forward to being in contact with you. And at the end of this podcast, there is, well, not only one thing left for me to say, but 2 things. So first, I wish you an amazing and relaxing, very joyful time at the end of this year. If you celebrate Christmas, I wish you Merry Christmas, Happy Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy End of the Year. We are now very close to 400 episodes with the English speaking podcast.
And one thing, we're not quite there yet, but we are very close. So I'm going to preannounce it here. We are very close now with the leisure podcast in English and German. Very close to 100 1,000 listeners, which for me is totally insane. I never expected it being anywhere near that. So thank you very much for all the time you spent here. Thank you very much for bearing with me.
Thank you very much for all the emails and inputs and the ideas you brought in here. And also thank you very much for all the discussions, the very respectful and professional discussions with all of you in due course of this year. Many episodes that we saw in due course of the year happened because of your feedback. So I'm looking forward to being in contact with you in the future. Have an amazing time at the end of the year. And now at the end of the podcast, there's only one thing left for me to say. Thank you very much for your time.