HR MANAGEMENT - Poor Work Performance

POOR WORK PERFORMANCE

By Faudzil Harun

What is Poor Performance?        

               
Many employers – if not most – confuse poor performance with negligence, incapacity and even misconduct. This is because of a lack of understanding of the clear distinctions that separate the various conditions – in other words, the employer does not know what the charge should be. He only knows that what is happening is unacceptable to him, and the employee must be dismissed as quickly as possible.

The result of this uninformed action is that the employee is charged with negligence, poor performance, incapacity, misconduct and, as if that is not enough, the charge sheet also states that the trust relationship has irretrievably broken down and that the employment relationship has become intolerable. The poor employee goes into a cold sweat, is so stressed about all this that he/she does not even prepare a defense, and in fact has not the faintest idea what he is being charged with, nor even why he is being charged.

Based on all this, the final outcome is that the employee is dismissed, he claim for unfair dismissal. Let us look at exactly what poor performance is. Poor performance does not look at the behavior of the employee at work problems of behavior are addressed under misconduct. Poor performance looks at whether the job, which the employee is being paid to do, is being done properly.

Therefore, in establishing whether poor performance exists, one must ask the following questions in relation to the employee and the job :

1.  Is the output sufficient?

2.  Is the quality acceptable?

3.  Are company operating procedures being followed?

4.  Are costs kept within budget or is the amount of rejects unacceptably high?

5.  Is the effort put in by the employee sufficient?

6.  Is it perhaps inability to do the job at the required level – can the employee
     perform satisfactorily at a lower level?

7.  Is just plain incompetence? I.e. not insufficient effort, but a clearly a lack of
     ability to do the job?

8.  Is it carelessness – lack of attention to detail?

9.  Is it a form of negligence but not misconduct? In other words "I don't care."

From the above, it now becomes clearer what the differences are between misconduct (behavior) and poor performance (ability) Misconduct deals with behavior – performance deals with ability.