Low productivity employees

Today, I need to start a conversation. It’s something I’ve been needing to talk to you about for a very long time. At the end, I’m going to ask you a question, one that I am hoping to hear from you about. Before I ask the question, however, I’m going to explain where my head’s at on the subject:

Basic Assumption of Productivity

One assumption I make is that people want to be productive and live a fulfilling life. That they want the enormous amount of time they spend at their jobs to mean something. That they want their days to be filled with activity and fun and productivity. That people know that they’re exchanging not their time for money, but their activity, and that without activity, the time is meaningless.

It’s a first principle for me, a basic assumption about humanity: people want to mean something, and that extends to their job. I’ve read and written a lot about employee motivation, and what I’ve read points to the idea that every employee, no matter what they do for a living, is happier when they are getting things done, and getting rewarded for their efforts through pay and non-toxic management of those efforts.

A game-changing conversation

I was talking with an Organizational Development expert recently. Organizational Development (OD) grew out of studies suggesting that the organization of a business and the processes it employs drastically affect employee productivity and motivation. OD works to bring change through org structure and process change, with the end goal of finding huge win-wins: wins in productivity for the company, and wins in morale and motivation for the employee. When it works, everyone’s life gets better, and the company is better off for it.

But change is hard. Change initiatives are met with resistance by the system undergoing that change. Managers that are used to doing things one way and are already overwhelmed may resist, because learning means rebooting, rewriting things that were once solved problems; it might take serious mental effort or mean having tough conversations with employees.

My OD colleague and I had a pretty interesting conversation about my Basic Assumption of Productivity. He’s worked as a consultant in organizations big and small. He’s been the executive consultant, he’s been the employee, and he’s been the team manager, so he’s seen the gamut of employees, and he challenged my assumption.

The Office Space digression

See, Office Space changed everything for me. Yes, the Mike Judge movie. Yes, from the 1990’s. Right. I’m old. Shut up. That movie, along with the comic strip Dilbert, gave office drones working at large corporate cube farms a vernacular to discuss the issues they had in common. But there’s one line in there where the two Bobs ask Peter Gibbons, the main character, what he does at the organization.

“Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door — that way Lumbergh can’t see me, heh heh — and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour…. I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I’m working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I’d say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.”

— Peter Gibbons, Office Space

This quote has eaten away at me for the last twenty years. After being that guy in the cube farm for far longer than I should have been, I started writing about it. It’s the reason I write about owner-thinking, being productive while remote, stepping up, and is the driving force compelling me to speak at CodeStock 2018. What I take away from Peter’s quote above is that he has been set up to fail because of his overmatrixed org chart (he reports to eight different managers), so why put any effort towards failure when it’s easier to just go limp and fail anyway?

All wrapped up in that thought process is my aforementioned Basic Assumption of Productivity. My first principle. The assumption that people are like me, frustrated when they have to sit on the sidelines with little or nothing to do while their managers have political fights over budgets and resources for their projects. Or sit there with little motivation because management doesn’t appear to care whether they’re productive.

Return to OD on OD

My OD colleague blew my mind. I gave an example in a previous column of workers avoiding work, but recounted stories of managers he’s worked with whose employees actively shirk their duties and do as little work as possible. These stories suggested that there are people out there deliberately hiding information from the manager responsible for that information. That there are people who don’t even look to their jobs for fulfillment, and maybe don’t even realize that such fulfillment is possible.

Well, that flew in the face of my beliefs, so of course, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Let me take these possibilities and explore each a bit:

Unfulfilling jobs

Ok, sure. I kinda understand this one. We’ve all had jobs that didn’t tickle our passion and wasn’t part of our purpose. I suppose many go through their lives not finding a perfect job fit. Everyone needs an income, so everyone needs a job. Not everyone draws gratification from the eight hours they spend at work.

Well, why not? You spend roughly 2000 hours a year at your job. Two thousand hours a year? A hundred thousand hours over a fifty year career? And in all that time, you’re not happy? Just grinding it out? I think this happens particularly often in very large organizations. People get institutionalized and just… drift.

Where do I put the onus for this situation? Management. Is it that difficult to tell which of your workers aren’t challenged, don’t care about the mission, don’t put in the time? Are you trying to inspire them? Do they understand how their role benefits the overall mission of the company and its customers? Employees are happiest and most productive when they see the impact of their work.

Actively shirking duties

It’s easy to picture Dante and Randal from Kevin Smith’s debut indie film Clerks, just doing their best to coast through life with as few hassles as possible. But we’re not talking about high school kids. We’re not talking about college kids. We’re talking about fully-grown, corporate-employed adults. I can’t believe that grown people spend time shirking work like a pre-teen afraid of housework, but apparently, it’s a thing.

So where do I put the onus for this? Well, a worker shirking is certainly guilty of knowingly stealing from their employer. The employer believes they are working eight hours. The employee knows they are not working, and avoiding work consciously. Why would they do this? Bad work ethic? A belief that the company is somehow taking advantage of them, so they do it to the company and that makes it okay? An individual deliberately avoiding doing their job is a liar and a cheat. That their organization might also be a liar and a cheat is not material. If you don’t like your organization, you can leave, or you can step up.

“I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I’m working.”

But my gaze continually returns to the manager. In this case, the manager may know the employee or the team is sandbagging. If they know and do nothing, they’re similarly culpable for misrepresenting their team productivity up the management chain. If they don’t know, then they’re not being responsible. Back to thinking in terms of small companies: if it was a 20 person company and one of the employees wasn’t doing their job, deliberately not doing their job, how long would that situation go unnoticed? How long would the situation take to remediate? It wouldn’t be long before the owner would replace the underachiever.

Hiding information

This one really frosts my cookies. If I’m not big on cheats and liars, I’m totally not down with obstructors, folks that deliberately hoard information and resources for some… purpose. I’ve known employees that would not give details of how the team’s process worked, secreted code away on their desktop, or otherwise obscured information.

The organization relies on that person’s manager being able to make improvements for the business. The manager can’t measure what the manager can’t see and can’t influence what they can’t measure. This is madness. This is literally employees fighting to hamper the progress of the company they work for. They do this for job security. How much security can you have if you’re undercutting your own company?

Is the manager completely powerless in this situation? Not at all, but it sure must be frustrating. Because the manager now has to play “get-it-all-in-writing” with the employee. Ask for a thing, wait to not get the thing, ask for a thing, wait to not get the thing, go through the process of getting the org chart involved, calling HR, getting your boss involved, if not your grandboss, and spinning up disciplinary action. That’s a painful game, but it might be the only option if the manager’s organization requires a lot of documentation to let people go for dereliction of duty.

[People] want the enormous amount of time they spend at their jobs to mean something.

So how do we root out suboptimal productivity?

Like anything else, with metrics and documentation. Ultimately, for whatever your span of control, a manager should know how to measure what you’re working on. If not metrics, sitting with the team, doing their jobs with them, understanding where their pain points are, understanding where the manager can clear roadblocks. There are great management books that get into the weeds, so I won’t dive deep here, but it can be done. Find the roadblocks.

Once you know where the roadblock is, you can fix that. If you know who the roadblock is, well, can’t you fix that, too?

You… can’t?

And this is where I need to ask the community, because my OD colleague and I got in a debate over this one.

It’s unfun, but if you have someone deliberately harming your organization, either by fraudulent wage inflation, or by deliberate obstruction, you have to let them go and bring on people that will positively add to your mission, not inhibit or do it injury. The folks that aren’t motivated to accomplish things because it’s just not their jam? Sorry to them, but I’m all for finding the folks whose jam it is.

“In a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.”

So you can let those employees go. Except my OD colleague said that it’s not that simple. Letting people go for performance happens infrequently in old-school corporate entities. You will occasionally see a Vice President or C-Level employee rotate out to another company due to anything from politics to performance, but at the leaf-node employee level? That doesn’t happen often. An employee usually has to cross a pretty high disciplinary bar to get ejected immediately, and performance doesn’t seem to qualify for that.

Like Batman said in the eponymous 1966 film, “Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb.”

Well, why not?

Nowadays decisions have to be made quickly. A modern company can’t afford to overpay its staff by 400% and still be competitive in the global economy. People can’t afford the stress and mental strain of being in a job they resent to the point where they actively harm the company. That behavior affects the leaders, the employees, the shareholders, the customers, and worst of all, the employees’ families. Let’s figure out ways to get people into places where they feel good about contributing and doing a great job. Let’s figure out ways to clear the underbrush and let the healthy vegetation grow.

Note here, I’m not talking about using beancounting to squeeze the life out of your employees or they’re fired. That’s a great path to push your best people to leave and create entire teams of low performers. I’m also not talking about folks who are benched for seasonal fluctuations, or employees whose rare skills are honestly needed, but infrequently enough that it makes sense financially to keep them on retainer. I’m talking about deliberately underperforming employees, or those that can’t match what their job needs them to be.

To do that, we have to figure out what the roadblocks are to managing employees out and surmount them.

Possibility 1: It’s an HR issue

I’ve heard this more than a few times. HR makes it so difficult for managers to let someone go, putting up what seems to be endless hoops to jump through, that the managers find it easier to explain away the productivity hit than to deal with the hoops.

I understand why HR has checks and balances to prevent capricious firings. But fear of employee retribution and lawsuits can be a real inhibitor to weeding out wastefulness. The process I’ve seen at places I’ve been generally revolves around getting a review, often an Annual Review, that places the employee on performance watch. A number of checkpoints are introduced, metrics are taken, progress or lack thereof is measured, after which the employee temporarily or permanently improves or is relieved of duty.

But there is a process, even at the largest organizations, for excising toxic human resources. It’s a shame that hiring can take place after only a couple hours of interview, whereas remediating a bad hire takes months, but that’s where we’re at. The process exists.

Possibility 2: Lazy managers

In this case, we presume that HR has a process, but it’s so onerous that the manager looks into it and decides that dead weight for the company is not worth the effort of removing the offending resource. Can this really be the case? If the owner were the manager, do you think they’d feel like paying someone to do nothing? Would the owner shy away from removing the person from the company, when that person was knowingly or unknowingly taking away from the company they built with their sweat equity? No way.

But what can you do? The manager knows there’s an inefficiency, but doesn’t care to do anything about it. That means that the manager now is the one deliberately not doing their job, and it should be detected and detectable from higher up. Practically speaking, I suppose it’s possible to have an entire organizational culture with this level of rot built in, but I’d argue that such a toxic company culture weighs a company down and eventually a smaller, leaner company comes along and eats that company’s lunch.

And really, while there’s HR hoops to jump through, is it really that hard to keep a little notebook of the times you assign something to your employee and then note when it’s not done correctly or on time? I have watched this process in action from the inside in a couple sizable, stodgy organizations, and it’s really not that complicated. It requires a modicum of diligence and note-taking, but it’s not crazy awful.

Possibility 3: Fearful managers

Just because someone became a manager, it doesn’t mean that person now has all the skills they need to have difficult conversations. I’ve had to lead conversations with underperforming employees. It’s really tough. It hurts morale, and it’s hard to look a colleague in the eye and say you need more from them. I’m not sugar-coating that at all. Performance conversations are devastating to everyone in the room. It’s nowhere near the stress level I imagine an Oncologist has delivering bad news to their patients, but since you’re messing with the employee’s security, their livelihood, their families, the conversation can be immensely intimidating.

But that person was promoted to manager. And having tough conversations is one thing managers have to do. If a manager doesn’t have that skill set on promotion or hiring, it’s that person’s manager’s job to train them in this art, and fast. There are books that can be read (I don’t endorse this particular book, but I included it to allow you to explore similar titles if you’re in need of such a thing), at a minimum.

Managers can be trained to overcome that fear, but first it has to be sussed out as a problem.

So, community, I ask you: how are unproductive folks handled in your organization? Post here if you want, or come find me privately on THATSlack. Before you respond, though, here are a couple pieces of feedback I’ve already had I want to address:

Oh come on, kpd, it’s not practical to optimize your productivity. There’s just too many needed people and not enough good ones.

I call “cow patties.” First off, the whole point is that big, bloated enterprises have too many people. And there’s always job seekers who are hungry. To get good ones, they may be harder to find, or you might need to pay them a little more to attract them, but if you eliminate a handful of Peter Gibbons from your organization, you can literally afford to increase the position’s salary by an enormous amount if you can find someone who will actually work.

Oh come on, kpd, our situation is different. Our business needs are too lumpy and seasonal to be able to predict outages.

I understand that the organization’s needs can depend on seasonal sales, the fiscal year, project approvals, etc. That’s not what I’m talking about here. It’s completely possible that your $50k resource is only employed actively half the time. If that employee provides $100k value over the course of the year, or avoids an expensive risk of not having someone when you need it, that could very well be a reasonable business decision.

I would definitely, however, be asking that person to do other things during those down times: training or training others, documentation, whatever else is sensible to ask that employee. I doubt that employee is sitting there idle 50% of the time and is happy about it and feeling fulfilled.

I claim that organizational efficiency improvements are possible. I believe they can be made. And if it can’t, I want to understand why. The fastest way to learn is to be wrong on the internet, so talk to me about what the obstacles are in your organization: kevin@ThatConference.com

Oh, and if you think your organization could use an OD expert, I know someone I can put you in touch with to help.