Question

Discuss how you would go about diagnosing an employee’s performance problems. List several factors to consider.

Answer 1

Here are several factors that impact employee performance problems and also mentioned how I would go about diagnosing the same:

• One of the major factors is the lack of resources - lack of money, personnel, the raw material can be a cause for lack of performance. It is much easier to handle such an issue and hence it must be told that the particular person should reach out to the manager and leader.
• All the complications and obstacles can another reason for lack of employee performance. For example - collaborating or synergizing with other departments, approval from leadership etc can cause obstacles to perform. It needs to be diagnosed by checking the communication channels and asking the immediate leader.
• Lack of skills, expertise, and competencies can be another main factor for the same. It is important to understand that and provide immediate training.
• Lack of clear expectation or goal setting. if the employee is confused about goals then the expectation setting needs to be clear. The deliverables need to be defined.

Here are several other factors that need to diagnosed and listed here as causes of performance issues:

• It needs to checked whether the reward and recognition is in sync with the performance. Lack of work satisfaction can cause performance to go down.
• The employee burnout is another main factor - if the work is not interesting or if the job has mentally / physically exhausted the employee it needs to be checked and adequate steps have to be taken.
• Lack of motivation is another major factor. To diagnose this it must be checked or understood that what motivates the particular employee.

It is important to ask the employee "why" and get to the root cause of the matter. All above are factors but the diagnosis can be done propoerly if the employee is asked directly and is shown that the organisation will make efforts to support the complications, problems, synergy issues if any.

Depending on the cause of the problems performance appraisal disciplinary interview, sessions to counsel and feedback for teams all those can come into the picture.

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