Published 16 April 2016
Unproductive employees can drastically affect your whole office’s productivity, efficiency, morale, and profitability. Even just a few bad apples can have an effect. Unproductive employees don’t get things done, frustrate the rest of the team that has to pull more weight, and can rub off on your other workers. If an unproductive team member is getting away with being lazy, others might start to do the same. So, as you can see, it’s definitely important to be able to identify unproductive employees so you can eradicate the problem before it creates an even more devastating effect on your company. Here are five ways to recognize unproductive staff members, so you can deal with them accordingly.
Generally, you should know how long it takes to perform any responsibility. If a task you’ve assigned an employee takes him all day to complete when you know it could be done properly in four hours, you probably have an unproductive staff member on your hands. An employee who says he’s preparing, consulting, or researching all the time is probably spending all his time on Facebook, chatting with co-workers, or playing games on his phone. If an employee can’t perform a task in a timely manner, chances are he’s procrastinating and not actually working on it. Of course, some tasks will take longer than expected, but someone who habitually takes twice as long to finish it than is needed is a waste of your time and resources.
If you always find yourself searching for a certain employee, you’re probably seeing a sign of an unproductive employee. Whenever there’s a team meeting, a social gathering outside of work, or a new task being assigned, you can be sure that unproductive employees will be far away. These members want to do the absolute minimum amount of work in one day, so they’ll often disappear when they sniff out any additional work that might be coming their way.
Do you have a team member who’s always coming up to you with a new excuse for why a report is late, why a task wasn’t done, or why he wasn’t at the last meeting? Unproductive employees are great at making excuses and blaming everyone and everything else for their mistakes. Sure, some unavoidable issues do come up, but workers who always seem to have an excuse up their sleeves are probably just unproductive.
Unproductive employees won’t do anything on their own. They have no motivation and no drive. Unless you’re giving them clear, precise directions with a strict deadline, they’ll consider the task avoidable and unnecessary. If you hear yourself having to give constant, specific instructions to a worker in order to ensure it is done, you’re probably staring at an unproductive worker.
We are living in a world of narcissists who take selfies every 30 minutes and post about their inner feelings on Twitter. The underlying problem? They're slowing down a project because they only care about their own rewards. Productive people see the greater reward of a successful company and want to play a part in building something cool. The selfies can wait until the weekend.
Bibliography
http://www.inc.com/john-brandon/10-excuses-unproductive-people-always-use.html
http://www.libertystaffing.ca/blog/5-ways-to-recognize-unproductive-employees