Are Your Good Workers Paying the Price for Slackers?
"When a manager has a tough project upon which the whole company depends, to whom do they turn? Who gets the late hours and the stress? It's not the low performers, because managers want the project done right. Instead, managers turn to their handful of high performers," Murphy says.
"Over and over, we ask our high performers to go above and beyond, making their jobs tough and burning them out at a terrible pace," he adds. "Meanwhile, low performers often get easier jobs because their bosses dread dealing with them and may avoid them altogether. The worst part of this is that we typically cause our high performers to quit."
A nationwide Leadership IQ study of employees and managers in a variety of industries found that 47 percent of high performers are actively pursuing other jobs, while just 18 percent of the low performers are looking to move on. Twenty-five percent of mid-level performers are seeking employment elsewhere, according to the study.
"While it's terrible that almost half of high performers are thinking about quitting, what's perhaps even worse is that low performers want to stay," Murphy says. "High performers keep companies in business, so every company is at risk if these people leave. If you lose some low performers, you might actually be better off. But when your best people quit, revenue drops, quality suffers and snafus increase. Even large companies can take a big hit with the departure of just a few key employees."
Leadership IQ compiled surveys from 70,305 employees, managers and executives at 116 commercial businesses and healthcare organizations of all sizes.
The results revealed that 87 percent of employees believe that working with a low performer has made them want to change jobs; 93 percent contend that a slacker colleague in the ranks has decreased their own productivity. Yet, only 14 percent of senior executives say their company effectively manages low performers, and just 17 percent of middle managers answer that they feel comfortable improving or removing low performers.
The employee survey asked 45 questions about work force issues, such as employee loyalty, corporate strategy and leadership effectiveness. In follow-up questionnaires, 6,241 employees were asked to list five characteristics that defined a low performer. The Top five responses were, in order of importance:
* Negative attitude.
* Stirs up trouble.
* Blames others.
* Lacks initiative.
* Incompetence.
"Low performers can feel like emotional vampires, sucking the energy out of everyone around them," Murphy says. "It's one of the great management misnomers that low performers' major problem is technical incompetence. While some lack skills, most low performers are so identified because of a difficult attitude."
Though it may seem paradoxical, Murphy notes that leaders may have to remove their worst employees in order to keep their best employees.
"When the overwhelming majority of employees say that working with low performers makes them want to quit their jobs, leaders should accept this as a wake-up call and tackle this issue immediately," he advises. "Because if low performers start dictating the company's culture, productivity, quality and service will all decline precipitously - and high performers will avoid your company like the plague."
Murphy says he believes that, since just 14 percent of senior executives think their companies address this issue effectively, there's a big advantage for those who can turn this around. To do this, however, companies must invest more time and energy in training managers on how to solve these problems.
A lot of this difficulty can be avoided by directing more attention toward interviewing prospective employees to discern disagreeable personality types, Murphy says.
