Managing underperforming employees

Managing performance effectively is one of the critical aspects of the management of any business. Employers who fail to tackle, promptly and effectively, the problem of underperforming employees, risk long running and often expensive legal and operational problems. Not only can poor performers undermine the efforts of co-workers and harm workplace culture, but their failings can have consequences for the bottom line.

Quite often, businesses facing these problems have underperforming employees that have not been properly made aware of their poor performance issues. Real difficulties emerge when managers:

• fail to act decisively and skirt around the poor performance issues;