Slackers can ruin the dynamic of any team—without doing a thing. When workers get lazy, their colleagues have to do more than their fair share. That results in overworked, stressed-out employees and mediocre projects. When they search the Web, make personal phone calls and take long breaks, lazy workers reduce productivity and, when their laziness goes unchecked, morale.
With the tips below, you can stymie the slackers’ toxicity in your workplace:
- Confront the problem. Many bosses are tempted to ignore this issue. They may hope that in time slackers will step up their game and become more productive team members. However, ignoring lazy workers will exacerbate the problem. It sends the message to slackers that you approve of their work habits and to hard working employees that you don’t value their work ethic. Instead, meet one-on-one with the offenders and tell them that their actions—or lack thereof—are not going unnoticed. Cite specific, documented occurrences and tell them that their work habits don’t change, there will be consequences.
- Make note of work habits. After speaking with the slackers, continue to document their successes and failures. When they do good work, reward them with praise and a sincere “Thank you.” If a slacker’s habits don’t change, be sure to record that too, as you will need it as proof should you decide that you need to fire the person.
- Remove any hindrances to their productivity. If their slacking stems from distractions, block recreational websites like FaceBook, YouTube and ESPN. Over time, if their performance improves, you can remove the blocks, but keep an eye on their usage.
- Assign extra work. When you catch your slackers blatantly putting off work, send a clear message. Keep them busy by giving them extra tasks every time they seem to be slowing down. Fill up their “free time” and you will get the productivity out of them that you’ve been looking for.
- Explain your expectations. Set clear goals for what you need to see from them in the future. Say “I expect you to arrive to work on time, leave when your colleagues leave, follow company break policies and become a more productive member of this organization.” Get them to agree to lighten their teammates’ workload by doing their fair share. Then address your timeline for change; you should see a difference immediately and a complete turnaround in two weeks. If you don’t see the necessary improvements, you should replace that team member with someone who is willing to pull his or her own weight.
Want more tips for dealing with “toxic” employees like slackers? Check out Detox Your Workplace!, which will help you flush out toxic behaviors before they destroy your team.
What other tips do you have for dealing with slackers in the workplace?
[Image Source: Sergeant Killjoy]
Filed under: Dos and Don'ts, Leadership, Workplace Personalities Tagged: | coaching, employee performance, performance issues, respect, slackers
pay them by the hour, make them keep a timesheet, and then use a website tracking program that shows where they have been. put it under their nose and tell them goofing off time is personal unpaid time and to go back and make sure it is not on their timesheet. Always block every website that has nothing to do with business. Don’t wait until there is a problem. My favorite are the programs that bring up the offending website for 2 or 3 seconds and then crash the entire browser! It’s unnerving. Sometimes they complain there browser has crashed and I tell them I monitor their activity.
Get a good employee handbook and tailor it to your business. Put it up on the desktop of each computer so employees can read it and know it. Tell them they can be monitored in any electronic device–phone, fax, web browsing and do it!
Put a digital camera over the desk of a slacker (many of them quit over this–good) and put it up on a recorded webpage so you can review it later and show it to them (ie, look at time bet 10 am and 1 pm. where were you? was that lunch. says on your timesheet you were doing X. Fix your time sheet).
a lot of the stuff to monitor is cheap and on ebay and plugs into any pc or laptop. use technology. tell the employee they are on probation and have to have a meeting once per week over productivity. http://www.denisonlaw.com
Wow, that’s a lot of monitoring! I would say that if you find yourself needing to go to such lengths to monitor employees, you should probably review your hiring process to ensure that the vast majority of your hires are great, hardworking, trustworthy people. (We actually have a good product about this, if you’re interested: Hire Exceptional Employees: A Process for Recruiting Top Talent.)
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