Happy Birthday, Mike!
 

Today, January 2^nd, is National Director Mike Maciekowich’s birthday!  We hope you have a great day and enjoy yourself!  Let this be the start of a great year for you.

How I Spent My Holidays
 

2006 was a busy year!  The Astron team took a well deserved rest between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.  Here’s how we spent our time:

Michael Maciekowich (National Director)

For the first time in a while I elected to take some time off with my family during the holidays.  We traveled to Quebec City on Christmas Eve to spend what we thought would be a white Christmas in Canada.  Living in Raleigh, NC I have not seen one for a few years.  However, the temperature on Christmas Day was a balmy 38 degrees which, as the locals told us, was spring-like weather.  In fact, this was the first Christmas in 83 years that was not white.  However the next day, the Boxing Day holiday, saw the first major snowfall of the season.  Boxing Day is similar to the US "Black Friday" after Thanksgiving.  The stores all have deep discounts and the malls were full of crazed shoppers, including us.  The day after Boxing Day came beautiful sunshine but more normal temperatures, around 9 degrees at night.  We took advantage of the sunshine and took an extended tour of the city including its colorful history and more shopping in the "Old City."  Once back to Raleigh later that week it was time for some R& R ending with a quiet New Year’s celebration at home watching both the celebration in Times Square and the dropping of the infamous Giant Acorn in downtown Raleigh, NC.

Jennifer Loftus (National Director)

Santa stopped in Denville, NJ to visit with me and my family on Christmas Eve.  After enjoying our traditional holiday celebrations, I headed to Houston, TX to attend the Texas Bowl and cheer on my alma mater, Rutgers.  The game was superb!  Winning was great, but the food, pre-game fun, souvenirs, and the Rutgers marching band’s rendition of On the Banks of the Old Raritan, a staple song for Rutgers events, were great, too!  Prior to the game, my friend and I went to the Johnson Space Center.  It was amazing to see many things, including the historic mission control center, where the NASA team worked to ensure the success of moon landings like Apollo 11, and the safety of the crew on Apollo 13.  For New Year’s my family enjoyed First Night Ocean County.  The weather at the shore was beautiful!

Eric Katz (Senior Statistical Analyst)

This was a very special holiday season for my wife Tracy and me, as it was the first we would celebrate with our baby boy, Ely (4 1/2 months old).  We bought him lots of gifts for Chanukah and spent time with the family.  We helped my brother and sister-in-law celebrate Christmas Eve at their house in Pennsylvania, where they had a 17 foot Christmas tree in their house.  On New Year's Eve, we had a small party at home with some friends where we ordered dinner in, played Outburst, watched the ball drop, and drank champagne and wine.

It was nice being off a few days from work, though time off never seems to be long enough.  However, I am looking forward to a busy and exciting 2007, both personally and professionally!

John Sazaklis (Senior Automation Expert)

On Christmas my family came over my house and we ate and watched the Jets beat the Dolphins.  I took off last week and went skiing with my friends in Vermont.  On New Year's Eve I stayed home, watched the Jets make the playoffs, and rang in the New Year with my family.  I also enjoyed participating in some family traditions on New Year’s Day.

Brendan Williams (Automation Expert)

I drove all the way back home to Syracuse.  I did a lot of last minute shopping before Christmas.  I had a nice relaxing time visiting family and friends.  I watched a lot of football this last week.  I also ate entirely too much food. 

Andrew Katz (Marketing Specialist)

Christmas in my family always means some sort of dinner and then a movie. Typically, the Jewish family likes to go Chinese but my family likes to switch it up. This year it was a family dinner followed by Keeping Up With The Steins, a very Jewish movie for the occasion. Chanukah is the one of those holidays during the year that our family always all gets together.  It’s also been a great way in recent years to replenish the bank account. New Year’s, since turning 21, needs to be spent in New York City and that's where it was spent this year, starting at Canal Room.

What to Do When Employees Are Sub Par
 

In the Austin Powers movies, whenever one of Dr. Evil’s henchmen does not perform up to his standards – from the cryogenic freezing process leaving Dr. Evil’s cat, Mr. Bigglesworth, bald, to using sea bass, instead of sharks, as the animal with laser beams on their heads – he deals with them swiftly and definitively.   Dr. Evil hits a button and the unlucky henchmen fall to their death into a fiery pit of hell in the floor. Those he does not kill, Dr. Evil teases or yells at, making their lives a living hell.

For today’s Human Resources professional, such drastic options are thankfully not available, even if Dr. Evil would describe the employees you work with as “frickin’ idiots.”  Teasing or yelling is also out of the question. But there is recourse when dealing with employees who perform poorly.  Taking a page from Dr. Evil, some think the only way to deal with poorly performing employees is to fire them.  Others think that employees will turn the situation around, so they should shy away from firing the person and dealing with the fallout associated with firing. Neither of these, by itself, is the cookie cutter, correct solution.  Rather, a systematic approach, as we will explore, aids an employer in dealing with poorly performing employees.

First, let’s explore why employees may perform poorly. Many times it’s not just because they are lazy or they “just don’t care” like Peter Gibbons, Ron Livingston’s character in the movie Office Space. The New South Wales Office of Industrial Relations succinctly lists these as reasons why employees may perform poorly:

• Your employee doesn’t know what to do — meaning there are unclear or misunderstood expectations about goals and standards (or no standards have been set)
• The job is poorly designed so there is a mismatch between your employee’s capabilities and the job he or she is required to do
• Your employee doesn’t know how well or badly they are doing because there is no counseling or feedback on their performance
• Your employee does not have the knowledge or the skills to do the job expected of them (eg. a new recruit, change of duties, a new task, etc.)
• Lack of personal motivation, low morale in the workplace and / or poor work environment
• Your employee may have personal problems such as stress, family problems, health problems or substance abuse problems such as drugs or alcohol.

Some of these may not be the fault of the employee, but failing to deal with poor performing employees can affect the morale of the entire office. As published in Workforce Performance Solutions Magazine, only two out of five employees who feel their companies are doing much too little to correct poor employee performance are favorably engaged at work.  This is according to a survey of 34,330 employees by Sirota Survey Intelligence, authors of The Enthusiastic Employee. This compares with a favorable engagement level of 73% among those who feel their company is taking the necessary steps to correct poor employee performance.

“A very small percentage of employees at a typical workplace — usually around only 5 percent — are ‘allergic to work,’ and do as little work as they possibly can,” said David Sirota, lead author of The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want.  “The main reason they get away with this is the lack of management’s will and persistence in stepping up to the problem. Management needs either to help employees understand they must pull their own weight and coach them to improve, or let them go. This is an unpleasant task that many managers choose to avoid.”

According to Workforce Management and a survey from Watson Wyatt, poor performers are still receiving short-term incentive bonuses and annual pay increases averaging 2.5 percent. With top performers’ increases averaging 5.6 percent, the pay differential between high and low performers is too small to drive behavior.

Employers may believe that they have designed an effective performance management system, but implementation is falling short. The Watson Wyatt survey unearthed a significant gap in perceptions of the execution of performance management programs, as shown by the chart below:

(Legend for Chart: B = Employer view, C = Employee view – Top performers, D = Employee view – Poor performers)

                         A                                                           B         C       D

Provide goal-setting linked to business objectives             91%    58%    31%

Provide ongoing coaching and feedback                          91        64      38

Provide formal annual reviews                                        98        75      57

Pay linked to review results                                            92        64      40

Elizabeth Gaudio, a Senior Attorney for the National Federation of Independent Business Legal Foundation in Washington, D.C. had this advice in Business Week for small businesses dealing with poor performing employees: “Clearly defined expectations and early intervention can save small business owners time and stress, and help decrease the chances that a minor employee problem will snowball into a major complication for their business.” Here are three simple steps to follow that will, in the long run, improve employee performance, increase morale, and protect against potentially costly litigation:

1. Explain the obvious. From the start, employees must understand what behavior is expected of them. Outlining what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior provides business owners the framework with which to evaluate an employee’s performance and provide discipline if necessary. Most important, the code of conduct needs to be followed by the business owners and managers. 

2. Evaluate employees regularly.

3. Early intervention

The Office of Personnel Management offers this three step program for improving performance: understand the process, provide an opportunity to improve, and then, if needed, take action.

The toughest part of this whole process may be the beginning. Poorly written job descriptions and inadequate performance appraisals may be a cause for many problems in employee job performance. Many companies have no clue how to tackle this problem.

Looking for a top-notch presenter for your human resource organization's meeting? Both Jennifer Loftus and Michael Maciekowich present highly-rated sessions on a variety of compensation and employee retention issues. For more information, send an e-mail to info@astronsolutions.com.

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Copyright 2007, Astron Solutions, LLC

ISSN Number 1549-0467