Where have all the good employees gone?
Where have all the good employees gone?
I caught myself this week asking my CEO to award an employee who, compared to her peers, is doing a stellar job. She has initiative, works with clients, educates them, revamps content, participates in recruiting events, and seeks opportunities to improve. Most of her peers, on the other hand, lack initiative. They wait for someone to tell them what to do and how to do it; they may or may not do it, depending on their comfort level. Compared to her peers, this employee is a diamond. She outshines all of them because…she does her job.
And that’s when it hit me, I have become so desperate for good working employees that an employee who does their job is seen as an All-Star. I want to immediately award this employee for showing up, doing what she’s asked, taking initiative to improve a process, and learn more about her role. The reality is that her award is keeping her job because she does what she’s supposed to do.
The real question is, what do I do with the other employees? Naturally, most of you would tell me to fire them, and you would be right. I absolutely should fire them. These are adults, they read their job descriptions and said, “yes” to the work and the wage. If they are only willing to do the part of their job they want to do, then that leaves someone else responsible for the rest of the work.
However, no one has ever held these employees accountable or responsible. Until I arrived, these employees were allowed to do whatever they wanted to do. They set their schedules, showed up whenever they wanted to, and worked less than half of the day. Ethically and morally, this was wrong. But nobody said a word to them about it. Interestingly enough, and they swear by this, they were praised for all the hard work they were doing–that is, until I came along and rained on their parade.
So, my choices were to set a standard, clarify expectations, and give them a chance to prove themselves, or let them go and hire employees who want to work. For a year and a half, I’ve been peeling back the layers of how deeply rooted these issues are. Naturally, I chose to give them the benefit of the doubt and work with them. In order to protect them and justify why they behaved the way they did, I made excuses for them. However, despite all my efforts to gently reestablish expectations and set a standard, I’ve been met with a lot of resistance. And now I’m tired and I have to make a choice:
Do I stay the course and hope they will catch on, or do I make the hard call and remove the employees who continue to resist?
-Q. Johnson
