MANAGING PEOPLE & TEAMS
I’ve Got a Lazy Employee, What Do I do?
Lazy Employees are a Telling Sign: is it you, or is it the company?
Humans are especially fragile beings and hard work can easily wear us down. That’s why we are prone to breaking down and being less productive as we countdown to the end of work. Yet, as a leader, you want your teams to be fully productive—even if you aren’t. Definitely, in an ideal world, everyone in the organization stays productive for the whole 8 hours (the average number of hours in a workday).
Especially at crunch periods, you want your team to more focused than before. However, many leaders and managers would know that there is usually one or two employees who are not performing as good as the others. It is not about the level of skill or about the amount of experience, it is about commitment. As blunt as the term may be, it is simply a case of classic laziness and it stems from many different causes.
Employee Productivity is not Engagement, but are Closely Related
Like a broken record, in many of the articles on this publication, employee engagement is something that you need to strongly emphasize and drive in your organization. As a leader, it is imperative of you to understand that having disengaged employees are directly tied to hidden costs and negative impacts to the business, be it current or future. One of the hidden costs and negative impacts would be lowered employee productivity.
Absenteeism and low productivity stemming from low employee engagement is a $450 to $550bn problem for companies worldwide. Just in the United States alone, being disengaged has caused billions of dollars in weekly revenue to be lost for businesses nationwide. Fact is, highly-engaged employees are reported to be “21% more productive” than disengaged employees—which makes a whole lot of sense if you piece it together:
- Engaged employees are greatly self-motivated: they require less external motivation. Their sense of belonging in the organization and ‘tribe’ is strong enough to drive them to work for the community.
- Engaged employees tag the organization’s success to their own, hence they have an even stronger vested interest in attaining the business objectives
- Engaged employees are high-performers as they are much happier to come to work and are not inclined to be absent from work or be distracted at work
However, many organizations in the quest for employee engagement and employee productivity often blur the distinctions between both of them. Hence, resources are not well-distributed, time and effort are wasted and many of the investments into both will be delayed or blocked by gatekeepers. On the other hand, the correlation between the two is very strong: high employee engagement begets high employee productivity.
Yet, high employee productivity does not necessarily employee engagement. Bek Chee, the Global Head of Talent at Atlassian, said that Atlassian is weeding out the ‘brilliant jerks’: “…someone who is technically-talented, but perhaps at the expense of others,” she said.
That is a telling sign: someone who may be extremely good in their work may not necessarily be engaged. In this case, Atlassian is specifically targeting at employees who are actively disengaging themselves or others while still remain excellent and high-performing in their own work.
Hence, companies on the chase for employee productivity must note that even if they do pour out their heart and soul (i.e. time and money) to drive that metric up, it may sacrifice valuable employee engagement. The only way to ensure that employees become more productive and engaged at the same time is to have a multi-pronged solution.
Why Are My Employees Lazy?
Let’s face it, we all have our lazy days. Burnouts occur frequently in many people, especially employees in high-stress environments such as finance or startups. Jobs with monotonous natures are also a factor, such as jobs in logistics, supply chain, and manufacturing, especially the people working on the ground.
However, employees who appear to be more ‘lazy’ than most are employees who are extremely disengaged and potentially disenfranchised. These are employees who will actively seek ways to avoid work, be absent from work while maintaining their job at the office, cause problems in team projects and bring pessimism into many discussions and sprints. All that extends to the overall employee engagement of the team.
Employees are lazy for many reasons.
Meaningless Jobs
Especially independent contractors, contract workers and temp workers who are just willing to ‘tolerate’ for the money, employees whose jobs aren’t very meaningful will definitely be prone to being lazy. There is not much incentive for them to stay committed as they have little reason to care for the organization’s success.
Ineffective Leadership
Most leaders are great at managing, but most managers are not great at leading, especially new managers who hold a typical ego of a manager and aren’t displaying the traits of a leader. When employees see their leaders fail at leadership, no matter the industry, they usually fall apart and become disengaged. Why would people work for an inept leader? This is one of the basic emotions of a human being.
Bad Coworker Relationships
It is not easy to make many friends, and not everyone is comfortable with having many friends, especially introverts. However, while friendships aren’t mandatory in the workplace, maintaining cordial coworker relationships is important for employee engagement. If there is an employee that is singled out from the ‘tribe’, there is little incentive for him/her to work at all as he/she will be contributing to the ‘enemy’.
Strong Office Politics
Ridiculous office politics often plague large organizations and organizations with egoistic leaders. The microcosm of a society within an office is extremely detrimental to the business as a whole: not just in engagement but in growth and revenue. Having office politics can cause employees to be disenfranchised, thereby losing many valuable connections and relationships that may contribute to engaging the employee. Employees who are involved in office politics are usually more invested in maintaining their ‘position’ than excelling at their work.
Purposeless Jobs
Simon Sinek’s Start With Why tells something important: purpose. If organizations are not able to drive the purpose into the role and responsibility, then employees are difficult to internalize and make correlations between their work and the company’s values. When employees feel that their work is meaningless and does not contribute to the company, they will feel disengaged and that their work is of no value, therefore choosing to be lazy if they sincerely believe in that.
It is clear that there are a plethora of reasons behind laziness in employees. However, there are few solutions to the problem and the fundamentals behind are extremely large. There are long-term and short-term solutions as well as theoretical and practical ones to apply. Leaders and managers have to understand that it is a matrimony of both effective leadership and management tactics that cause employees to be highly engaged.
There are two key things that any leader can do to drive employee engagement and productivity in the workplace. In the day and age where research has shown that 72% of adults report feeling lonely, human connections and attention are startingly important; no one wants to simply go to work and clock in the hours, day by day, without having a single human connection in the company.
A study conducted by Leesman has shown that internal mobility and the emphasis on collaboration, be it online or offline, at the workplace is extremely important: individuals who are highly mobile in the company (i.e. able to work anywhere in the office) report at 79–81% satisfaction level with the collaboration level with other co-workers—that’s almost a 20% increase from those who are not as mobile.
Activity-based working is a positive trend and signal that organizations have begun to embrace collaboration in their own way. Whether that’s couches in the common area or advanced tech solutions like Slack, meaningful collaboration is a huge contributing factor to engaging employees and forging interpersonal relationships in the office.
As a leader, what you can do is to:
- Understand and select technologies that can provide more collaborative opportunities and apply them in a seamless manner
- Identify who are the employees who are lagging behind in their coworker relationships and pay more attention to those people
- Drive collaboration as a value, not just as an activity, by providing the tools they need to ensure that they can collaborate easily
- Allow time for building interpersonal relationships between employees
- Involve the people who are not close to their coworkers more in team discussions, focus groups, sprints and any activity that requires more collaboration
- Have a one-to-one conversation with the employee(s) to understand the why and the how regarding that
Collaboration and interpersonal relationships combat laziness and virtually eliminate any possibility of it scaling. When organizations create a sense of belonging, the employee will therefore subconsciously believe that he/she is in a ‘tribe’. It is human to be interdependent, hence, employees who feel that they belong somewhere safe and secure are employees who are at environments where they can be at their prime.
It extends further to Simon Sinek’s Circle of Safety, illustrated in his book, Leaders Eat Last, where he described how community-building and strong bonds are a key to engaging employees. When people feel safe somewhere, they are much more inclined to work harder. It is also natural for them to feel comfortable working in that group due to the fact that they trust others, whether consciously or not. That trust is key to releasing the throttle on an employee’s productivity.
The combination of community and paying personal attention is part of the core tenets forming empathetic leadership. When leaders adopt such an attitude, employees will feel that they are being well-managed and taken care of. As a leader, your role is to:
- Drive purpose in their job: what are they doing that contributes to the business goals? Remember: every contribution may not be equal, but all contribution should be treated as great in its own right
- Check-in with your employees to ensure that they get what they want. Even if you are unable to deliver most of it, the fact that you show interest is a major contributing factor to building trust between employees and management
- Close the divide between employees and management by being genuine and sincere in your approach to understanding the needs that they have
- Clear away office politics and ensure that they have a smooth path to success in their career
- Provide as many opportunities for growth as you can to those who have the potential to grow
Empathetic leadership is a huge umbrella of leadership styles, one of them being Servant-Leadership. When you as a leader show so much interest in the wellbeing and growth of your employees, the appreciation will be returned in staggering amounts. No one wants to work for a leader that does not care about them, especially with the multigenerational workforce and the advent of technology—it is easy to find out what they are missing through Facebook and Instagram today.
By marrying both theoretical (i.e. leadership style) and practicality (i.e. collaborative solutions), managers can, therefore, become leaders. It is imperative to note that it is a delicate balance between achieving business results and ensuring that leadership remains effective and empathetic. Lazy employees are dime a dozen, but employers need to first identify whether the problem is with themselves or with the employee before making any conclusion.
Unless your company is a startup, where it is important to let go of such employees as soon as possible, then organizations need to give themselves more time to assess the situation.
It is more human to give the benefit of the doubt—plus, by reviewing ourselves, organizations can become highly self-aware of where they are in the employee engagement quadrant. What have they been doing well? What are they missing? What are they supposed to do? By understanding where all the puzzle pieces are, organizations can embark on a self-improvement journey for the benefit of all the employees and the business itself.
If the lazy employee remains lazy (at the same scale or worse) after the change in the organization, it is also better to review the current processes and performance of the leadership and management to see if there could be any improvement in the fundamentals. Perhaps it might be the lack of resources, or perhaps it might just be misguided leadership.
The fact is, a truly lazy employee will never change—this employee is part of the annual turnover at every organization. As leaders, we must acknowledge that we cannot control every employee in the company, but we must take it upon ourselves to ensure that at every touchpoint of the employee’s journey in the company, they are well taken care of and paid attention to.