Should They Stay Or Go?

Staffing has been a significant challenge for the last few years. You got through and scraped together a team in this unprecedented time of staff shortages. Hopefully most of who you hired were winners and you’ll want to find ways to keep them around. Some may even be superstars. But, maybe, you are left with a few too many. OR a few that aren’t up to snuff. We’re sharing some tips we discovered about how to evaluate employees and when it’s time to make the tough decision on letting them go.

As staffing challenges are easing, you may now have employees that you aren’t sure of their value. It can be hard to decide if they should stay or go.

And we know that firing and rehiring is an expensive endeavor, so we want to keep the ones who have potential. Yet, you don’t want to be stuck with someone who isn’t a good fit for your organization.

How you evaluate them will be important to using them to build a stronger team.

What if there was a better way to evaluate employee performance and make an informed decision?

According to trainingmag.com, studies have shown that traditional methods of evaluating employees’ performance leads to a perception of bias that reduces their value. Businesses move faster now, it’s harder to find good people, and an employee’s potential is more important than their past performance.

They report that less than one-third of businesses believe there is a high correlation between the highest-performance evaluation scores and the highest-performing individuals in the business. Based on their quantitative research, interviews with scores of businesses, and performance management leading practices, here are seven questions you should ask yourself when evaluating and having performance conversations with employees.

Answering this question considers an employee’s performance, but also their level of engagement, their aspirations, their ability to collaborate with teammates, hidden skills and competencies they might have that are not necessarily reflected in their job performance, their feeling about the business and its mission, goals, and values. Even if there is not a promotion opportunity available, understanding who on your team is ready for promotion—and why—is extremely valuable.

Once you understand whether someone is ready for promotion, you must understand what opportunities exist for the person. If there are none—or none of interest to the employee—the business needs to solve this before the person decides they’ll be better of working somewhere else.

Whether the employee is ready for advancement now or needs more development, a plan should be created so the employee can continue to grow. If there are no learning, training, or growth opportunities in the current role, that is a problem not just for the employee’s development but for your business’s ability to retain talent. Superstars don’t want to stagnate.

This question helps to answer first two questions and provides perspective on the condition and needs of the manager’s team. Every manager should understand the value each team member brings. It may not be hard skills (those you can train for), but soft skills like integrity, humor, enthusiasm, consciousness, that are difficult to cultivate.

A lot of the time, it comes down to money. Do they bring enough value to warrant the money you pay them? If you wouldn’t consider giving them a raise, or a bonus, then maybe they need more training, or feedback, or do they need to go?  

Considering this question forces you to again think about the employee’s true value, but also about the depth of your talent pipeline. If the person is hard to replace and there is little talent on the bench, then it requires further hiring action.

If the flight risk (their likelihood to quit and find a different job) is high, the next question is, what do we do about it? If overall attrition is a problem, what are their motivators for leaving and how can you prevent them from doing so. It’s vital to know the real reason people leave, so holding exit interviews are helpful. It may be that the culture is leading to their departure, or a specific person that negatively impacts the work experience, both of which are valuable insights.

We would also add that you need tangible ways to monitor and track each team members results.  Are they hitting sales goals? Are they upselling the way you want them to? Do they sign up people to your Rewards Program at every opportunity? Do they process the Rewards transactions properly? With Royalty Rewards® you can input employee codes into the system so that these metrics can be measured. That way, you have tangible data to help you make your decision.

All these questions are important in the performance evaluation, providing insights into your business. Your hiring process will be greatly improved once these factors are considered.

Getting the best from your team is even easier when your sales and profits improve – everyone wants to contribute more effectively when they feel part of the successes. We work exclusively with independent local Business Owners who need a proven, powerful marketing system that brings them results and tracks employee effectiveness. To book a call to discuss how Royalty Rewards® can grow your sales and profits, click the button below.

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