How to Make Your Employees Move Up the Rating Scale

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, HR Strategy: Job Leveling (26-slide PowerPoint presentation). Job Leveling is a disciplined approach to gauge the value of work for individual positions across the organization. It entails ascertaining the nature of work done by each position, authority levels, and the effect of each job on business results. Jobs that are configured inadequately bread [read more]

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Implementing a rating scale can often invite mixed reactions from employees. While high performers often look up to it, those struggling to get good ratings can get demoralized, resulting in poor work performance or, worse, attrition. In a bid to counter such situations, you can attempt to bridge this disparity by making your employees move up the rating scale.

When your employees don’t perform, it could mean they require upskilling. Empowering them with the right skills and resources can align them on the right path. And with a few motivation strategies, you can keep them with a job they enjoy and one that allows them to grow.

But first, let’s look at some reasons employees don’t do well in their jobs.

Why Employees Don’t Perform

Lack of necessary skills: When employees don’t perform to the optimum, it’s linked to the must-have skills required to carry out the job. And it often stems from a lack of necessary skills that can give an excellent on-job performance. This leads to poor productivity, longer production time, higher costs, and usually a drop in competitive performance, impacting an organization-wide growth rate.

Insufficient necessary resources: With a lack of required resources comes the burden of delivering pre-decided goals, falling short of meeting these goals, undue stress, and the increased negativity of on-the-job performance. It also seeps into team morale and the attitude to deliver over-arching management and individual goals.

Lack of necessary motivations: People outgrow their current job because they cannot fit into the typical mold of the perfect employee. It results in constant job switching, the need to validate their small wins and a general lack of motivating factors to boost their performance. In return, there is rapid degrowth in the career trajectory.

Equipping Employees with the Right Skills

Hiring the right employees: To equip employees with the right skills, start with hiring the right people. Establish clear job-oriented roles and descriptions that help build a Statement Of Work (SOW). Identify the exact skills necessary to execute the task. Create a checklist of skills and map them to the job description. Ensure you include a set of work tasks and expectations that comes along with the role. When hiring, identify people that fit these criteria.

For existing employees: For existing employees, identify their on-the-job performance and map it to their growth path. Set a few key parameters that will push their career forward, and invest in elearning and training resources to equip your employees with the necessary skills. Pick a few industry benchmarks that can accurately assess their learnings. Then let your team execute the learnings and put them into practice for the assessment, helping your team gauge your training outcomes accurately.

Equipping Employees with the Right Resources

A skilled workforce can be upskilled for better work performance. However, not all individuals lack skills. At times, it might be a case of a lack of the right resources. In this context, understanding the need for the right resources and providing them can help a particular set of employees thrive.

For this, conduct 360-degree feedback to identify factors that are impeding productivity. It could be too much spent on unproductive tasks, executing outdated SOPs, or improper resource allocation.

Unproductive Tasks: Certain repetitive tasks like meetings often take too long, and there is too much back-and-forth. Not all meetings are productive and give constructive results. And that’s one reason to look into such repetitive day-to-day tasks from a productivity angle and eliminate the immediate need to execute them without a clear end-goal and result.

Executing Outdated SOPs: Because some SOPs have been a success in the past doesn’t mean they continue to add value to your employee’s life. Time block to assess such outdated SOPs that aren’t adding value to your employee’s work-life that contribute to your organization’s growth.

Improper Resource Allocation: When budget constraints impede team-wide productivity, re-look at your budgets instead of adding more budget allocation to your to-do lists. Reallocate budgets for projects that need immediate attention. This way, you can identify tools and resources to help with this.

Making Employees More Motivated

Motivated employees are self-driven, with less effort required to push them to deliver outstanding work. It leads to better morale and improved work output—factor in a few ways to use this motivation and match it to your team goals.

Find the right motivating factors: Find the proper motivator for each employee. It could be hierarchical growth or a financial perk. Often work challenges concerning team bonding, job location, or individual personality styles could hinder employees from moving up the rating scale. Identify how these motivating factors can make employees feel heard.

Make employees feel heard: Make employees feel more heard. When you conduct meetings, avoid the top-bottom approach. Instead, follow the ‘Lean Coffee‘ method that allows employees to set an agenda for the meeting and make them more engaged during discussions.

Other meeting techniques that move away from traditional meetings include mindful meetings that emphasize aspects other than work to spark innovation and tech-free meetings that are devoid of any gadgets and solely focus on constructive interaction.

Rejig roles: Switch roles internally so people align with their potential. So, place people in jobs that they enjoy the best or what they are good at. This way, it’s easier to set an expectation in an ideal work setting for the individual, and delivering the work is an expected result of this effort.

Wrapping It Up

Non-performing employees face issues of lack of skills, resources, and motivation. When hiring employees, create a statement of work and map it to the potential skill sets required for the job. Support existing employees with courses and e-learning training. Remove repetitive tasks not tied to the end goal and do away with outdated SOPs.

When your employees have the right resources, guide them to use them to their full potential by identifying their motivating factors, lend a collaborative approach to meetings, and swap roles if required to keep employees engaged and motivated for better work output and productivity.

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