What if once exemplary professional employee suddenly starts working like the most inveterate slacker: makes a lot of mistakes, does not adhere to deadlines, does not accept criticism, and develops conflicts with colleagues.
How to explain it and what to do about it?
The explanation for this situation is likely simple – this is professional burnout. Solutions to this problem may be different.
How to stop prairie fire and prevent your employees from burning our? The plan of action:
Closely monitor the situation in your team and do not ignore problems: it is not going to solve by itself. The automated time tracker of CrocoTime will allow to see the problems in a large team in a timely manner: it should alert you if an employee’s productive time deteriorated sharply.
Identify the reasons for the non-professional conduct of an employee and try to fix them. In the light of the current shortage of qualified personnel, a manager’s time will pay off if the experienced employee will remain in the company.
If the reasons are not clear and there is no possibility to fix them, try to “shake” the employee, e.g. temporarily move him to another department, or supplement his duties with unusual tasks, have a talk.
A feeling of being underappreciated is a common cause of burnout. An employee works hard, does much more than his duty regulation states, stays in the office until late in the evening, when necessary, but the manager does not notice this. Here is where the employee starts to think that his is underappreciated. And again, the time tracker will help to avoid such problems: by objectively assessing the workload of staff, the manager will not forget to encourage and cheer a valuable employee.
If nothing helps don’t be afraid to part ways with an employee. A monitoring statistics will be a conclusive argument in a conversation of dismissal. Looking at the results of the reports, the employee will not be able to say that he is still as productive as before.
An opinion by:
Herman Klimenko, CEO of LiveInternet portal said: “I am ready to tinker with the problems of employees only if we are talking about the complexities of the lives of my deputies, or key personnel. I’m ready to make any concessions and discounts, talk with the staff, go into all the problems – in general, act as a psychotherapist.”
Research by Rabota.ru portal names inability to request a manager to be excused from work as the major demoralizing factor: 33% of respondents answered so.
Remember, using the automated time tracker is definitely needed, but live communication and humane attitude to employees drastically motivates staff and helps to prevent “burnout”. An integrated approach to the problem is the right decision.