It’s March, a time when employers find themselves dealing with office pools, college rivalries
, and a tendency for sports fans to shift their attention from work to the college basketball national championship tournament. The distraction of the “big dance” can cause even the best employees to slack off as they follow games during the workday and compare notes with coworkers also preoccupied with tournament brackets.
If March Madness presents an employer’s only slacker problem, the human resources department and supervisors have it easy. It’s the year-round slackers that pose the bigger issue. Those are the employees who lose their way and don’t get back on track once the nets are cut down after the championship game. They’re the group Steve Albrecht, an author and manager of a training, coaching, and management consulting firm in San Diego, California, terms “smart slackers.”
Albrecht recently led a Business & Legal Resources webinar titled “Managing Challenging Personality Types: Dealing with Bullies, Idea Killers and Smart Slackers” in which he identified various problem employees and gave advice on how to coach them into shape.
Retired on duty?
The smart slackers are the ones who know how to work hard, but they don’t want to. They may be considered missing or retired on duty. They work only when they want to, and they serve as models for other employees who want to slack off, Albrecht says.
Why do they become slackers? Often they’re burned out and dissatisfied. They may have topped out so they can’t advance to the next level, or they don’t want to move up because they’re afraid to take on new responsibilities, Albrecht says. Also, they may want to retire but can’t afford to, and they often miss the “old days” when they had a different boss or before technology passed them by.
How should employers deal with smart slackers? Albrecht says to confront their behavior, attitude, or performance. He says to remind them of their “legacy employee” status. The boss should tell the employee that he or she has been counted on in the past and can be again. Often, the employee has the ability to be a mentor to other employees.
“But the smart slackers are pretty clever guys,” Albrecht says. “They can find their way in the world and make your life difficult because they know how to turn it on, get things done, and they also know how to turn it off.” They may work hard around performance evaluation time or for certain key projects but then return to their missing or retired on duty status.
Often smart slackers and other problem employees don’t take responsibility for the harm they cause and if they don’t see consequences for their behavior, it typically gets worse, Albrecht says, but coaching can be the answer.
“The biggest challenge, I believe, in dealing with some of these personality styles is your ability to control your frustrations and have some patience and wait for the coaching process to take effect,” Albrecht says. The focus for HR and supervisors needs to be on the impact a problem employee has on the business.
Coaching tools
When engaging in corrective coaching—coaching designed to get an employee “out of the penalty box”—Albrecht says he uses a tool called keep/stop/start. The coach identifies practices that the employee needs to keep doing because they work, practices the employee needs to stop doing because they don’t work, and other practices the employee needs to start doing because they would work better.
Coaches also need to use what Albrecht calls the three C’s: communicate, in which the employee is allowed to vent issues while the coach listens carefully without interrupting; clarify, in which the coach uses paraphrased questions to make certain the employee’s concerns are understood; and commit, in which the coach gets the employee’s commitment to change.
If coaching hasn’t worked, Albrecht advises using a personal accountability meeting (PAM). In that meeting, the employer needs to clearly communicate that the employee has to change. The PAM is the last coaching conversation. If changes aren’t made, the next conversation will be discipline.
“I use a PAM as a crossroads meeting,” Albrecht says. “It is a crossroads conversation. The next conversation we have with the employee will be discipline related.”