Productivity must be measured based on output rather than effort, otherwise, you’ll have a firm or community that’s exhausted but unproductive. In companies, there are employees who may be doing “stuff” (imagine Miranda Priestly here), but are actually avoiding real work without you knowing. They consume time, money, resources, and probably your energy too, without handing out material contributions. It is highly likely that they, themselves, are unaware that they’re avoiding real work too!
Here are some signs that an employee is simply avoiding work:
1. They make sure others see them doing something all the time. While they take excessive amounts of breathers when no one’s looking, they make sure that they flip a page or two when someone sees them or click their mouse anywhere on their screen (probably to switch from social media screens to actual work screens). Sometimes it is not this superficial—they could be extremely participative in meetings pouring their hearts out to circular statements they formulated in their heads for hours if not days. Although some work requires a lot of strategic thinking and research, these ones procrastinate, ask only themselves questions they could never answer, and exert very little effort to consult key stakeholders who could have helped them right from the start.
2. They are loud about what other people/teams lack. Never his job, but something’s always lacking from the other department’s output, at least in his eyes. Others may complain about his speed, but he would always go back to the other team’s failure in doing a thing or two. Whenever you offer feedback it always comes back with a finger pointing to another direction. You could sense less accountability when you hear him say things will only improve if team X will do its job better.
3. They mistake creativity for cosmetics. Poppers during presentations, bright colored slides, and fancy transitions—they’re more concerned about the performance instead of its content. Don’t get me wrong, the optics and aesthetic communications are sometimes as critical as the core substance. But these work avoiders exert more effort in what people can immediately judge, perhaps to buy themselves some time to continue building the real work. When critical thinking is required but laziness eats them up, they focus on what’s doable and workable for them, which in many occasions, is the prettying-up of things (a chocolate-coated kale). Things could turn chaotic when you ask them to think about what they’re missing/not thinking about.
Delaying or total avoidance of work commonly roots from being overwhelmed either by the amount of tasks or their complexity. For new employees, it can usually be resolved by breaking out tasks into more doable chunks, as they’re probably grasping at straws because of lack of knowledge and experience. For the seasoned ones, work avoidance could be due to monotony, ego, jealousy, lack of determination, misalignment, losing sight of the end goal, or simply laziness.
If work avoidance leads to having employees performing less than expected, the firm could end up spending more on resources and garner much less profit (could impede organizational growth).
Some of the best ways to manage them are:
1. Coaching. Understand the root cause of work avoidance and apply action items accordingly. While knowledge and skills issues can be addressed through training and development programs, will issues post a demand for more complex solutions, such as counselling, focus group discussions, or even mandating time off.
2. Delegation. Give the bored ones more complex tasks—tasks that will challenge their existing skills and potentially develop new ones in them. Sometimes this is a make or break solution which could end up with the company losing an employee or promoting one.
3. Redesign. Work-life integration can surface itself in the form of having people do what they love. Some creatives are stuck in tasks that require tons of analytical skills, and this could result in fatigue and diminishing outputs/output quality despite it working fine at an earlier time. Job redesigns may vary from simply requiring a different frequency delivery to as complex as a department overhaul.
4. Manage out. Some things are really not meant to be, and forcing expectations may result in lose-lose outcomes. Sometimes it is better to let people go for the betterment of the company and for their own good too! This process could start with a deep-dive, or with formulating a performance improvement plan (PIP), which is supposedly a wake up call. Not to say that PIPs are for managing people out because they are primarily a support tool to help an employee perform better. Nonetheless, through programs such as PIPs, one can see potential that can be cultivated or root causes that are impossible to address with only corporate resources (perhaps divine intervention is required!).