Most people want to do a good job. It is a natural instinct innate to all human beings to want to perform their best at their tasks. However, sometimes even the most hard-working staff fall short of your work expectations, whether they are office-based or virtual. When this happens, how should you handle such situations?
If your staff doesn’t seem reliable at times, but are skillful, competent, and efficient otherwise, here are four points you might consider checking.
1. Understanding – As a business owner and a boss, you must always consider the importance of communication and understanding. This might be a common issue when working with staff from the Philippines. Working with a remote staff might lead to communication and cultural gaps, which you can easily address by setting clear tasks and goals. Communication is a two-way street and is essential to business success. Take note of questions and feedback, and make sure that your message is not only heard but also understood.
2. Capability – Do you have the right person for the task? It is a given that you would want to hire a staff who seems the fittest for a job role. But it is difficult to have a hundred percent skills fit. Take for example a professional virtual assistant. Maybe your staff is a terrific writer, but an average web designer. Or maybe, you have a good researcher who is not that good with numbers. Consider calibrating and re-calibrating your staff for their positions, and assess their abilities. See what areas need improvement, and maybe provide training, or access to seminars to help them upskill. Learning where your staff’s strengths and weaknesses lie, could truly optimize what your staff can do for your business.
3. Resources – Equip your workforce with everything they need for their job, and there would be no room for mediocrity. Think of this as an investment. By providing your staff with the right resources for them to do their work—such as better computers, access to research materials, and updated software programs—you get the most out of your employees. Poor equipment might hold your staff back from doing the best that they can do for you. Leverage your staff’s skills and expertise with the right and necessary resources, and you just might see a boost in their efficiency.
4. Willingness – Attitude matters. Work ethic matters. Sometimes, you may find yourself having a truly skilled staff who is unfortunately not delivering on their potential. When you’ve provided them with all the aforementioned things above, then you might want to examine their willingness to do the job. Could there be any other external factors which you can’t control, affecting your staff’s reliability? When this happens, have a genuine conversation with your staff, trust your gut, then make a decision regarding your future working relationship.
There are excellent workers, and there are ineffective workers. As a leader, sometimes, you would need to give your staff a little push to help the latter become one of the former. And while in some cases, there are staff who are simply unreliable, a huge number of employees truly just want to do their job well—all they need is the right kind of support from you.
