The First (and most likely) "Cricket"

As mentioned in the post below, there are several reasons that employees may not be doing what they should be doing, and the most obvious (but most often overlooked) reason is that the employee may not know what he or she is supposed to do.

Early in my career, I accepted a job as a recruiter for a medical staffing agency. Fresh out of college and wanting to impress my employer with my thoroughness, I would conduct lengthy and comprehensive resume reviews with each potential recruit. No stone went unturned, so to speak. I was pretty proud of my work. So imagine my bewilderment when I received my first performance evaluation and received a low score in the area of "interview skills", with the supervisor's written comment of "takes too long to complete applicant interviews". The supervisor explained that applicant interviews should take no longer than fifteen minutes each, and my average interview time was 30 minutes. The problem was that no one ever told me that! It was an unwritten "rule of thumb" (my supervisor's exact words) in that organization.

Take a minute to think about how many unwritten "rules of thumb" that you may be imposing upon your staff. Are you assuming that they know them? Are those expectations in their job descriptions or work plans? The bottom line is that you are setting an employee up to fail if you don't clearly communicate your expectations prior to the employee attempting the work. To ensure that your employees know what to do:

1) Provide the instuctions/expectations in writing to the employee.
2) Verbally review the instructions/expectations with your employee.
3) Have the employee tell you what the instructions/expectations are (this helps to ensure that you are both on the same page).
4) Follow up with feedback for the employee in a timely way (don't wait until performance review time to point out problems or provide praise).

Eliminate the possibility that your employee does not know what to do before moving on to address other, more complicated, reasons for poor performance.