Human resources and performance management go together like America and apple pie. Today, I’ll be discussing performance gaps, what causes them, and what you can do to close them.

Photo by Lumaxart

The Performance Gap

I’ve mentioned in previous articles that HR’s most critical and value added role in an organization is to align employee behaviors with the organization’s business strategies. The difference between the behaviors you want your employee to demonstrate and the behaviors they actually exhibit is called a performance gap.

Performance gaps have four potential causes:

• Lack of skills, knowledge or ability
• Incorrect role expectations
• Lack of resources
• Lack of motivation

Let’s look at each one in a bit more detail.

KSAs (or lack thereof)

This is a fairly common issue. Sometimes, an employee just lacks the knowledge, skills or ability to perform. When this is the cause, you have two options:

• Train the employee
• Remove the employee from the role (and replace him or her with someone who has the KSAs)

Which of these two choices should you take? It really depends on your situation. If the needed skills can be learned easily, or if it would be very costly to refill the position, you may want to train the current employee. If the employee is in way over his head, or if he can be replaced pretty easily, that may be a better option.

Replacing an employee doesn’t mean you need to terminate him or her, either. Sometimes employees end up in roles that are poorly suited for their skill set. You can do both your organization and the individual a favor by finding a different position for which he or she is a better match.

Role Expectations

Employers often assume that when an employee isn’t performing, it’s because he lacks the skills needed to do the job. Sometimes the employee just doesn’t know something is expected of him. Correcting this is so easy – just tell him what he’s supposed to be doing!

You may also want to look at the manager, and make sure that there are no communication issues. You may also want to evaluate the staffing function and make sure that the role expectations are being clearly communicated during the recruiting process.

When you identify a performance gap, your first step should be to ensure that there are no role expectation issues. If you explain the employee’s responsibilities and you’re still seeing issues, move on to one of the other causes.

Resources

Photo by Lumaxart

Its possible that an employee can have the knowledge needed to perform his job, clearly understand what’s expected of him, and he can still not meet performance expectations. You should ask yourself, does this person have the resources necessary to perform the job.

Identifying this cause can be a bit difficult. Sometimes the kinks can actually occur in areas not related to the employee. For example, let’s say your engineer is expected to produce a new product each quarter, but for the last two quarters her product launches have missed target by a month. This was a clearly stated business objective, so your first assumption may be that the engineer doesn’t have the skills necessary to complete the task.

Upon further investigation, you discover that the cause of the performance issue isn’t the engineer, but rather that the design team is late in getting the product specifications to the engineer, which leaves her with less time than is necessary to create the product. The resources that she needs – the design specs – are being given to her.

I’ve seen organizations terminate talented people for performance issues, only to later realize that the performance gaps were caused by things outside of that person’s control. It’s critical that you ensure a lack of resources isn’t the cause.

Motivation

It’s certainly possible that your employee could have the skills to perform a job, know exactly what’s expected of them and be given all of the resources they need, and still not meet your performance expectations. Employers are often quick to terminate employees in this situation, often under the assumption that motivation is innate.

The truth is, the employee may lack motivation for a variety of reasons, ranging from job assignment structure to management style issues to dissatisfaction with compensation and bonus plans. Before you let an individual go, consider whether or not minor tweaks in how you motivate your employees could make a difference.

How does your organization address performance issues?