Okay, that may sound off the wall, but what about an employee who is so lazy or idle they get little if anything done? To make matters worse they tend to distract other employees from getting their work done. It could make one wonder if this employee ever really “arrived” to work or if that employee may just as well have stayed in bed in their pajamas.

This “pajama” employee can’t make deadlines and always has some excuse for why things aren’t getting done. They can be very clever at producing nothing but they know how to look busy. Or they take no initiative and need orders to do anything. There are solutions to get people back to work and more productive.

MOST COMMON PRODUCTIVITY KILLERS AT WORK

A national survey was done of over 2100 hiring and HR managers in June 2015 by Career Builder and Harris Poll regarding employees being distracted from their work. Here are the top 5 productivity killers:

• 52% Cell phones/texting
• 44% The Internet
• 37% Gossip
• 36% Social media
• 31% Email

There were even some strange ones like, flying drones around the office, printing pictures of animals and naming them after their co-workers and posting them around the office, playing a video game on cell phone while in the bathroom stall.

In an effort to curb such activity some employers put in restrictions such as:

• Blocking certain websites.
• Ban personal phone use.
• Schedule break times.
• Monitor email/internet.

While these may all be valid attempts to curb such problems do they really fully solve them?

In many training workshops I have done for both large and small corporations, I have asked the staff to imagine what it would be like if someone were to have a camera on them 24 hours a day. You can see the audience of staff cringe. One for one they all know they could be more productive at work.

Unfortunately it is becoming more and more common in the workplace to find such non-productive activity and people in general tolerate it. For this reason I actually created a 42 minute video called Emotions in the Workplace that goes into detail on the HR function and how to spot the best and the worst staff. And how to deal with them.

These types—the non-team players—can cause any executive to become frustrated and begin to believe that all employees are lazy and resort to just using punishment to drive his staff. But this over the long haul will not make a highly productive team with high morale.

A SOLUTION

I am going to give you one of the simplest but most powerful solutions I know of.

Be interested!

You can actually speed up an employee or a group of people for that matter, as an executive by being interested in what they are doing. By being interested you can actually get people to do what you want them to do and there is nothing wrong with that.

The way you can be interested is through daily inspections. Get out from behind your desk or away from your own work as much as you can and go around and inspect the various jobs and/or departments of your company. And when you inspect them, don’t inspect them from the attitude of what can you find them doing wrong, inspect them by being truly interested in what they are doing. This will show your employees that someone is interested in what they do and will also acknowledge them whether you voice it or not. Employees often don’t realize just how valuable their work really is. It takes a lot of interest both on the executive’s part and of the employee to keep the employee at his job all the way through.

The size of your organization and/or the type of work you do can monitor how many inspections you can do daily. You may have such a large organization that you don’t have time to see everyone every day. Or you may be so busy servicing clients or customers yourself it is difficult to break away. In that case you schedule on your calendar your inspections for each staff/department. But make it a point to see them as often as possible and generate as much interest in what they are doing that you can. You will see a difference!

I would love to hear from you any successes from doing the above.

And don’t forget, if you’re in the Sacramento area on November 4th, to come to our 2nd “Ignite Sacramento Business” workshop. It will be at the Sheraton Grand in downtown Sacramento starting at 7pm.

Rohn Walker