Your team is the backbone of your business. This means you need a team that can hold up to the standards of your business and grows with your business too. The goal is to find people who are gung-ho about learning and advancing your business, but not everyone will work out. The sad truth is, even if you find people who seem to be all about helping your business grow with their talents, they might ultimately cause major issues in your operations.
So how can a bad employee really impact your bottom line?
Let’s take a look:
How Bad Employees Affect Your Bottom Line
Constant Re-dos
When you start to dictate tasks to your employees, it should be like granting them access to the inside of your business. Of course, this will come with a learning curve, but when does that learning curve excuse no longer work?
Typically, it’s a great practice to set up a training timeline for your employee. For each task, set up a training period that allows them to ask as many questions as they need to, so they can understand what is expected of them.
Take social media, for example, maybe you have a strict client that expects certain criteria with each and every post. Setting up your SOP for your new employee is a great way to start, so they can learn, adapt, and growth with the process. This will require re-dos at first, but when do these re-dos become too much?
After your employee starts to catch on, you should start ticking that timeline clock you set up for your new crew. After your employee understands the operations and processes, that’s when the re-dos will start to bring you down.
One or two little re-dos won’t exactly hurt your business (depending on the size of the project of course), but re-doing entire weeks of work for your employee means it will be on your shoulders. At the end of the day, too many re-dos really comes down to the ability to trust your employees to handle the tasks they are given.
A misunderstanding of what is asked is no big deal as long as you can trust that employee to re-do the work. If you can’t, it’s time to find someone else.
Morale
If you have a team, you need to build with complimentary personality types. This way, your team can start building and developing in a healthy way as long as they are productive relationships.
Sometimes you will run into situations with your team that causes them to falter. This will typically happen in one of two ways; too positive, or too negative. Either way, it has to do with morale.
It’s not a bad thing to have a team that really gets along well, but, sometimes, that cohesive team can get along a bit too well. This can lead to a lack of work in light of conversation or extremely flawed outcomes due to being too cooperative. Although this a bad thing, it’s easier to reign in than the other option.
If you have a problem cog in the gear set, the assembly will not turn. That’s the same as having an employee that destroys your team mentality. If there is a member of your team that is always bringing other team members down in unproductive manners, they are killing your morale. There are constructive ways to challenge people, but simple insults will only cause doubt and resentment in the targeted team members. Keep in mind, the targeted team member can also be the problem… it just depends on the situation. Self-deprecation can hurt other members of your team too.
Stunted Growth
Stunted Growth doesn’t always mean you have a bad employee. It could mean you have helped someone find their comfort spot for productivity in your company. When we mention stunted growth, we are talking about those employees that you know have more to give, but simply won’t continue to learn.
This stunted growth can also start to hurt their productivity and the team’s productivity. These types of attitude issues can cause your team to fall behind as your stunted employee waits to get their work done. They become too comfortable, and they start to slip.
When they slip, they will produce work that shows it, and they won’t be learning anything to make up for it.
Constant Complaints
Understanding the in’s and out’s of your job can be tricky, but constant complaints never helped anyone, the complaining employee included. Complaints can be a productive conversation piece for you and your team, but constant complaints can drag your team down. Whether the complaints are about the team, the work, the client, the product, the service, or whatever, hearing them constantly will drag your productivity through the dirt.
Complaints on a constant basis are a great way to build self-doubt, team-doubt, company-doubt, and I can promise your customers will feel that impact. That’s not good.
Talk about the complaints with your downtrodden team member and control the situation.
“I Can Do It”
This is one of the biggest red flags you can get from an employee, especially if you know they have never been trained on that task.
When you ask them if they understand what you are showing them, and they respond with “I can do it,” they most likely can’t.
I know that sounds crazy, but it’s basically a guaranteed sign that they didn’t listen to everything you told them. If they don’t break down the process you just explained, “I can do it” can come back to bite you, quickly.
Instead of finding the “I can do that” person, look for the “that makes sense” person. They are more likely to adapt to what you are doing and thrive when you challenge them to progress.
Conclusion
Finding the right people for the job can be a challenge, but don’t shoot yourself in the foot by jumping to the first “qualified” person. Instead of taking the impact of a “qualified” bad employee, try taking on a bright and adaptive person who wants to be involved with your business and has a variety of talents.
At the end of the day, qualified or unqualified, an employee that wants to learn and puts the effort into doing so is what you want. They don’t always come from where you expect, and often times the ones that you thought could be the golden ticket could just be poop spray painted gold that doesn’t bring you any luck.
Don’t let them make your company smell because they looked good on paper. Make sure they can do their job through self-motivation.