Your organisation’s culture is determined by what people think are the behaviours you reward and punishment. Not what you actually reward and punishment and not what you say you reward and punishment. So a delay in dismissing an underperforming employee can send the wrong message.
Conflict management is part of the job but managers. Avoiding challenging an employee over their work competence will result in more and bigger problems down the line. Ignoring a personality conflict between two team members won’t result in them resolving it but lead to an escalation and drag in other team members. In action by the line manager often results in individuals taking a grievance out against the manager.
HR are often accused of putting obstacles in the way of tackling “problem” employees. But in my experience HR are often the ones encouraging managers to take early deceive action to challenge poor performance or unacceptable behaviour. For example managers sometimes leave it to an employee is reaching the end of their probationary period before contacting HR to inform then they consider the individual’s performance was unsatisfactory and should not be offered a permanent contact. A few questions from HR reveal that the individual has not up to this point been given feedback that their performance is not satisfactory, has therefore not been given targets or the opportunity to improve let alone any written record of concerns. In effect the manager has tolerated this performance. The probationary period maybe extended and the individual may eventually be dismissed but the damage to the culture has been done.
Managers ability and willingness to challenge bad practices, poor performance and inappropriate behaviour is as important as their enthusiasm and energy in encouraging best practice. HR assist managers in encouraging best practices by creating and promoting employee development opportunities, they also support and encourage managers to challenge bad practice, unsatisfactory performance and unacceptable behaviour. But it is often managers reluctance to challenge behaviour such as absenteeism , poor time keeping, missed deadlines, avoidance of training and development opportunities, a negative attitude or cynicism until it becomes a major problem that creates the impression that the organisation tolerates this type of behaviour, no mater what senior managers may say. This situation is then compounded by a line manager who rather than risk allocating important work to an uncooperative, unreliable team member gives the work to other members of the team. The message is be lazy and incompetent and you will be given less to do whilst your conscience colleagues will be rewarded with extra work.
In order to capture the idea of an unofficial or “real “ culture within an organisation some management gurus have defined culture as what people do when no one is looking. I think it would be truer to say culture is the gap between what HR believe should happen and what individual managers are prepared to make happen.
