A recent article I read about how to hire the right people for the right jobs gives a statistic attributed to the US Department of Labor that 50% of all new employees are gone within the first six months of the job. I’ve tried but failed to verify this number; I even get different answers when I try to find out what the overall average turnover rate is. So, I take this statistic with a grain of salt (although it may be true, say in the fast food world, for example), but it did get me thinking. I’ve seen a number of new hires who clearly demonstrated, within their first six months on the job, that they really weren’t going to work out, yet I’ve rarely (if ever) seen them leave, neither on their own accord or through dismissal.
While I suspect this situation is true in the business world, too, I would bet it’s more prevalent in academia and less prevalent in the highest performing institutions in and out of the real world. Correctly hiring and firing people is a difficult task. I won’t discuss hiring here, other than to say sometimes you hire the right person, but put him in the wrong job, or give her the wrong supervisor. A person underperforming in a new job may simply be in the wrong seat on the bus, to use a Good to Great analogy. I don’t have any magical means to determine if it’s the person or the position that’s wrong, so I just note it as another area where careful attention to the process and good management are again needed.
Academia – and observatories are run more like academic than commercial institutions, for better or worse – has a specific mission to train and educate. This educational mission, I believe, is one reason for the reluctance to let a new employee go who isn’t performing. Perhaps they just need more training, or more time to learn the system, goes the logic. Additionally, through the fundamental trait of academic life called tenure, people have grown accustomed to having underperformers remain on staff with nothing that can be done to move them on. This sort of tone, combined with a general desire to avoid confrontation and spend as little time as possible in managing, means poor hiring decisions are rarely actively corrected.
While I’m all for giving the right person in the wrong position a chance, there are multiple reasons why we should be more responsive to removing new employees that are simply that aren’t going to work out. First of all, keeping these employees is bad for business (remember, astronomy is a business) as they obviously won’t be performing as well as your star employees. Perhaps even more important, though, is that keeping these people on board is bad for morale and makes the rest of your staff work also less efficient – both through morale loss and having to cover for the poor job of the subpar employee. When someone is hired who clearly isn’t right for an organization (or a position), most people can tell right away; it’s not a secret held only by a few manager or HR staff. When employees see new hires with poor performance being kept on, they lose respect for managers (and HR) and lose motivation to perform at their best,seeing as how poor performance is apparently enough to stay on the job. One bad hire can lower the performance of an entire group or division. And finally, as both Jim Collins in Good to Great and Buckingham and Coffman in First, Break all the Rules say, you aren’t doing anyone – you, your organization, or the employee – any good by keeping on people who are simply not going to work out. You lose performance and the employee loses a chance to actually find employment that is a better match to his skills.
So, all this is really to say that the hiring process does not end when the new employee starts her first day on the job. Managers and HR personnel should be continually assessing employees’ performance and fit to their jobs, making corrections as necessary – and making it clear to the new hires that their evaluations don’t end when they get the job!
[4Jun10: A reader pointed out I have oversimplified things here- see the comments below for what I really meant to say and please continue the discussion, if you like.]
Like any other management decision, mistakes can be made in deciding whom to hire. The best leaders Scot has seen are those who can recognize their mistakes and correct them – whether they be in hiring or anything else. Luckily, Scot hasn’t (or so he hopes) yet been anyone’s hiring mistake.
Hi Scott, I’ve been reading your blog for a while now and find it very helpful. I’m an academic who has been thrust (unofficially) in to a project management role, so it is particularly apropos for me. I have to question one of your statements on this post though:
“When employees see new hires with poor performance being kept on, they lost respect for managers (and HR) and lose motivation to perform at their best …”
What’s the basis for that idea? It goes against my instincts. I’ve no training in this, so this might be management 101 level material that I’m missing.
From my own perspective, if a new hire is struggling and the manager is backing them up and trying to help them succeed, that would improve my morale to see. If I see another employee (even a new one) treated as a commodity and fired if they aren’t the optimal part for that piece of the machine, that has negative effects on my morale. I start to think that I shouldn’t go out of my way to perform at my best if all I am is a cog in a machine, I should perform well enough to not get fired and that’s it.
This worry about the lost respect for managers strikes me as being a very … manager-centric view. The underlying idea seems to be that as a manager, “when I look good, the employees are happy and productive.”
As an employee, I would think that’s backwards. It should be: “When the employees are happy and productive, the manager looks good.”
Perhaps I’m missing the point, I won’t argue that a hire which is a complete disaster is clearly not good for the organization, but in my mind, someone who is “underperforming” isn’t at that level.
Hi Josh,
Thanks very much for the comment. And I agree with you, but did not make my point very clearly. What I should have said is not “when an underperforming employee is kept on, everyone else loses motivation and morale”, but “when nothing is done about an underperforming employee, everyone else loses motivation and morale.” I didn’t mean to imply, although I did, that all poor performing employees should be dismissed, but that their performance should be addressed. My mindset assumed that efforts to work with the employee to improve performance have been tried and failed, or that the employee is such an obvious mismatch to the position/organization that further attempts at bringing the employee up to speed are not likely useful.
I had been thinking of several people I have worked with who were continually causing the organization problems, but whom nobody ever properly dealt with – either to explain to them that what they were doing was not helpful to them or the organization, or to re-assign them to where they better, or remove them from the organization entirely. In these cases, when everyone sees a problem that is not being dealt with, the loss of respect and morale I discussed is obvious.
You are correct in pointing out that when an underperforming employee, through proper coaching and mentoring, evolves to become a high performer, there is a gain in respect and morale. This is obviously the better approach than dismissal. But when these efforts have been tried, and there are still obvious problems (most every organization has one or two people like this), not doing something more severe (like re-assignment or dismissal) rapidly kills morale and involvement. Thanks for pointing out my oversimplification and unclear context above.
scot
Scot,
Interesting article. My perception is that there two secondary factors at play that contribute to this problem that you didn’t explicitly mention:
1) There’s often pressure on the recruitment panel to fill the position, even if none of the candidates come over as a really good fit. My experience is that people that were hired as “the best of a bad bunch” (if you’ll forgive the blunt expression), or alternatively as “the only applicant that’s actually qualified, so we don’t have any choice anyway” are less likely to work out. I’m not suggesting an r=1 correlation here – sometimes someone comes over great an interview and doesn’t work out, sometimes you reluctantly take what you’ve got and they turn out great, but I do think recruitment panels would do well in such situations to have a frank discussion about whether they actually should fill the position or not. Of course if the position being empty places hardship on the other team members, it can be very difficult to justify not taking a somewhat qualified applicant.
2) It seems to me that there’s a general perception, especially in academia, that it’s very difficult to fire or otherwise get rid of someone from a job. As a manager, I’ve been sent on courses that explain things like how you go about firing someone for unacceptable behavior (harassment etc), and the party is line is a series of verbal and written warnings, documenting what they did each time and having them sign something to say they acknowledge being told not to do that. Given all the documentation you’re supposed to keep (of specific, dismissal type offenses) to defend your position if they argue that they’re being dismissed unfairly or whatever, it’s difficult to see how one would create such a water tight case for someone who just “wasn’t really working out”.
Of course, it’s generally a good thing that firing people on a whim is discouraged, but I’d certainly be interested to know the perspective from a legal / HR viewpoint of how difficult it would be and how one would go about getting rid of someone in that situation.
Cheers,
Paul.
Hi Paul,
First, I agree there are about a billion ways to hire the wrong person and far fewer ways to hire the right person. Hiring the “best of the bunch” is certainly not one of the latter!
i also agree that academia’s documentation requirements can make it difficult to fire someone, but with lawsuits so prevalent everywhere, I don’t think this situation is unique to academia. I think some keys are to use the probation period aggressively – prolonging it, if necessary. Another is to keep up with the documentation and honest performance appraisals. A record of good (or at least not BAD) reviews, often made to avoid conflict, can cast serious doubt on the motivations and results of later bad reviews, once people actually do start building up the needed documentation.
scot