A helping hand


Every company wants its employees to
succeed. One way to guide employees
toward their full potential is by using a practice called performance intervention.

Performance intervention is more than a
fancy name for coaching, mentoring or formal performance appraisals, says Don St.
Clair, vice president for enrollment management and marketing and adjunct faculty member of organizational leadership at
Woodbury University. “Performance intervention suggests that when you see a possible performance problem, you’re going to
immediately take action on it in a positive
manner.”

Smart Business spoke with St. Clair
about performance intervention, how it
can best be utilized and what pitfalls to
avoid.

What is performance intervention?

Performance intervention is the concept
of identifying gaps or areas in employees’
performance that can be strengthened or
improved. When employees have an area
that they’re underperforming in, rather
than taking punitive action, which can
even include firing someone, you want to
intervene. You want to take employees
aside and tell them what areas they need to
improve in and how you will help them
meet these expectations.

How can a company best utilize performance
intervention to improve employee productivity?

The first thing that should be done is to
position performance intervention as a
good thing, not a bad thing. The inclination
in many organizations is that people not
meeting expectations should be replaced.
The fact is that employee turnover costs a
lot of money. There is the cost of finding
and recruiting employees, the cost of training employees, the lost productivity when
a position is open and the lost productivity
associated with somebody getting up to
speed. It is important to recognize that dismissal should be the course of last resort.

Performance intervention can be utilized to identify the areas of employee productivity that aren’t where you’d like them to
be. By identifying the areas of employee
performance that could be improved and
then by taking a proactive approach to help
the employee become better, you’re going
to increase productivity, reduce turnover
and improve morale.

How should a company get started with performance intervention?

It starts with being able to identify exactly what it is that you expect from employees. I like to break it into two different categories: the characteristics that you would
like an employee to have and the specific
job outcomes that you would like the
employee to achieve. The characteristics
might be personal. For instance, maybe
you have an employee who does a great
job and is very competent, but doesn’t
always dress well. This can be an issue
with younger employees who have limited
business experience and don’t understand
that you don’t dress for work the same way
you dress for a 9 a.m. physics class. Public
speaking could be another personal characteristic. Maybe you have someone who
is capable but doesn’t speak well publicly.
Performance intervention would address these issues by coaching the employees on
how to dress or how to appropriately
speak in public.

On the other hand, you might want to
address outcomes. For instance, there
might be an employee who is not meeting
sales targets. In this case, you would want
to have a very specific outcome-oriented
intervention to establish how he or she is
doing the job, and how you can help him or
her do better.

What are some pitfalls to avoid?

The number one thing is that employee
interventions need to be positioned as a
positive thing. The performance evaluation
should be going on all the time, not just
once a year. A number of years ago, Ken
Blanchard wrote a book called the “The
One Minute Manager.” This book is about
catching people doing things right and
doing things wrong and identifying them
on the spot. If an employee is doing something really well, you should take a second
out of your day to tell him or her what he
or she did was really great. On the other
hand, if you find someone doing something
wrong, rather than making a note in a file
and talking to him or her about it at their
end-of-the-year performance evaluation,
you should stop them right there and tell
how he or she can approach the situation
better.

Once in place, how should a system be evaluated?

If you’re doing good appraisals and intervening in performance problems timely
and positively then you should have less
turnover than you did before. The idea is
that you don’t want to replace people. You
want to get people into the organization,
get them performing at a high level and
keep them performing at a high level.

DON ST. CLAIR is vice president for enrollment management
and marketing and adjunct faculty member of organizational leadership at Woodbury University. Reach him at [email protected].