How to Manage Lazy Team Members – 6 Ways to Deal with Lazy Employees

Working out how to manage lazy team members and taking the right action to reduce or remove the issue is a challenge most managers’ dread. If you ignore lazy employees at work, laziness has a way of spreading into the rest of the team. Taking action quickly is a must. I am sharing 6 tried and tested ways to deal with lazy employees so you can deal with lazy team members effectively and fairly. When you are managing lazy employees, the first action is not to ignore the lazy behaviour. If you do, you are sending a message to the lazy team member and the rest of your team that being lazy is okay. Then laziness starts spreading through the team, and your management ability starts being questioned.  The second action to manage lazy team members is to find out why the employee is being lazy. There are lots of reasons, and once you understand why, then you can work out how to deal with lazy team members much more easily and successfully. Your approach should be tailored to the employee and the situation. When motivating lazy employees, setting expectations is really important. Add clear goals to be achieved, ideally agreed with lazy team member, so that both parties know when expectations have been met or exceeded.  Next when working out how to manage lazy employees in the workplace, listen to all their excuses as to why they are not delivering. Note them down and then go away and go your homework. Demonstrate that all the spurious excuses are not valid and work to remove the valid ones with training, resources, and mentoring. When managing lazy staff, providing honest feedback is very helpful to them and reinforces your expectations with them. To manage lazy employees monitor their improvements through tracking their measurable output.  Finally, after going through these ways to manage lazy team members and you are seeing limited or no improvement, take formal action with the lazy employee. Put them on a Performance Improvement Plan, involve HR and finally use the disciplinary process of your company. Don’t let lazy team members carry on being lazy. Take fair and corrective action quickly. Good luck!

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