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Oracle Tips by Burleson |
Poor Job
Performance
Inadequate job performance occurrences tend to
organize most often into the three general categories of productivity,
lack of skills, and quality of results.
Productivity
There are some IT employees who are consistently
non-productive at work for various and sundry reasons. They may just
be too laid back by nature, have poor morale, worked previously in a
slower-paced environment, are overwhelmed by multitasking, or are
intentionally causing a work slowdown for some personal reason.
It is not a simple task to quantify the
productivity of computer professionals since they do not work on a
production line with easily tracked units of work. Most IT job
responsibilities are more subjective and many require large amounts of
time to resolve unplanned events. In a production environment, this
time would be considered non-productive since widgets, for example,
are not being produced. In the professional ranks, technical problem
resolution is an integral and valued job responsibility that should be
recognized by management.
Given the subjectivity of much of the computer
professional’s responsibilities, productivity can still be measured
through project and task deliverables attained within target dates.
Any negative anomalies in such assignments should be discussed with
the employee. Just the act alone of discussing productivity issues
with an individual may provide sufficient impetus for the employee to
be more vigilant in their responsibilities.
The manager might uncover in discussions valid
reasons why a person’s productivity was perceived to be below par.
This occurs fairly frequently in IT since there are so many
dependencies between support groups building the various components of
the infrastructure. Nonetheless, the IT manager must carefully observe
and stay informed of their staff’s quantity of results.
Lack of Productivity Story
A programmer was nearing retirement. The problem
was he seemed to be nearing retirement for as long as 10 years.
Anyway, he was finally less than two years from his anticipated ride
into the sunset.
This created a productivity issue. He had a poor
work ethic. He always completed the minimal amount of work to
satisfy the business requirements. The work results could have been
better in most cases, and there certainly were not any of the extras
that could have provided exponential benefit to the company. Writing
the application code, testing, and promoting it to production was an
arduous process. He would have to be reminded continually that his
assignments were due or past due, that we had other groups waiting for
his code, and in general what he should be working on. He would lose
track of what he actually was assigned to work on. He was shown how to
use checklists and “to do” lists but that did not help either. When he
was reminded of one task, he would forget all the others.
In addition, he did not assist his teammates with
their work even when it was obvious that they were carrying a heavy
burden for the group. Teamwork
is very important in an IT
organization and leaving team peers to fend for themselves does not
foster camaraderie. So his lazy attitude caused others in the
department to shy away from responding to his requests for assistance.
People just did not trust that he had made sufficient effort on his
own before requesting the help of others.
He was fortunate that the company was able to find
him another less-demanding job in another department where he could be
fairly productive and finish out his final tour of duty.
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