Work standards slipping among your employees is a risk that you need to consider. Standards don’t always fall because your employees have consciously decided to give up or check out. Sometimes it happens because people forget what they should be doing or start to feel less motivated than they once were. But no matter what the reason is for falling standards, it can affect your business. In addition to resulting in poor work from your employees, it could also mean that they’re not keeping up with important things like health and safety, or other forms of compliance.
Preventing standards from dropping is a must if you want to keep up productivity and produce good results at all times. But how do you stop standards from falling?
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Refresh Their Knowledge
One of the reasons the standard of your employees’ work could drop is that they are lacking the appropriate knowledge. Even if they have learned something before, it’s easy for them to start forgetting. In fact, they can forget something as soon as they’ve learned it. Refreshing their knowledge with appropriate training is a key part of keeping up standards. Use an LMS to organize and deliver your training programs to your employees. It’s important to deliver regular training to your staff. It’s not just new employees who need to receive appropriate training, so don’t forget about existing staff.
Avoid Overloading Employees
When there’s too much to do, it’s easy for standards to start slipping. People just don’t have the time to do everything properly, and they can start to lose their motivation when they feel overwhelmed. There are several things you can do to make sure you’re not giving employees too much work. Firstly, ensure you have enough staff at all times so that everyone is only doing the workload of one person. Secondly, avoid giving employees extra responsibilities that are outside of their job description. And thirdly, communicate with employees to ensure they are coping with their duties.
Provide the Right Tools
Working well without the right tools to do so is more than difficult. Without the appropriate tools, your employees can take a lot longer to do their work or even find it impossible to complete things to their requirements. It’s important to look at the resources you have available for your employees and check that everyone has the tools and materials that they need to get their work done to the standards that you have set. Communicate with your employees to ask them about what they feel might be missing from the resources that are available to them.
Offer Desirable Incentives
People need motivation to help them work and set high standards for themselves. Caring about their work is one way they might be motivated, but it’s also important to consider external forms of motivation that will make them want to work hard. This could include a variety of different perks and benefits offered by your company. They might be rewarded at the end of a project with a bonus or extra paid time off. Or maybe what motivates them is the key benefits in their compensation package, such as excellent medical coverage.
Deliver Feedback
Sometimes employees may let their standards slide without realizing it. This can happen if they’re not receiving regular feedback, for example. They might start to get a little lazy, take shortcuts, or just let things slip their mind, without realizing that they’re affecting the quality of their work. Providing feedback to employees ensures they’re aware of when their work might not be up to standard and what they can do to correct it. There are plenty of opportunities to deliver feedback in both casual and more formal ways, whether it’s day-to-day or when certain milestones are reached.
Give Employees Support
A drop in standards for a particular employee won’t always be directly related to work. It can also be that there is something in their personal life that is making it difficult for them to stay on top of their work. This is where an employer can do their best to be supportive of an employee. There are various ways to offer support that can help an employee in their personal life and help them at work too. You might help by arranging counseling or financial advice, giving the employee some time off, or allowing them to work flexibly while they deal with whatever issues they need to address.
If you want to prevent standards from slipping in your workplace, give your employees the support they need both at work and outside of it.