UK employers waste more than £30m a year on under-performing staff, according to exclusive research by Personnel Today and HR consultancy Chiumento.
The Tough Love survey of 800 HR professionals reveals that 96% of respondents have issues with poor performance, with 29% admitting that it is a major problem.
On average, 16% of staff in the organisations surveyed were rated as poor. When calculated using the respondents’ average wage of £22,000 and the average company size of 9,000 staff, this equates to a waste of £32m across the UK. The public sector is the main offender in not dealing with poor performance – 63% of respondents claim under-performing staff are not tackled as it is accepted as part of the culture.
Worryingly, 82% of respondents had reviewed their performance management procedures in the past two years, but were still wasting money on staff who were not up to scratch.
Two-thirds of respondents placed the blame on line managers, who spend an average of 1.6 days a month tackling poor performance, rising to more than two days in the health and retail sectors.
The survey reveals that one of the most common ways of dealing with under-performing staff in organisations is to ‘manage them out’.
This approach is most common in the IT sector, where 54% of survey respondents managed out poor performers. The health and education sectors also took an extreme view of poor performance, with just under half choosing to get rid of problem staff.
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