IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done (15 page)

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R—Realistic:
A goal is realistic because the resources needed to achieve it are available and can be assigned to this goal.

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T—Timely:
Set a deadline for the goal so that it is not a continuous “work in progress” with no end in sight.

Salary Review

The salary review is often associated with the performance review. Some companies like to do them at the same time, whereas others intentionally like to treat them as separate events and schedule them at different times of the year. In general, when it comes to salary reviews, you as a manager will be told that the increase in your salary budget will be a certain percentage. In short, that means if you want to give one person a little more, you have to give someone else a little less.

Oftentimes, HR will give you some guidelines about increases based on the performance review ratings. For example, top performers should get an increase within a certain percentage range, average performers get another range, and poor performers get less or nothing. The guidelines from HR may also factor in where someone is on the pay scale. For example, if a programmer is already very well paid for their job, their increase may be scaled back some. In many cases, between the HR guidelines and the overall budget you were given, you may find that you have very little wiggle room for your own discretion—you may be tweaking increases by just a few tenths of a percentage point. You may end up spending a few hours with a spreadsheet trying to maximize the budget you’ve been given and come up with a reasonable increase for each employee. The process for bonuses can be just as involved.

If an employee is disappointed in their increase, it sometimes helps to explain the process so that they understand you just aren’t deciding the increase amounts on a whim and that they see there’s a structure and policy behind the decisions.

Be careful if an employee talks about another employee’s salary. Your response should be direct and along the lines of: “anything related to Mark is confidential and has no bearing on you and is not something I will discuss with you. However, I’m happy to talk about your job, your goals and accomplishments, your salary, and my evaluation of your performance, as well as the overall salary review process.”

Disciplinary Problems and Terminations

At some point in your career you’re going to have to have some difficult conversations with a team member or make some difficult decisions. There can be a variety of reasons that lead up to these, including:

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A poor hiring decision

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Performance problems or skills deficiency

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Employee not fitting in with the organization’s or team’s culture

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Personal life impacting work life

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Economic conditions impacting the company

All managers hate having these types of conversations with employees. They are difficult and they generally make both you and the employee very uncomfortable. However, there are some basic guidelines to help ensure that the discussions are effective and to correct a problem before it gets too severe.

Disciplinary Problems

Employee problems come in all shapes and sizes, everything from problems with quality of work to punctuality, from bad attitudes and not following procedures to spending too much time on Facebook. More extreme situations can include things such as violence, theft, harassment, ethics violations, substance abuse, and racism. In some cases, a company may have a clearly stated zero-tolerance policy, and once the company believes there is sufficient evidence to confirm that an incident happened, the employee is immediately terminated—no coaching, no warning, no probationary period.

Although each situation has to be approached uniquely, depending on the circumstances and the individuals involved, there are general guidelines to follow.

First, when something is brought to your attention, you have to make the decision on how to handle it. In some of the more extreme cases, it is very clear that you must involve others immediately, such as HR, Security, Legal, and possibly even law enforcement. In the less extreme, and more traditional, employee problem situations, you have greater latitude as to how to handle them. How do you decide? Your HR rep can be a great source of guidance, as well as company policies. As a general rule, if you’re unsure, speak to HR. Also, consider how it might reflect on you if you’re made aware of a problem and decided to wait before informing others. In the case of an employee who takes too long a lunch, that’s probably not much of a problem. However, it’s a very different story if you don’t do anything if someone tells you that one of your employees used racial epithets.

In extreme cases, such as situations where violence is involved, HR may step in entirely and take over the handling of the situation. In other cases, HR may work closely with you or just give you some guidance. For the less extreme cases, you may be handling it all on your own until you feel it is necessary to escalate to HR.

Outside of the extreme examples mentioned earlier, you should look at these situations as an opportunity to grow, learn, and, most rewarding of all, coach an employee to get him on the right track. A less extreme example of an employee problem might be his excessive surfing of the Web during the workday. His performance is suffering and the rest of his team resents having to “carry” him. This is a problem you can—and should—address as a manager without involving others.

As is always the case, communication is the key from the outset. Also, you want to approach the situation in a measured manner. You should always be careful to have the facts correct, not just rely on some rumors you heard in the break room. Depending on the situation, you may want to give it some time to see if there’s a pattern of this behavior or if it’s just a one-off occurrence. In the case of the employee taking too long a lunch, for example, it makes sense to see how often this occurs. (You also don’t want to be the manager who gets a reputation for calling someone on the carpet the first time they are 10 minutes late.)

When it’s clear there’s a problem, you need to discuss it with the employee. You need to explain to the employee what has occurred, why it is wrong, and the impact it’s having on others and the department. Then you must make it clear what sort of change in behavior you are expecting to see and that you expect to see that change immediately. For more specific issues, such as delivering reports with errors, the corrective steps are pretty clear. In other cases, such as weak technical skills, you as the manager may have to be involved in arranging for training or partnering the employee with a more experienced team member. Still in other cases, such as poor attitude or disorganization, you may have to be even more involved to help coach the employee to see the problem, its impact, and how to address changing the pattern of behavior. Sometimes, the employee isn’t even aware of the issue and as soon as it is brought up, it is resolved. At this point, you don’t have to formalize anything in the employee’s file, but do make notes for yourself about the discussion.

As you continue to monitor and observe the employee, make sure to keep the communication lines open. If you see that things are changing for the better, give some immediate and direct positive feedback. If things are not changing, point that out as well. While each situation varies, if you have two heart-to-heart conversations with an employee and the behavior doesn’t improve enough or fast enough, it’s time to have a discussion with HR. At this point, it may be appropriate to give the employee a formal written warning. A written warning generally recounts the problems, the discussions you’ve had, the problem’s impact, and the behavior changes you expect to see. It will probably also make reference to the fact that failure to address the problem will lead to further disciplinary action, up to and including termination. HR usually has a standard template or format for these and will often have the Legal department review the document.

Delivery of a written warning usually comes in a meeting with yourself, HR, and the employee, where the situation is reviewed and the employee is given the warning memo. Very often, a written warning is the kick-in-the-pants necessary to get an employee on track. Other times, the employee may just “shut down” entirely and you can see that things are not likely to improve. The number and timing of the discussions and warnings will vary from organization to organization, on policy, and on the specific circumstances.

If the situation continues, the next steps are usually a final written warning and then termination.

Layoffs and Terminations

If an employee has been a performance problem and you’ve taken the appropriate progressive disciplinary actions outlined earlier regarding discussions and warnings and the employee has still not improved, it is time to terminate the employee. In all likelihood, by this point, the employee may not be terribly surprised. Whether you, HR, or both inform the employee, the phrase “you’re fired” is usually not used. More common ways of saying it include “we are terminating your employment,” “today is your last day,” and “we’re letting you go.” While no termination is a good one, and more than one manager has lost considerable sleep over it, if you handled the disciplinary process properly, you should take some comfort in the fact that you did everything you could and gave this employee every opportunity to address the problem. It then fell to you to take the next step, and if you didn’t it would now appear to your boss that you’re not performing
your
job.

More difficult than terminations related to disciplinary problems are the layoffs related to economic conditions. In these situations, you may be directed that you have to cut a certain number of employees and it becomes your job (either alone or in discussion with peers, HR, or your manager) to decide who. These can be the most gut-wrenching decisions you’ll have to make as a manager because you are severely impacting people’s lives. You need to focus on thinking objectively:

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If the company is shutting down some projects and initiatives, who are the people in your organization on those projects?

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Which employees show the greatest capacity (technical skill sets, attitude, and work ethic) to take on additional work if the department size is reduced?

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Are there already any weak performers or disciplinary problems on the team?

These are difficult and challenging situations. Not only are the layoffs difficult enough, but morale will suffer, and it’s entirely possible some of the remaining people will resign soon after because they are afraid that they “may be next.”

Regardless of the situation, the discussion should be done in private, and enough time should be provided for an employee who becomes emotional and need to regain their composure. Sometimes HR will review some paperwork (e.g., regarding benefits, unemployment insurance) or tell them that they’ll be receiving a packet in the mail in a few days. Depending on the policy and the circumstances, an employee may be escorted out of the building immediately.

HR will probably offer some guidance, but it’s usually a good idea to speak to your team in these situations, particularly in the case of layoffs. Gather the team together, explain what happened, the difficult economic conditions, and so on. Allow them to ask questions. Give them time to be upset by the situation. Explain to them that things will be tougher now, with a reduced work force, and that you’ll be relying on them more than ever. If possible, try to bring some closure to the situation by saying that these are all the layoffs that were planned.

In the case of a termination related to disciplinary problems, you should not reveal too much about the circumstances, but it’s usually appropriate to inform the team that Francine is no longer with the company. It sure beats people spreading rumors about why Francine is no longer around.

The termination package available to employees who are let go is usually dictated by company policy and sometimes law (e.g., continuation of medical benefits). Some companies may offer things such as outplacement services, company-paid benefits, or perhaps even use of an office and phone for a while. Severance pay is often defined by some sort of formula that HR can provide. However, there is usually some latitude depending on the circumstances. The employee who was terminated for punching a coworker may not get any severance pay; on the other hand, the severance policy may be made more generous when there is a round of layoffs, as opposed to performance issues.

Alternatives to Company-Wide Layoffs

None of the alternatives proposed here are perfect, but they can often be more efficient, more profitable (in the long run), more humane, and often better received than the layoff options discussed earlier. As global economic conditions worsened starting in 2008 and 2009, organizations experimented with all kinds of different methods to save money and cut employee costs:

• Cut everyone’s hours a small amount instead of cutting certain employees’ entire jobs. This option has benefits and drawbacks but it is widely practiced in some industries.

• Cut everyone’s pay a small amount instead of cutting certain employees’ entire jobs. As just described, often individuals would prefer to take a small pay cut rather than have their coworkers lose their entire jobs.

• Offer packages to employees who are willing to leave the company.

• Radically scale back the services/products/hours the company provides. Severe economic conditions force companies to rethink their core missions and often that rethinking can be a good thing. Rather than being open seven days a week with all the staffing issues that entails, perhaps the local bakery is closed two days in the middle of the week. Rather than offering four models with 10 options each with all the manufacturing costs all of those alternatives offer, perhaps the car/cell phone/stereo company offers two models with five options each.