Stars, Workhorses & Dead Wood

Take Stock of Your Workforce

Periodically evaluating your employee team is important to ensure each person contributes to the success of your business. Dr. Rich Stup, AgChoice Farm Credit, suggests considering each person's present performance and potential for advancing or taking on more challenging work as you review their fit in their current responsibilities and in your overall operation. Using this process, employees can be divided into four categories:

• stars currently perform well and have potential to take on even greater responsibility;
• workhorses have excellent performance, but probably cannot handle much more of a challenge;
• question marks may not be performing at a high level now, but have good potential; and
• dead wood employees are those that have low performance and potential.

Understanding these categories can help you manage individual employees more appropriately.

High-performing stars and workhorses are employees you want to keep, and strategies for them are aimed at keeping turnover low. For stars, encourage greater responsibility, leadership opportunities and job ownership, perhaps through cross-training or incentive programs. Motivate workhorses to keep up their peak performance by recognizing their hard work and productivity. Teamwork can help keep workhorses engaged and allow them to share their expertise.

Employees that are currently low performers need to be converted to high performers if possible. For question marks, such as new hires, coaching their development, promoting job ownership and avoiding harsh criticisms as they learn can help advance them to star level.

Converting dead wood employees to workhorses requires frequent performance feedback and good communication. Honest discussion between manager and employee about attitude or performance problems is essential. Dead wood employees that cannot be motivated to change need to be let go; keeping them around can damage morale and the overall performance of your workforce.