How to Fix a Bad Employee/Position Matchup

Employees are often called “opinionated” or “not good enough” when their skills don’t match a particular position. But, in most instances, managers are keen to make the ship stay on course and expect the staffers to perform well.

Don’t be that manager if you want your company to move forward.

The thing is, it’s not a good idea to put an employee in a position that doesn’t match his/her skill set. Even if customers are eager to buy your company’s product/service, an employee’s skill gap may weaken your branding, which could result in loss of customers.

An employee and position matchup can suffer over time (as demands at the workplace change) or it can be a bad fit from the beginning. Your company can invest hours in employee training and still end up with decisions that are just not right.

Fortunately, there are ways to address a bad employee/position matchup. Here are some measures you can take to fix the problem:

Utilize Subject/Domain experts

If an employee and position mismatch brings up a temporary problem, you can address it quickly with the help of domain/subject experts. For instance, if an employee was able to finish only 60% of an assigned project before the deadline, you can bring a professional project consultant to speed things up and get the job done to ensure your company meets its goals.

With Extreme Technologies Inc and other similar companies boasting an extensive portfolio of domain/subject matter experts that can bring industry experience to your company, you can immediately fix the employee and position mismatch by letting the professional do urgent tasks. This can be done during the information gathering and definition phase or during the final phase of an assigned task/project.

Rotate Between Departments

An alternative approach to downsizing is rotating employees between different departments. It could be that an employee doesn’t perform well in the IT department, but the same employee shows significant productivity when he/she is transferred to the finance department. It will depend on the learning ability of the employee as well as the ambition to acquire new skills.

In both hierarchical and flat companies, the desire to try something new gets smaller if an employee doesn’t feel motivated in a particular position. If this is the case, the employee would prefer to stay a silent contributor rather than take steps to perform well and get promoted. For such employees, department rotation can be a key strategy toward helping them grow and keeping them within your organization.

Invest in Technology

According to a study conducted by Microsoft, 40% employees feel workplace tools encourage better teamwork. Some would go even as far as spending their own money on these tools. What you could do is increase the IT budget for creating custom tools that empower employees in different departments. These tools should automate certain processes, such as the social media work in the marketing department.

So what this would do is enable mismatched employees to be productive until you find a replacement for them. For instance, if you’ve hired someone who is not a good fit to handle your social media accounts, you can just equip him/her with a tool like Hootsuite so that they can at least have consistency in posting across platforms.

Take these measures and you’ll be able to deal with the mismatch problem, at least for some time.