It can be extremely frustrating when your employees don’t do what you expect of them. As a manager, it’s easy to get frustrated when things aren’t going according to plan. Management is all about getting things done with others, and when things aren’t getting done, it presents a huge challenge. This video is all about employee performance problems and their various causes.

Identifying employee performance issues quickly and accurately is crucial to continuing successful business operations. In order to properly address employee performance problems, you need to diagnose the cause of the issue. All of the actions that you take to fix said issue need to flow from the initial diagnosis. In this video, we identify five common causes of employee performance problems:

1. Lack of knowledge, skill, or experience. You have to know how to perform a task before anyone can have a reasonable expectation that you can perform it successfully, and managers often overlook this. There is a good chance that the struggling employee simply doesn’t have the knowledge and capability to do what you’re asking of them. Perhaps the employee said they had a certain skill that they actually don’t, or perhaps they were successful with other similar tasks so you assumed that they would be able to accomplish this one as well — regardless of why, lack of skill is a major factor in performance issues.
2. Lack of awareness. Does the employee even realize that there is an issue? Perhaps you haven’t properly aligned your expectations with theirs, so take some time to be sure that the understand exactly what you need from them, as well as what they need from you.
3. Lack of motivation. If employees don’t understand the ‘why’ behind a task, they may not be motivated, enthused, or interested in it. Make sure you stress the importance of the task they’re doing, as well as why it’s important to the firm.
4. Lack of confidence. There is a major difference between competence  and confidence. Someone can be extremely bright and have all the right answers, but without confidence, their self-doubt will over-shadow their abilities. Do your best to coach employees to become confident, engaged members of the team, and make sure they feel that their contributions are valuable.
5. Lack of control over the outcome. Does the employee have all of the resources that they need to accomplish the task at hand? Are there some external factors that are preventing them from being successful? Make sure that you’re providing the employee with a path to succeed before you tell them they have a performance issue.

The most crucial aspect of addressing a performance problem is to correctly identify the cause of that problem. If you mis-identify the cause, you’ll end up putting your time and effort into solving the wrong problem. Once you’ve identified the issue, check out this video on how to effectively give corrective feedback.