Consider all the ways things can go wrong after you hire people. If you hired them to do job X, there is a good chance, they will not have done exactly that job before, which means you will incur either one or two types of cost: underperformance while they learn the job or time spent away from the job receiving training.
Even after they have started to perform at the expected level, you may find they cannot sustain the performance for any number of reasons, with perhaps the most fundamental being, they simply do not have the qualities required of someone to perform the job in question. The job may require them to be pleasant with the customer, but their personality is basically sarcastic or indifferent. Or the job may require them to be physically strong, but they are not.
In the case of those who do learn the job and have the qualities necessary to continue performing it well, you may reasonably expect them to grow beyond that job so they can do other things for your organization. An important part of this process is surrounding them with people who demonstrate how you would like things to be done. But what if those role models are not there? What if you recently had to downsize and in the process you lost a good number of your senior people who would have served well as role models, but were deemed too expensive to keep around during difficult economic times? In such a case, you may find the cost of losing those potential role models is greater than the savings of their salary, but of course, you will not necessarily be able to quantify this loss.
Over time, the workers you hire may grow indifferent toward the work if it is boring, repetitive or even an interesting job but something they can master and thus no longer find challenging. Or they may not be bored so much as they do not buy into the standard of performance you have set for them and thus are always seemingly eager to negotiate down the expectations. On the opposite end of the spectrum may be those who were stretched initially to perform at the expected level and find they are unable to make the personal sacrifice required to stay at that high level. They may have underestimated the basic life adjustment the job would require of them in terms of time, energy or commitment.
Or it could be what changes is not so much the employee, but actually you or your fellow managers. Without being fully aware of it, over time you may relax your standards of performance due to inattention or distraction. Your attention may shift to other things and away from frequent enough reminders of what is expected. Or, relatedly, you may start deluding yourself that standards are being met, in the absence of hard data; but when real data does show up, you realize, perhaps too late, that you had been assuming everything was fine due to your overreliance on qualitative information or the comfortable feeling we all sometimes get when we work with nice people who are nevertheless, underperforming.
It can also occur that people working for you start to shift their opinions of what is important in their life from say the work, to their children, continuing their education, focusing on their marriage, improving their house, or finding fulfillment in a more spiritual or emotional dimension, once material needs have been met.
Thus far I have been kind to the organization and harder on individuals when imagining what all can go wrong, but suppose your policies and procedures have made the job distasteful for people? Maybe the job does not offer enough feedback on performance, enough recognition, enough input from them, or too little variety, or other components most would consider requirements of an “interesting” job. In such instances, you may not always get negative feedback from your employees out of fear they have of you or the belief they may hold that the organization would come down on them hard if they complained. You may be forcing people into a position of learned helplessness, one where they do not complain, seek to fight for justice or anything, but just hunker down and do the job. In the short run this may not appear to be a problem, but eventually, they may suffer the negative effects of stress, mental or emotional breakdown, or work in such a distracted manner they are dangerous to themselves and others.
Sometimes people will, perhaps without knowing it, begin to defer excellence; by which I mean, they start assuming they can let things slide until right before inspection time, or deadline time, or evaluation time. This often happens in sports where the players go through the motions until the game is on the line, with little time to go and then they get going, but sometimes they do so too late.
One of the constant issues with an aging workforce is that after a while, older workers begin to stop caring as much about how they perform, because they are counting down the days until retirement. This can even happen years before actual retirement, especially if sufficient attention is not paid to incentives that may keep them engaged.
And we have to acknowledge, sometimes working hard for long periods of time can be tiring and even grueling, even if we usually enjoy what we do. The most committed workers in the most interesting jobs will need time away to recharge their batteries, opportunities to sit back and reflect on where they are in their life or in their career; to assess, or just to be away from the activity for a while. Some people, especially those inclined to high levels of commitment, may be afraid to take time off or get away from the work, perhaps due to the suppressed feeling that if they step away for a while, they may not be able to return at the same high level, that the time off may come to feel too good by comparison.
Cultural norms can influence the commitment people give to their work. Sometimes even high performers sink to the lower performance level of those around them after a while. This can occur because their frame of mind changes from being one of focus on performance goals to being more social or comfortable among their peers. Any frame of mind we find ourselves in should probably be considered temporary, such that even those of us who work hard most of the time now, may find it much more difficult to stay focused at some later point due to social changes, too little recognition, or the fear that many see in the middle of their lives, that they will die without ever having had any fun. They may start to ask, why continue to sacrifice my own desires for those of the company or other people or why sacrifice current reward for some promised future reward that may or may not happen anyway?
These performance issues are matters of concern for the entire organization, but other managers often turn to HR to address them with such programs as more aggressive recruiting, improved selection methods, career development and guidance, as well as training and development.
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