Do You Ignore The Middle Employees?

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Are you ignoring the employees that fall into the middle of the performance bell curve? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I manage just under a hundred employees on my team.  I have some fantastic performers in that group.  I also have a few employees that struggle to meet the basic standards that we have established, but the majority of my team falls somewhere in the middle. 

I am a huge proponent of giving employees praise regularly, but I find that the majority of that praise goes to the high and low performers.  The middle group, which is by far the majority of the employees, gets largely ignored.  Why is that?

The high performers get a lot of praise because they are high performers.  They are exhibiting the behaviors that we want others exhibit.  That’s straight out of a management 101 course.  Praise the behavior that you want to see more of.  There is nothing wrong with praising the high performers, right?

Why would we praise the low performers?  In my case I can say that we will actively coach our low performers to see if we can raise their productivity.  If their productivity starts to go up after they have been coached, then we certainly want to praise them for that.  Again they are starting to exhibit the behavior that I want to see, so it is completely appropriate to praise them right?

So that leaves us me with my largest group of employees.  All of the people who are quietly meeting the standards.  They may not be my highest performers, but they consistently meet the standards and they show up for work each day without fail.  They don’t bring any drama into the workplace and they are not creating any HR nightmares for me.  These are the people who go largely unnoticed in most organizations.  I think to some extent, I am guilty of letting them go unnoticed in my organization.

Time to fix this.  I want to implement two ideas this month.  One is to recognize those that have perfect attendance.  I have a number of employees that I think would fall into this category.  Why not recognize them?  Is this not one of the greatest behaviors I would want to see?  I am not sure how I will recognize them yet, but I am curious to know if any of you have a system for recognizing perfect attendance?  If so, please share the details.  If not, why don’t you? 

The second thing I want to implement is a way to recognize our employees that hit their performance objectives consistently.  Again, I will need to figure the details out, but it will not have to be an expensive program to implement.  I feel very strongly that we must start doing more to recognize all of the employees that are neither high nor low performers. 

Do you recognize all of those “middle” employees?  Do you think that this group is largely ignored? What should we as managers do it about it?


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