How should I deal with a subordinate who is distracted and not performing well?

Question

I'm the manager of IT department in my company. One of direct reports is sometimes browsing the web and reading articles instead of working.

His performance is suffering and the project is behind the schedule, and I don't know the reason for this behavior (maybe I've just become too sensitive about him).

What should I do about it?

I don't want him to feel micromanaged all the time and I want to help him become interested in work and increase his performance.

Answer 1

The problem here is not the web browsing, but that his work output is not satisfactory.

You need to address this like any other performance issue: set clear expectations and hold them accountable. For example, agree on what you expect to be done by Friday and get them to commit to it. If he delivers, all good, just keep doing this. If he does not, ask them why and figure out what you both can do about it. Maybe he needs to spend less time web browsing, maybe it's something else entirely.

Answer 2

This is one of the cursed problems of IT:

1. Accurate estimates are impossible; they are more of an expression of uncertainty. Holding people accountable for their own estimates can lead to overinflation of estimates. Delegating estimation to someone not doing the work is going to lead to stress and suboptimal solutions, like programming to a spec rather than to the intention, which will then have to be reworked to be useful. Any estimates should be worked out in concert, so that the developers have an idea exactly how much they are expected to do per task. Just saying "it should do X" is not useful, because X can be done in an infinite number of ways, most of which are far from ideal.
2. Accurate performance measurements are impossible. Unless their performance is literally zero for long stretches of time I wouldn't trust a personal assessment of someone else's productivity.
3. Worker satisfaction influences their productivity. If this person feels under- or overqualified to do this work they will be overwhelmed or bored, respectively.
4. Private life influences productivity. That's just a fact of life. They might be going through a tough time.
5. Are you sure the things they read online are irrelevant? If so, they are probably incredibly stressed out at the amount of surveillance. If not, what's the problem?
6. There is no silver bullet. Talk to them with an open mind. What are the main blockers, programmatic, organizational or otherwise? How can you help?

Answer 3

You need to have a conversation.

If there is any doubt about in your mind about this situation, you need to start by giving your colleague the benefit of it.

Ask about what you have seen, and see if they have an explanation.

Why?

A manager, you can see reduced productivity for several reasons:

1. your staff are not working the hours that they should
2. your team are putting in the hours but on the wrong thing
3. your people are working on the right thing, but there is a knotty problem reducing their productivity
4. they are being productive but the things they're getting done aren't obvious to you, their manager.

You've said that you "feel" that (1) is likely. If I were this person's manager, I'd want to verify this assumption before "setting expectations".

Assuming (1) is correct, you need to dig a little deeper. Why has productivity dropped off? Again, there are many possibilities. Some examples:

• Your colleague is stuck on a hard problem, but is shy about asking for help
• they are being bullied by another team member, and are finding it difficult to concentrate
• they're having problems at home
• they're staying up late playing video games
• they don't understand what's expected if them

...and many others.

The point is, each of these should elicit a different behaviour from you as their manager.

• If the problem is expectations, for example, then setting expectations is going to help.
• If it is something else, like problems at home, then re-stating what you want from them may not help very much, and could even make the situation worse if you're adding to their woes.

In the second case, cutting your colleague a little slack in the short term could do wonders for you over the long-hall.

Take the wrong action now, and you stand to loose someone who has shown they can be a good employee in the past. Take the right action, and you stand to gain loyalty and hard-work in the long run.

Answer 4

I want to clear up some common misconceptions that you seem to believe:

1. It's impossible for a software developer to stay focused on programming for 8 hours per day. For most developers, you should probably count yourself quite lucky if they can even reach half of that on a consistent, day by day basis. Studies and surveys have found that software developers generally are only able to spend about 2-3 hours per day actually writing code. This is partially due to programmers having non-programming tasks like meetings, emails, phone calls, solving problems with their work environment; and partially due to programming being an extremely cerebral task that generally exhausts the developer if they stay focused on it for prolonged periods of time.
2. Even if a good manager can remove all the non-programming tasks from the programmer's workload, a programmer can't spend 8 hours per day writing code, even if they wanted to. Any nontrivial program eventually has a bug that needs to be solved. To solve these bugs, programmers need to spend time researching what causes the bug: Googling error codes, reading documentation, browsing blog archives of people who encountered the bug and found a fix, creating questions on Stack Overflow,... Expecting a programmer to write code the entire day is like expecting an action hero movie to shoot a bad guy every shot.
3. Even if a programmer somehow doesn't encounter any bugs for an entire day, there's still a physical limit to how much they can do. Again, that's related to the 1st bullet point above. A programmer does his best work while in "The Zone", a mental state of extreme focus and concentration that's found in creative jobs, but also among athletes. While in The Zone, a developer is intensely focused on their program, weaving delicate webs of mental connections that lead the developer to the best solution. Any interruption while in The Zone, regardless of how short or trivial, destroys this delicate web and leaves the programmer stranded in an island of confusion.
   The big problem is that there are physical limits to how much time a developer can spend in the zone. Generally this is about 2 hours per day, if lucky. Delevopers may be able to borrow Zone time from the future, but generally there's a conversion rate that means every extra hour spent in the zone today can lead up to an entire following day of being an unproductive zombie unable to get into the zone. There are developers that can stay in the zone for longer, but these are rare.

Answer 5

What is hard as a manager is keeping your team members motivated. If they are motivated, they will make their best every day.

In this case, I would discuss with him getting more information about how he feels these days, and trying to know what makes him less motivated than before. I think the best way to lead your team is to know deeply how the members are doing, what they don’t like, and what they do like.

Ideally, you would trust them all, and you would not have to control them. This idea comes from the freedom-form company theory by Isaac Getz, among others.

Answer 6

One thing to look out for is to see if there is something that is frustrating this worker's efforts. If he feels unable to progress on an issue, he might get bored from a lack of anything to do and go out for some entertainment.

Answer 7

Browsing the Internet at work is not inherently a bad thing

Many people learn about emerging technologies through social media like twitter , they learn how to solve problems through Q/A sites like: How should I deal with a subordinate who is distracted and not performing well?, even reading web comics like xkcd.com can be quite educational and a much needed emotional reset similar to taking a smoke break, but potentially more productive.

In most cases when an IT worker is "wasting time on the web" at work it is not that they are reading articles that is the problem but how much.

In many cases, it also turns out that the perceived problem is that people are animals of habit. You may always have enough downtime at a certain time of day to check on him which just so happens to be when he also has a bit of down time to read articles; so, just because you routinely "catch him in the act" does not mean that that is what he is normally doing. If instead you should be looking at his projects: how much he is backlogged, how many hours a day he is devoting to tasks, and are those tasks are taking as long as they should.

Don't address the Problem, address the Solution

The best way to do this is making your IT department use some manner of CRM for tracking the work they do. Normally CRMs are used for tracking the work consulting firms do for outside companies, but even if this is an internal IT department, a CRM will help them organize information about your infrastructure, track projects statuses, and most importantly as far as your question is concerned: log how much work he is actually getting done.

Then if the data shows he is in fact slacking, instead of trying to confront him about something that may or may not really be a problem, you can talk to about how you need him to meet measurable data points. So your conversation might sound like, "Arjun, I noticed you have a lot of projects left open, I need to you to step it up and get your queue back down to a manageable size." or "I noticed you spent 3 hours yesterday on task that only takes Kabir or Ananya 1 hour. I need you to speed those up, and if you're not familiar with how to do it, I need you to get with one of them to see how you can do it better."

Here you are setting goals instead of fence posts, he will know if he needs to stop spending so much time browsing to reach his goals, then he can find the balance that makes the most sense for him. The important caveat to remember though is that IT is a mental task. It is emotionally and psychologically draining; so, while a CRM is good for tracking your projects, make sure to use it as a means to set goals and stay motivated, and not to let it degrade to the knife you hold above thier heads, because if anything drives an IT guy be less productive, it is feeling like they have goals they can not meet.

As for goal setting: There is a metic often used by sales managers that states that all minimum goals should be meet 80% of the time. What this does is it keeps your minimum goals hard enough to motivate them to do what it right, but easy enough that people don't loose hope or feel like they need to cheat the system to reach them. Goals should also not be a moving target. Once you feel you have a good gauge on what your people can do, set a goal and see how it works for at least 6 months before revisiting it.

Answer 8

How about transferring him to sales? (Only partially joking.)

EDIT: (Sigh) all right, it's because this guy seems like all talk and no walk, and doesn't have the concentration necessary to make it as an IT developer. But in sales, all they do is talk.

How is it I come up with the obviously best answers but get voted down? I guess people don't appreciate real answers.

Answer 9

If you see something you perceive to be an issue you investigate and proactively mitigate against it.

In this case you're not even sure, so you have a couple of recourse's. Firewall the internet connection (it probably is already) and monitor usage at least broadly, on top of that you can restrict access to sites if you feel the need.

Almost all my clients have had to block social media like YouTube and Facebook to increase productivity. Some have outright blocked them, others allow management access, or time limited access, still others allow all web traffic but monitor usage.

Blocking proactively eliminates the surfing as a problem symptom, monitoring makes it easy to identify what is actually happening. I've had a client who's total web traffic was over 90% YouTube and Facebook.