by Tom Boyles

Created on: July 31, 2008   Last Updated: August 01, 2008

Nothing can be more frustrating than working with or having someone who works for you that is lazy. This article isn't a how-to deal with lazy employees or if a lazy employee should be fired or not. What I'd like to discuss is the fact that there are; seemingly, a lot of people in upper management (managers and directors) that are lazy themselves, or allow their employees to be lazy.

Let me explain this way. A department of, let's say, five employees who are responsible for processing some business related information, building reports, presenting information from these reports in meetings and evaluating and suggesting ways to improve business based on these reports. Doesn't really matter what the topic of these reports are, this is all just hypothetical, for this article.

Lazy is probably a harsh way to "label" certain employees, but it's making the point.

A representative of this team goes to a meeting and doesn't really have the information to make the meeting productive. The explanation, or apology, is because there wasn't enough time or there just aren't enough people to get the information together in time for the meeting.

I tend to believe that it would be in the best interest of the company or the manager of that group to get in there and find out why. Find out what the employees are doing, other than working on work-related tasks to get the job done. They may be surprised to find that one, two or maybe all of those employees on that team may be watching too many videos on YouTube, surfing the web for their fantasy baseball team stats or even making modifications to their photo site (again, all hypothetical, but makes the point).

Instead, it sure seems that far too many times, a new position is created, a new hire advertisement is made and a new employee joins the team. If this situation is looked into closely, now the team can continue doing what they've done before (other than the work they are hired to do) and, guess what, the new employee will probably adapt to the same practices. Then it's full-circle because then another team member will be needed because now the new employee is watching videos on YouTube, getting the stats for their fantasy baseball team and making changes to their photo site.

My point is that companies grow so quickly (in the number of employees it takes to do "the work") that soon, the company has so many employees that really aren't working as hard as they should. If this hypothetical group I've been discussing would work hard at their jobs, leave the YouTube, fantasy baseball and their photo site to when they are at home, I contend that that team wouldn't need six, seven or eight employees, but instead, three.

I'm not bringing this up because the leaders in a company don't desire more and more work out of their employees. In fact, they do and will always want to see more from their employees. What I am saying is, the employees do have the ability and the bandwidth to do more work, they just need to work harder.

What I will add, and I don't want it to be the excuse as to why you shouldn't work harder, but if an employee is underpaid or feels they are underpaid, I'll guarantee that they won't work harder. It's far better for a company to pay their employees more money if they are truly underpaid. It's much less expensive in the long run to pay employees what they are worth than it is to just keep hiring more people.

The more people that keeps getting hired will will cause the company to be a company with more chaos and so unstable, that sooner or later, the company will crumble under it's own stress and strain. A company with strong, hard working employees will be a company with less employees and ultimately be a company that makes more money.

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