Scenario: A core group of customers is loyal to your company year after year. One day, they learn that your company hasn’t been making the changes necessary to effectively manage its affairs. They start to have doubts, raising questions like: "Am I getting less value by continuing to do business with this organization instead of with its competitor?" and "Am I being cheated because I’m forced to deal with employees who lack the skills, competency, and motivation to meet my expectations?"

How does an organization respond to this all-too-common scenario?

Too many businesses today invest valuable time and resources hiring employees for the sole purpose of filling a vacancy, or retaining customers who add little, if any, profit to the company’s bottom line. This is a mistake.

Progressive companies focus resources on those employees and customers they simply can’t afford to do without. Think about your own employees for a moment. Nationwide, an estimated 25% of the workforce—your workforce—is comprised of motivated, dedicated, and productive workers. How long can you retain them if you surround them with low-energy, highly irritating, and only marginally productive employees?

Learning new ways to manage employees and improve corporate performance used to be a choice. But the globalization of the U.S. economy and the explosion of hi-tech information technologies have changed all that. Today, innovation and change are an imperative. Forward-thinking managers will work hard to understand each employee’s thoughts about his or her own work, and decision-makers will create policies and systems to help handle the work load and ensure that standards are met…and exceeded.

But training and development are more than just exercises to acquire professional designations or meet government regulations. They are tools to overcoming old assumptions and, more importantly, closing the gap between expectations and performance. Developing innovative strategies is only the first step. The toughest challenge is having the courage to make the necessary changes…and timing those changes correctly.

Start by building commitment to the company. Engage your employees’ energy and attention. Each individual comes to the workplace with his or her own unique communication, learning, and relational styles. Each also bring his or her own motivational resources. These resources provide the energy that stimulates the behavior observed in their interactions with other people. They also affect the way each employee completes tasks and copes with demands.

When the demands placed upon an individual exceed what these resources can accommodate, s/he may become depressed, confrontational, or withdrawn. The behavioral makeup, personality, and emotional stability of an employee determine how s/he will react when demands exceed resources. When this occurs, a manager, owner, supervisor, or co-worker will conclude erroneously that the employee is unmotivated.

The truth of the matter is that a seemingly unmotivated worker could, in fact, have the potential to be a productive and loyal employee. His or her low performance may not be caused by a lack of desire to learn or to perform. More than likely it’s a lack of skills—technical, communication, or learning—or paralyzing fear that his or her current skills may not meet the requirements of the position. By taking steps to understand motivational resources, employers are presented with a priceless opportunity to close the gap between demands and resources.

Advanced software technology is readily available today to help companies address this issue. There are top-notch programs that do everything from identifying the potential of current and prospective employees, to identifying gaps that may exist between performance and expectations. These programs can help you determine which skills may need to be developed in a particular employee, as well as what behavioral and motivational barriers may interfere with efforts to train (or retrain) an individual.

Simply put, performance assessment programs can help you manage your business by providing you with a reliable and accurate framework for determining:

• motivational resources of individuals in your company;
• the natural skills each employee brings to the workplace;
• training that might be needed to close skills gaps; and
• the level of resistance to change to expect from employees.