The path to entrepreneurial success begins through a very treacherous and perilous territory. You not only have to start from scratch and act like you have no money but you also have to worry about hiring the right people. When you add time shortage into the mix, what you’re left with is a rush to hire employees that not only need to perform at par with the industry but actually exceed the standards. When a start-up actually gets this mix right, it is magical and slightly hard to believe because it is so darn rare. The majority of start-ups, though, have to cope with various challenges. One challenge that they all have to deal with is that of slackers at work.
In their rush to get people to man all the battle stations and avert instant defeat, they often end up hiring people who’re not in it to win it. These people end up becoming slackers at work that not only fail to pull their own weight but also act as albatrosses around their colleagues’ necks. In simple words, they don’t work and they don’t let others work either. How do slackers at work cost your business money? Consider.
Slackers at Work Hinder Workflows
The most obvious way through which slackers at work will cost your business money is by making it less productive. As the idiom goes, a system or team is only as strong as its weakest link. This means that even if you have five geniuses in a team, the sixth slacker in the team is going to nullify all their intelligence.
While people know this little fact, many don’t understand how a single lazy individual can reduce the brilliance of five others into ashes. It happens because slackers at work hinder, disrupt, and interrupt workflows. Imagine that components of a task have been divided amongst the six team members. While the genius five operate at maximum efficiency, the slacker doesn’t. This means that work keeps getting stuck in the pipeline at the slacker’s station.
Therefore, even if the five people together are completing five components of five different projects, each of those projects is stuck because the slacker hasn’t even done one. By slowing down workflows, slackers at work slow down output which means that the business either loses money through regular expenses or through lost revenues.
Slackers at Work Create Distractions
Slackers aren’t only troublesome because they don’t work but also bothersome because they don’t let others work either. Typically, slackers try to gain power by hindering others from working as well. They try to distract them at every juncture so as to bring everyone’s productivity down to their level. They can do this in various ways.
The most obvious is entertaining everyone and keeping them from working, while a subtle method is trying to show everyone up in personal life and challenging them to do better.
More often than not, these people end up associating “cool” with “lazy” or even “manipulative”. What this does is keeps them from being pinpointed, which is just another vehicle of self-preservation. Needless to say, their self-preservation ends up costing the business money because every employee’s productivity drops drastically.
Slackers at Work Incite Negative Emotions
Slackers at work also influence the work culture in myriad ways. However, the most dangerous way they do this is by inciting negative emotions in the entire staff. A slacker will try to make himself look better and the senior management bad by trying to divide them with hyperbole and exaggerations. It is even possible that slackers will try to play one colleague against another simply to keep work from being done.
Inherently, they’ll try to ensure that the company culture is about conning the senior management and having fun as opposed to working together and being productive. Also, they often end up making employees resent the company they work for, which directly results in reduced work output with respect to not only quantity but also quality.
Slackers at Work Fuel and Thrive On Confusion
Everything that slackers at work do is aimed at one single goal – find a way to get out of doing work while simultaneously protecting their behinds from repercussions. The best way of doing this is to fuel confusion in the workplace. Resultantly, slackers at work will always try to create confusion regarding projects, client expectations, leaves, boss’s expectations, and even simpler decisions such as what to have for lunch.
Once they create such confusion, they try to extend it for as long as possible because they thrive on it. The longer that doubts about something remain, the longer it will take for decisions to be made. As a result, the longer they’ll be able to go without having to do any real work. Slackers at work can be very insidious and sly in how they approach their goals of procrastination. Sometimes, they, themselves, are unaware of what they’re doing.
Slackers at Work Often Throw Others under the Bus
Slackers at work are mostly harmless to their colleagues. However, when they’re pushed into a corner, they can often go to extreme lengths to save themselves.
Typically, this takes the form of throwing their associates or even their seniors under the bus. Blatant lying and even fabrication aren’t beyond a slacker provided he can get away with it.
When colleagues take the brunt of a slacker’s tardiness and incompetence, they also become disillusioned with life at the business in questions.
Effectively, slackers at work can end up increasing the employee attrition rate of a business to a point where the business ends up being devoid of all genius and full of pure mediocrity and incompetency.
Slackers at Work Invariably End Up Damaging Reputation
If you take all the points above and see them from a broader perspective, you get a business that is being eaten from inside. For instance, when a business is unable to deliver what was promised to the client in time and with quality, its reputation takes a massive hit. When this happens repeatedly, the business’s reputation in the industry takes a hit.
The result of the first is that the business loses its client but the result of the second is that the business loses the majority of its future clients too. Therefore, if natural progression of events is allowed to take place i.e. slackers at work are not weeded out, they will end up seeing the burial of the business on a first-hand basis.
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