How to remove employee performance roadblocks.

Did you know that most employee performance roadblocks can be traced to 1 of 4 different employees working in your service department? If I were to ask you to provide me with your list of the most challenging employees, you could probably name them, no problem.

What’s amazing is, I can name them too.

The 4 people working in your dealership right now that are creating the most performance roadblocks and challenges are as follows:

1. Don’t know how.

2. Not allowed.

3. Can’t.

4. Won’t.

Your 1st order of business is to determine which of those employees you are addressing. 

Is this person a “Don’t know how” employee? Out of the 4, the “don’t know how” employee is by far the easiest to diagnose and provide an action plan to get them up to speed.

This action plan includes a “training plan” and when completed properly, will provide you with an employee that knows how to do their job, knows what the definition of success is, and understands how they will be measured to determine success.

Once you train them, it doesn’t stop there. There is ongoing coaching, goal setting, and monitoring to keep that employee on track to hit performance metrics.

The second team member working in your store is the “Not allowed” employee. Most of the time this employee is just out of date on policy or process because somehow, they have always missed the training, couldn’t make the meeting and were out sick on the other days.

This is the second easiest employee to diagnose and get back in the game. They are like a cell phone app that is out of date. It still works, but it doesn’t have all the new cool features and sometimes bogs down the other apps.

This person is doing their daily duties without the knowledge and authority to perform their duties.

They need the newest training, the newest policies, the newest performance metrics and the support of the dealership when they decide to do something for a customer, otherwise known as empowerment.  

By the way, this lack of “empowerment” or the inability of the employee to take action is at the top of customer dissatisfaction results. Many CSI studies lists “advisor/dealership could not or would not help me with _________” as a reason to give a bad CSI score.

And it is one of the easiest things to fix on your "to do" list.

Next is the “Can’t” employee. Keep in mind, sometimes can’t is the result of the dealership or other constraints that are beyond the team member's control.

For example, you might have a great all-around advisor that continues to miss CSI goals. In every other measured category, like sales performance, they do a good job. They just don’t have a “friendly” personality, maybe they are somewhat of a grouch. Maybe they would be a great warranty administrator instead.

Or maybe, you truly have someone that has been fully trained, understands the job, knows the service drive sales process and for whatever reason cannot hit sales goals. It happens. Maybe that person would be better suited for a back-parts counter position rather than a service advisor.

These are decisions you must make.

Whatever is keeping the “can’t” employee from hitting performance goals, you need to figure it out and put a plan together to address it.

Finally, the last employee working at your store is “Mr./Ms. Won’t.” There might be all kinds of reasons. For whatever reason, they've decided that they won't perform the tasks and duties associated with their job description.

The bottom line is the “won’t” employee can’t stay.

Remember, nothing in the service drive sales process or dealership works if you have the wrong person in place. Nothing.

You will never hit your performance goals if the people you are counting on to hit those performance goals don’t want to, don't plan to and you can’t convince them otherwise.

Running a dealership and or service department is hard. Running a successful performance-driven dealership and or service department is even harder if you haven’t identified and removed these 4 employee performance roadblocks.

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