The best way to prevent such behavior are clearly defined individual tasks.
They are completed on time or they are not.
Excuses may be given to future employers—not present ones.
Lol.
A former work friend and I had a colleague like this - named "Steven." We called it "pulling a Steven."
It was a large corporation and we could not figure out what the guy did. He had some dotted-line reports to people elsewhere, but never figured out who watched or evaluated him.
He was always attending conferences and meetings, you'd see his (usually bland) opinions on emails, he was always well-dressed, and he would flit in-and-out of the offices. He didn't have customers that we knew of, he didn't work in operations or implementation as far as we could tell. He was always on various "work teams," but If he disappeared immediately, it would affect no one else's job whatsoever.
I've seen in the military, in academia, in congregations and even clubs and families.
Good managers can handle this sort of problem quickly and easily. It’s not hard at all.
But good managers are hard to find these days. In my experience, a lot of the freeloaders are in management positions going on up the chain and none of them want to call out the others, or do anything about the worker bee freeloaders.
When I was in management, I had a terrible freeloader on my team. I put together a plan to “resolve” the issue and went to my boss to get it approved. I got into trouble for that. The “proper solution” was basically to ask the freeloader to stop being a freeloader. Doing more than that was definitely frowned upon. After that, I stopped caring very much and I moved on.
Freeloaders don’t survive long in a genuinely performance oriented organization, and any problems that exist at the bottom start at the top. In any moderately sized group, the leader is familiar with the performance metrics of every member, and in very large organizations, systems are in place to assure that mid-level management are held accountable for everyone under them.
If you don’t know who isn’t performing, then YOU are not performing.
I worked with a girl who looked busy all the time — practically frazzled. Then I realized she was a master at shuffling paper. LOL!
The sweetest person ever. You couldn’t even get mad.
This person would fit right in with the highly paid meteorologists. For years I have pointed out their insane vocabulary
Maybe, perhaps, chance of, partly.
They interchange partly sunny and partly cloudy all the time.
If I used this vocabulary in my job, the boss would come back with "there is a chance of no paycheck."
I stopped whining about that many years ago - when I stop being part of that 20%, you can take me out back and shoot me.
Very late in my career I had an Indian H1B assigned to me. He never finished anything or the task was poorly done. I had to fix his work to complete the project. When I finally had enough and complained he called me a racist. Maybe I shouldn’t have said how did I get the only lazy, stupid Indian out of a billion.
DEI expands this.
It wouldn't be that way if management didn't want it so.
There’s also to consider pareto’s law. You get 90% of the functionality done in 10% of the time, the remaining 10% takes 90% of the time. Sometimes it’s 80/20.
We had a guy at my last contract whoever really thought was a superhero cuz he got so much done but he’d get the 10% work done and leave the 90% error checking and unit testing and code coverage and Etc. to whoever came after him.
And since he wasn’t experienced doing all that necessary stuff he didn’t understand the mistakes he was making with the easy part.
Got one in my office
Billing and collection specialist
* Consumate liar who cannot summarize why Customers refuse to pay their Bills
* Customers call me begging for an invoice and statement
* Over $1,000,000 over 180 days past due, we are a $5,000,000 Company
* Daily crapshoot, will she report to work, or not
* Skips her Tuesday and Friday update meetings>plans and achievements to get Accounts Receivable under control
* Disappears and does not log paid time off, HR could not give a flying fadoo.
* I could go on and on
A DEI problem.
Bkmk
the social butterfly always makes their way thru life wooing their peers... those first 5 on every guest list... that guy/gal who bs’s their way and everyone is sitting on the edges of their seats in awe... that guy who does about 40% of what you do every day but always manages to keep the job while you get the pink slip when the work load is over....
happens everywhere and their is absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. if you got young kids, teach them to communicate if you can. if you got ability/talent and a becoming gift to gab, well you got the world by the ass... if not, then its a hard way to go... I know... I live it...