October is a month filled with spooky imagery and themes, so it is a good time to review some of the “monsters” that can exist in the workplace. I’ll also put on my Van Helsing hat and provide some tips on how you can kill each monster with help from talent management best practices and technologies.

Vampires
These folkloric undead beings feed off the life essence – usually blood – of their victims. Workplace vampires are employees who feed off their colleagues’ energy, good will, or accomplishments. They sap the strength and engagement levels of those around them. They aren’t merely disengaged in their own work – they actively sabotage their peers. Like the fictional vampire monster, they also can spread the disease quite easily, by causing morale problems through their actions or inactions.

How to kill a workplace vampire
As much as you might like to at times, wooden stakes through the heart are not allowed. What you need is the sunlight provided by easy-to-use performance management solutions that will increase the engagement levels of your employees and keep them on track in meeting their goals. Software with well-designed user interfaces, that people actually want to use, encourage regular, positive dialogue between manager and employee and between employees and their peers.

You can also get a garlic-like protective effect from having strong onboarding and learning management solutions. A robust onboarding solution will go far beyond compliance-mandated forms, and provide a high-level of engagement for the new employee from day one. Integrating a modern learning management system will smoothly extend this high engagement level by encouraging the ongoing learning that modern work requires.

Ghosts
Whether friendly or spooky, ghosts are usually portrayed as entities trapped where they don’t belong – remaining on earth instead of “moving on”. Workplace ghosts are people stuck in a position where they aren’t a good fit, instead of moving on to a role more suited to their talents, personality, or career path. This can happen for many reasons: a change in career aspiration, business needs causing a change in the job, or perhaps they were hired into the wrong role in the first place. Ghosts are almost always depicted as not being fully corporeal – not fully present in this reality, shadows of their former selves. Workplace ghosts can also be only “partially there” – disengaged and under-utilized by their organization. At best they are sub-optimally productive, at worst they can really hamper a team or department until they have been “released” to find their appropriate home elsewhere.

How to help or eliminate a workplace ghost
Whether you are dealing with a friendly or malicious ghost, the advice is the same: you need to help them find the destination they are seeking. The solution is a strong focus on talent mobility, which aligns the needs and objectives of the organization with the skills and aspirations of each individual. Your tool of choice is an integrated talent management solution that provides rich individual talent profiles – complete with both pre-hire data from recruiting and onboarding, and post-hire data from performance management, succession, compensation, and learning. Each of these individual profiles will provide you with the talent intelligence you need to help your workplace ghosts move into positions that are a better fit.

Talent profiles are also crucial to your recruiting process itself, as line of business leaders can use them to help recruiters understand the ideal candidates for each open position. Such talent profiles also enable the creation of robust talent pools that blur the line between internal and external candidates, with search capabilities from the software platform giving HR professionals and line of business leaders the ability to quickly find great matches who have little chance of becoming a workplace ghost (or any other type of monster for that matter).

Werewolves
Whether caused by a bite or a curse, the folkloric werewolf is a human who transforms into a wolf or a human/wolf hybrid. An example of the broader concept of a shape-shifter, workplace “werewolves” or “Jeckyl and Hyde”-types are those who sometimes work productively towards appropriate goals, but often go off on unrelated tangents. Such inconsistent employees can be so harmful to an organization it can leave you wishing that they merely turned into a wolf on full-moon evenings.

How to kill a workplace werewolf
While you don’t have any silver bullets, there are some talent management best practices available. What allows their inconsistency to continue for so long? I’d argue that traditional performance management solutions are one enabler, because annual performance reviews don’t allow for the regular goal realignment that modern organizations require. Business today simply moves too quickly for such antiquated practices. What is needed are technology solutions that don’t merely support annual or bi-annual performance reviews, but also encourage regular dialogue and feedback about goals, and are agile enough to be adjusted regularly as the business needs dictate. Such a performance management solution is what line of business leaders need to keep workplace werewolves from developing in the first place, or to reign in those who have temporarily been bitten by performance inconsistency.

Zombies
Essentially corpses that have been reanimated, zombies are usually portrayed as arising through some mystical means such as witchcraft, or by a virus (as in the hit TV series The Walking Dead). Wikipedia also describes a zombie as: “a hypnotized person bereft of consciousness and self-awareness, yet ambulant and able to respond to surrounding stimuli.” Does that sound like anyone in your organization? There are days when we’ve all had a bit of “zombie” in us, whether due to illness, stress, or some other temporary factor. A real talent problem arises, however, if some employees become consistently unthinking – unable to use good judgment in applying best practices, unable to focus on goals that are aligned with the business, or unwilling to learn and develop their knowledge and skills to better support the organization’s needs.

How to kill workplace zombies
Causing a significant head injury is not a solution available to you, so you’ll need to consider alternative approaches. I recommend that you support a culture of ongoing learning by implementing learning technology solutions that enable greater informal and social learning – that integrate learning with work. After all, if your employees are constantly being stimulated by a wide variety of learning experiences, day-in and day-out as part of their  work, they are far less likely to become disengaged and unthinking. Fostering such a learning culture, backed by the tools that enable it, can even reverse the zombie disease in employees already infected.

Frankenstein’s monster
In the classic story, Dr. Frankenstein tried to create a new human-like life, usually portrayed as one composed of parts of other beings brought to life through massive electric shock or similar means. I have seen many such technology monsters arise over time. First a simple system is developed or purchased, and for a while it does what it was intended to do. In time new business challenges require additional technology solutions. In some cases workarounds are used, with later workarounds applied to handle the negative side-effects that arose. In other cases additional software is developed or purchased, with usually poor levels of integration because they each come from different providers. After many years of such decisions being made, often without enough long-term thinking involved, if you step back and look at the processes and technology systems you have – the resemblance to  Frankenstein’s monster will be uncanny.

How to kill your workplace Frankenstein’s monster
You can avoid Dr. Frankenstein’s fate – the monster enacting revenge on its creator – by replacing your set of poorly integrated systems and processes with integrated software solutions that have been proven to work well together. Such proof comes from real-life battle conditions that exhibit the same scalability, flexibility, and availability that your organization will require. An integrated talent management solution can deliver powerful talent intelligence from recruiting, onboarding, performance management, compensation, succession planning, and learning and development. Replace your nightmare of trapped data from multiple systems with robust talent intelligence that provides the data and insights to drive better business decisions.

Don’t let your organization continue to be a haunted house, full of workplace monsters of every sort. As a savvy HR professional or line of business leader you can be the hero who kills the many workplace monsters that arise when strong talent management practices and systems are not in place.

As always, we welcome your comments on this and all of our blog postings… and Happy Halloween!

(All monster images from Wikipedia Commons.)