4 Kinds of Excuses Employees Make at Workplace
with
Moruf Kolawole Nasir
(Experienced HR professional)
nmkolawole@gmail.com; jarushub@gmail.com
The saying that he that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else is not far from the truth because nobody wants excuses, even though everybody makes them. Just as your friends don’t need them, so also your foes don’t believe them.
Excuses, if given among peers are pardonable but when such becomes predominant in the work place it becomes a serious management issue that must be well managed by supervisors and line managers. Managers must be able to identify excuses when offered and disarm them to ensure a productive work force.
Although employees’excuses come in all manner of shapes and sizes, they tend to fall into four general categories:
1. Diversions: These are excuses that are made when employees redirect blame back to the supervisor/manager. At any point in time when employee is unable to get a task done and all he/she could do is to give an excuse that the task is “not my job” or he/she gives an excuse that he/she was not asked to implement the said task “you never told me that”; the employee is simply adopting diversion excuse. This excuse is employed in many cases when employees ignore a task that is supposed to be done along the line of their normal routine work. If you find yourself always doing this, it is high time you stopped because it is counter-productive and usually send bad signals to your superiors and employers.
2. Discounts: These are excuses that are adopted when employees refer to the past or pointing out the behaviour of others in justifying an action or a done job. A good example here is when a task is done contrary to directive, and when asked the employee’s excuse is “it’s been done that way for years” or “that was how Mr Akeweje did it” or “Other people do the same thing”.
3. Denials: These are excuses given by employees to reject any responsibility for a performance problem. Here employee may claim “It’s not my fault” or “You shouldn’t blame me”the question that will readily come to mind is whose fault is it, or who then should be blamed to accept the responsibility? If this excuse is not properly managed it can inculcate a culture of buck passing in an organization and this is highly counterproductive in any setting.
4. Half-Truths: This excuse is the most common one; here, employees point out a possible obstacle as a cause for a performance problem. This is a kind of excuse you hear from applicants when they arrive for interviews late. Instead of admitting performance problem and take responsibility, it is a common practice among employees to shift the problem or to dodge responsibility. That is when you hear employees say “I got sick” or “forgot to do it”, etc.
Having said all these, the key to any manager’s success is to first identify the type of excuse advanced by his associate/subordinate, and then know which approach to take with the employee. Some of the approaches that could be taken by line managers/supervisor will be addressed in our subsequent article
Always remember “In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn”.
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