Theory of Employment - Larry Winget meets Selden/Colvin Angel Customers

I have been expanding a theory by the authors Winget, Selden and Colvin related to staffing and managing employees I thought you may be interested in.

In any company you have 20% of the worker who are great, 20% who are bad and 60% in the middle.

The Top 20%

These are workers you don't even have to manage.  Just stay out of their way and try to make them happy.  The top 20% probably do 50% of the work that gets done in a company.  Unless you company is growing at a fast rate you will not be able to keep the top 20% long term as they are on such a fast track to success that they will eventually out grow the company. 

The Middle 60%

These are worker who are average in every way.  These are the workers who need the bulk of a managers time in training, review and mentoring to either motivate them into improve into the top 20% or show that they are actually a bottom 20% performer and should be replaced.  The middle 60% contributes about 60% of the workload.

The Bottom 20%

These are the worker where most managers spend the bulk of their time.  It is a waste for both you and the worker as you need to be focusing on getting the most out of your productive employees and not babysitting these jokers.  The bottom 20% of workers should be put on notice and fired unless they move into one of the higher categories in a short time.  They may be nice people, but they are not doing their fair amount of work.  The bottom 20% probably contributes -10% of the workload as their errors and lack of diligence cause more work for the other two categories.

So that is the basics of the theory.  My contention is that if a company does not fire the bottom 20% of employees and it is true that the top 20% leave then eventually you will end up with 50% or more of the employees in the bottom 20% of performance.  I believe that unproductive workers, much like unproductive customers actually do negative work as they cause problems for the rest of your workers.