The employee shows up. The work gets done. The quality of that work, however, is marginal or worse. Mistakes may be so frequent that you feel it would be less work to do it yourself. Or errors may not be the problem, but the document falls short of the excellence expected by your company, your industry, your customers, or you. How do you handle the situation so that this employee’s quality rises to meet the company’s needs and begins to be a source of pride to the employee as well?

Employees may have several reasons for producing poor-quality
products or services, including being unqualified, needing further development, or simply not achieving the quality levels that are within their reach. The interventions in this chapter are broken down for each of these three categories, but some interventions may apply to all three.

UNQUALIFIED EMPLOYEES
How do some people land jobs for which they are not qualified? A few
are promoted by overly optimistic former bosses. Some lie on their
résumés. Some get past recruiters who are very busy and are dealing with a competitive talent pool. However the unqualified employee came to you, that employee is your problem now. He or she may lack the skills, ability, education, or experience to be adequately qualified for the current job. Determining the way in which the employee is unqualified is the first step.

Interventions
• Consider whether the employee has the ability to do this job under
any circumstances. Some employees may have physical or other
limitations that prevent them from doing this job. You can move
such a person to another position or adapt the job to the employee.
Get counsel on this from an HR representative or your attorney,
since any such change may be viewed by an employee as discriminatory. Under some circumstances, you will be allowed to
remove employees. For example, if an employee is a piano mover,
but he cannot lift more than 10 pounds because of back problems,
clearly something must be done, at least until the employee’s back
condition heals. Can you move the employee to scheduling or dispatch? Can the employee be an appointment setter or a driver?
Avoid any move that could be viewed as punitive.

Taken From: 201 Ways to Turn Any Employee Into a STAR Performer