• Participate in team-building or relationship-building exercises with this employee if her issue is personal and not professional. With an outside consultant or on your own using off-the-shelf or online programs, try to work through the rebellion that the employee is demonstrating. The American Management Association or the American Society of Training and Development can offer you a variety of games and job aids aimed at improving the dynamics of your relationships. Some are as simple as answering a series of questions so that you and the employee get to know each other better. Others are designed to reveal your different personality styles to each other and to increase tolerance for different styles. Some courses, like ropes courses, have you engage in a fun activity designed to increase your trust in each other and to create a bonding experience.

• Ask the employee to present his work to his peers or to management and let the embarrassment be his. If the risk to you is not great, allow the employee to present his shoddy work to his peers or to management. If he is capable of better, he will probably be embarrassed. The embarrassment about his work should be not yours but his. This intervention works only if the employee knows that he will be responsible for presenting this work to others and doesn’t want to look ill-prepared or unprofessional in front of others.

• Ask the employee to train or mentor others. This may sound contradictory if the employee’s work has not been a model of excellence in the past. The best way I know to learn to be better at
something, however, is to teach it to others. That forces a bored
employee to tune in and pay attention to details. Watch the employee closely, however. Although this usually works, you need
to watch to make sure that the employee is not teaching others her
slovenly ways.

• Show the employee dramatic results of poor quality. If the
employee’s inferior quality can lead to safety issues or material
damage, try to find photos or videos of the results of mistakes and
poor quality. Much of this can be found online now. Ask the employee to research and write a report or a list of all the ways in
which poor quality could hurt the company, customers, the department, and him.

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