How to manage your coasting employees

Look around your team and you notice different profiles. You’ll see the incredibly committed, looking-for-promotion people. The newbies still finding their feet. Your technical experts – the font of knowledge for their key subjects. And then, there are your coasters. They haven’t quit, but their delivery and enthusiasm has dropped so far, it might be better if they had. You can’t avoid it any more – it’s time to manage your coasting employees.

Your aim is to spur them into action – either within or outside the business – so they stop being a drain on you and your team. You need people who are committed to their role, and supportive of their colleagues. So, let’s explore:

• What coasting is and why it’s bad for business
• The difference between coasting and disengagement
• Seven steps to managing coasting employees:
  • 1. Talk about the issues
  • 2. Provide employee recognition
  • 3. Offer feedback and support
  • 4. Apply strengths-based management
  • 5. Craft roles around individual skills
  • 6. Set clear goals and expectations
  • 7. Consider mentoring options

What is a coasting employee and how they affect your business

Your coasters are doing the bare minimum. These are people who don’t stand out for being disruptive or rude. You rarely manage the performance of your coasting employee. Instead, they’re doing what they need to, with the least amount of enthusiasm possible.

Often, you’ll notice a shift. A once committed and excited employee now lacks any interest in feedback. They don’t want to contribute to meetings, and they certainly aren’t looking to get promoted. Rather, these are people who spend a lot of time looking busy without actually having much to do.

In essence, they’ve checked out and their primary reason for attending work is to collect a paycheck.

So, why does it matter if you have these people in your team? After all, they aren’t underperforming. No, they aren’t. But they’re draining your time and resources, and are probably dragging the rest of your team down with them.

For better or worse, every employee contributes to workplace culture. And nothing disengages others more quickly than a colleague who’s already checked out. Coasting employees, at their worst, start neglecting their responsibilities. Others are left to pick up the slack. As a result, team motivation drops, your risk of burnout among individuals increases. And, because your coasters are still there, you can’t take on anyone else to replace them.

Understanding the difference between coasting employees and disengagement

Coasting is a consequence of low employee engagement. And that can be influenced by various issues, including:

• Company culture – a change in management or leadership can have a negative impact. Somewhere that felt like home can suddenly feel alien
• Management style – a manager who fails to recognize your contribution makes an employee wonder why they bother trying
• Struggling with workload – employees feel overwhelmed, and with no support or process to manage it effectively, they start to check out
• Lack of career development – it’s hard to stay motivated when you want to develop your career but have been passed over for promotion (more than once)
• Limited feedback and support – coasting becomes the new normal where managers don’t provide regular feedback and employees fail to grow or develop new skills

People don’t always choose to coast, and it rarely happens overnight. Rather, it’s borne from frustration or disappointment that builds over time and eventually erodes an employee’s motivation entirely. Either that, or it’s the result of long-term workplace stress leading to burnout, or a personal issue knocking on to the work environment e.g. a bad break up, bereavement, a mental health issue.

Employee disengagement, however, is different.

It’s typically more obvious. Increased absence, significant dips in performance and applying initiative. Disengaged employees tend to say nothing at all in team meetings, and make you wonder if they’re even listening. They may also disconnect socially, losing interest in team lunches or the monthly pub quiz, even when they’ve been team captain for six months.

The other difference is what happens next. Once someone reaches disengagement, it can be almost impossible to bring them back. Coasting employees, however, can regain their motivation when given the right support. So, here are seven steps to help you manage, and re-engage, the coasting employees in your team.

7 steps to manage employees who are coasting at work

Whether you need one or all seven of these options, learn more about how you can talk to your coasters and (hopefully) get them to re-engage with the company:

1. Talk about the issues
2. Provide employee recognition
3. Offer feedback and support
4. Apply strengths-based management
5. Craft roles around individual skills
6. Set clear goals and expectations
7. Consider mentoring options

1. Talk to your employee who’s coasting

Discuss the changes you’ve noticed e.g. not contributing to meetings, opting out of team lunches. Review any issues they’ve flagged within their regular employee check-ins and explore them in more detail.

Make sure you don’t treat this as a regular performance conversation. Rather, this is a separate conversation to find out what’s happening from their perspective and offer any support they might need.

2. Recognize their contribution

When did you last say “well done”? If the answer is, not recently, consider why not.

You can find yourself managing more coasting employees when people feel their contribution is getting ignored – it feels like their efforts aren’t worth it. So, get proactive. Congratulate employees for an excellent sales month, impressive project delivery or great client feedback. Take the time to personally show gratitude.

And make recognition a team thing. Peer recognition can be even more effective than manager feedback. So create a culture which encourages people to highlight and celebrate each other’s accomplishments.

3. Offer feedback and support

Regular employee check-ins give employees a voice and a way to get feedback. They help you to spot issues early, provide proactive support, and remove barriers to success.

Start with an open conversation about the employee’s motivation and personal goals. And explore ways to move them in that direction. If it’s new to you, providing ongoing feedback might feel awkward initially, but understanding more about what drives your team members will reap rewards both in their commitment and productivity.

4. Introduce strengths-based management

Most people have elements of their role they would rather not do. When they’re spending too much time doing these activities, you find yourself managing employees who are coasting. Why? Because they lose enthusiasm.

Strengths-based management allows you to focus on their skills and the elements they enjoy. Adjust their role so they spend more time doing the things they love. And watch as you see an increase in sales, profit, employee and customer engagement.  

5. Consider job crafting to minimize coasting

Give employees a reason to reconnect to the business. Job crafting does that by allowing employees (within reason) to define their own job. When you offer them autonomy to shape their own role, motivation improves and productivity across the team increases.

Individuals not only have a better outlook on their work and the business, they also bond more closely with other team members as they each play to their strengths. They find new ways to do tasks, work more collaboratively, and reshape responsibilities to play to people’s preferences. And, at the same time, reduce coasting behaviors and boost employee engagement.

6. Set clear goals and expectations

This one comes towards the end of the list, because you’re probably already doing it. Most great managers work closely with their teams to set goals or Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). And they make sure everyone knows what’s expected.

When employees are clear on what they need to deliver, it’s easier for them to get behind it. When they aren’t, they can stumble, lose focus and start to coast. So, use goals to connect employees to the broader vision. And adopt check-in platforms like Engage365 to track progress and offer support along the way.

7. Explore mentorship for employees who are coasting

If things are going wrong, sometimes your manager is the last person you want to talk to. Instead, having an employee mentor can offer a safe space to chat through issues. A mentor is a non-judgmental individual with experience in the organization. They can guide an employee, support career progression, identify next steps, and even help work through challenges with a manager.

The important thing to recognize when managing coasting employees, however, is this may not be the first step to take. When someone’s motivation has significantly dropped, they may not be ready to “bare all” to a colleague without action in other areas first.

Moving from coasting to committed employees

Supporting employees who are coasting takes effort. You’re unlikely to have one conversation and find everything is magically better. What you should start to see is a shift in direction.  

Where the cause of coasting is someone feeling undervalued and unappreciated, taking the time to connect with them makes a huge difference. Just building that relationship impacts how they feel about you, their role, and the organization. As a result, their commitment improves, and their productivity rises.

This won’t happen for everyone though. For some, coasting is the step before resigning, and that’s ok. When you follow the steps and have the conversations, you’re likely to spur them into action, one way or another. And at least, if they leave, you can bring in someone else who wants to be there.