Is Your Organization Symptomatic of Low or No Accountability?

Do you often find your executives asking, “Who’s accountable for this?” when something goes amiss? Are your teams loaded with enough work but no focus? If your answer is a “yes” to any of these questions, your organization shows signs of no accountability or a lack of accountability. Besides, over 80% of managers accept they have “limited or no” ability to hold others accountable successfully. Knowing that learning organizations face the challenge of low or no accountability, let us dig into the signs showing the same. Once you take note of these symptoms and correct them, you can have accountable employees.

Symptoms of Low or No Accountability in the Workplace

Symptom #1
Employees no longer care about their performance but about the job

When your employees aim to secure their jobs, they work out of desperation and are not so thoughtful. Not getting fired is at the top of their mind. They hesitate to commit mistakes. Instead, they take calculated risks to bring about improvements while engaging in tasks they consider safe. Such employees no longer worry about collaborating with other teams and innovation. They are symptomatic of a lack of new ideas; there is more blame game among members of a team and across teams, and disintegration of social aspects of the job. Employees develop a mentality of “I vs. Them” while practicing no accountability in the workplace.

Symptom #2
Tasks are left incomplete or are not completed as per the deadlines

Your employees don’t care about the projects they are working on. They do not feel the resolution or responsibility to fulfill their commitments, like, they don’t plan to meet task or project deadlines. Team members have no clarity on their role in the project and don’t know its objective. If and when questioned on their inefficiency, they may not be willing to answer for the delay in project completion or lack of productivity. Even the manager chooses to be non-answerable for the negative effect on the overall team performance.

Symptom #3
Feedback becomes occasional and poor

One of the signs of low accountability in the workplace is when there is no uniform flow of feedback throughout the organization. Neither an individual contributor nor a team member requests your feedback, nor do you, as a manager, offer any feedback to your reports. This implies no feedback from individual contributors, executives, and senior leaders. Even the peers don’t care to share critical feedback. You may see a pattern of people inflating the positive effects of others’ work. Consequently, there is a decline in performance standards and, thus, the quality of results. Achieving a goal becomes challenging.

Symptom #4
Commitments Become Meaningless

When leaders refrain from following through on their commitments, other employees working in the organization do the same, thus affecting accountability in the workplace. They often ask themselves. Why do I work hard to get the job done when leadership doesn’t care? The level of commitment decreases, and there is low morale across the organization. Besides, teams are overloaded with tasks; their company has too many goals to accomplish. For instance, in an IT company, follow-up work for incident reviews never gets done, and teams are pulled into other tasks.

Symptom #5
Employee Turnover is much low

Roles, expectations, and context change with every stage of growth or iteration, and this happens across developing and high-change organizations. Employees should thus adapt to the new and changing needs or leave if they can’t or don’t. In case quite a few employees stay, despite big changes happening in the organization and there are issues in their performance, it is typically a sign of unclear performance standards, no performance management, or poor feedback. Remember, a high retention rate isn’t always a positive sign.

Now that you have learned of the symptoms of low or no accountability, as an organization, you must take corrective measures to boost your employees practice it. Unless your people are answerable for the task(s) undertaken, they can’t achieve organizational goals and ensure business success. Learn how an employee experience platform is the one-stop solution to resolving accountability problems in the workplace.