Low Employee Accountability: Causes & Solutions

Structural Causes for Low Employee Accountability

These causes for low employee accountability are rooted in the operating model of your agency or service business.

No clear role definitions

Teams with low accountability often don't have clear roles defined. Even if roles exist, it's not clear for every task or outcome who owns it. If multiple people are responsible, nobody is.

Expectations aren't explicit and documented

When team members don't know what's expected from them or what's considered a success, then it's hard for them to develop the accountable behavior that will get them there.

It's not enough to tell your team what you want them to do. A lack of written goal definitions and expectations will inevitably lead to a lack of clarity on expectations.

No structured meeting rhythm

If there's no weekly or other meeting cadence where work is actually reviewed and accountability is called upon, then how does your team know and feel that they are accountable for tasks.

Similarly, if there's no tracking of performance or outputs, for example in a dashboard or report, there's no public accountability built into the operating model.

No consequences (good or bad)

If your operating model doesn't include any incentives for the behavior and outcomes you want to see, then you're missing the opportunity to build accountability.

No adoption mechanism for tools or SOPs

Many service businesses have well-spelled out SOPs and yet nobody uses them. The same goes for templates and tools. If there's no structured way to recurrently drive adoption of these tools (e.g. training, weekly check-ins), then they won't drive accountability.

Leadership & CEO Behavior Causes

Low accountability is more often than not caused by the CEO themselves.

Too much friend, too little boss

Many CEOs tell us that they suspect they're part of the reason their team has low accountability, because they are acting more like a friend than like a boss.

This happens to inexperienced founders, and is also more likely in agreeable personality types that try to avoid conflict.

If your team lacks clear direction, critical feedback and you calling out if something goes wrong, accountability will suffer.

CEO jumps in to fix things

If you as the CEO jump in and fix things for your team when they go wrong, they'll learn that they don't have to own the outcomes of their work.

The same is true for reviews of client facing work. When you patiently give feedback on 80% finished deliverables, then your team will use it as a free human spelling check.

Inconsistent standards

If you enforce a standard sometimes, but not always, your team will learn that these are not really standards, but more moods.

CEO doesn't delegate management authority

We often see that CEOs hoard responsibility and decision-making power. If at all, they only delegate tasks. In such a setup, nobody will assume accountability because it would conflict with the signals the CEO is sending.

How to Increase Employee Accountability

Regardless of what of the above reasons you have identified for the lack of accountability in your team, here's the step-by-step to go through to increase accountability. Skip steps that don't apply.

Define clear roles and responsibilities

The first step is to define clear roles. Use a RACI matrix to define what each role is accountable and responsible for. It's important that there is one (and only one) person accountable for each process/client etc.

Next, you need to talk the role description through with each team member. Writing it down alone will not change anything, instead sit down and go through the role description line by line to make sure you're aligned on the scope of the role.

Ask your team to flag any items they need support with or don't yet know how to do. Ideally, both you sign the role description.

Set goals and define what success looks like

Alongside the role description, come up with a set of 2–3 KPIs per role. Don't overthink this. The key here is to make clear to each team member what they optimize for. If it makes sense for the KPI, define goals and then set a cadence to review the performance (monthly, quarterly or yearly work).

If there are strategic outcomes you're looking for, write them down in a goal setting session with your team.

What you need is a written down statement for each role that defines what success looks like.

Implement a weekly accountability cadence

Meet your team weekly. Discuss both client delivery work as well as strategic and continuous improvement initiatives. Check in on progress.

Establish a single source of truth to look at, likely some form of PM tool or dashboard like Asana or ClickUp.

Use these meetings to hold people accountable for their work, outcomes and deadlines. Make sure work and progress is being tracked and reflected in the PM tool.

The team needs to know that in these meetings, their work will be discussed, and you'll ask them uncomfortable questions if necessary. If you do this, they will soon also see this meeting as an opportunity to shine.

Decide what your standards are and enforce them always

Go through what you expect from your team. What are the things that you must have (your standards), and what are the things you'd likely let slip (the nice-to-haves).

Identify what the core is of what you expect. The standards you're actually willing to enforce. Three things that you always insist on are much more powerful than 10 things that you skip when inconvenient.

Settle on a list of "always-on" standards, and communicate them to the team. Ideally write them down in a form of a manifesto. And then, enforce them always, without exception.

A client deliverable is already late but doesn't meet your standards? It goes back to the editor. An employee is late for a client meeting where you set being on time as one of your standards? Penalize them.

Standards will only be accepted if they're actually standards, meaning: "This is how we do things around here".

You are the CEO, not the most senior peer in the delivery team

You need to be brutally honest with your team.

When you decided to build a business, you decided to take on a new role, that of a CEO. This means you can't be fixing deliverables for your team. And it's also not your job to hand-hold every client account. It's your job to build the infrastructure your team needs to deliver, and then support them.

If things go wrong, your job is to clean up. Not to prevent things from going wrong in the first place.

Accept conflict and not being liked by everybody all the time as part of doing business. You can't be friends with everyone, at least not all the time.

Add more leadership capacity

Depending on the state of your business, you might just need more leadership capacity. Consider adding team members to your leadership team, either promoting from within or hiring externally.

Make sure your focus when filling leadership roles is on managerial qualities. You need someone who will hold the team accountable. Promoting the best delivery staff often carries the risk of the new manager being too tied up in old friendships and loyalties, so they avoid conflict.

Give it time, you won't change behavior overnight

If you do all these things over extended periods of time, you'll create higher accountability. But this will take time. You have unintentionally trained your team to have low accountability. This took you years to do. You won't change that in a week.

Employee Accountability in Remote/Distributed Teams

Accountability in remote teams follows the same logic described above. The difference is that you're missing all the little, accidental opportunities and events that help create accountability in an office.

That little chat in the elevator about the upcoming client deadline. The colleague overhearing you discussing delivery standards with a colleague. The team chatting during lunch about how important XYZ is to you.

To balance that you'll need to be even more rigorous with an outcomes focused management of your team.

You need to be even more intentional about the accountability meetings, about setting personal success criteria and about all progress being tracked centrally.