Sometimes managers avoid dealing with employee performance issues out of a concern that a direct conversation will become confrontational, complex or time consuming. Other managers worry about creating potential legal issues if they don't have a company policy to stand behind.

To slice through the fear and complexity, I asked Alice Waagen, president and founder of Herndon, Va.-based Workforce Learning, to share her simple framework for dealing with underperforming employees. Here's what she suggests.

An occasional bad hire is nearly unavoidable. But if you churn through executives in a key department every few years, your chronic turnover almost certainly runs deeper than people problems. It may be unintentional, but something in your work environment may be setting people up for failure.

So don't just kick back, blame the individual employees, and then immediately start hiring again. Chronic turnover problems are best solved by first exploring the issues in your work environment. Here are seven common causes of employee failure. More...

Hiring managers often tell me they want to hire someone with "passion." They believe that passionate people will be more self-directed, more motivated to learn new things, and more likely to stick around for the long haul, and not just quit when times get tough.

And truly passionate people will do that.

But far too many hiring managers don't recognize passion when they see it, because they struggle to look beyond a candidate's superficial charm, and focus instead on the harder-to-identify traits that deliver results, like resilience, persistence, and determination. More...

Consultants often urge employers to 'make work fun,' but there is significant evidence that this approach can backfire. Recent studies show that "while 'fun' activities imposed by bosses might slow employee turnover, they can damage overall productivity."

Instead of striving to make work fun, managers should concentrate on creating the conditions in which a variety of personality types, from the excitable to the naturally downbeat, can flourish. More ...