Every employer knows the situation when the employee forgets an important piece of information about the client or project or even worse forgeting something about both. If you have not experienced this, then congratulations.But be aware, the situation will come sooner or later.

Let's summarize the reasons for forgetfulness of employees.

1. Attitude towards work and motivation – Specifically for younger people (but not only them), they can tend to have a very relaxed attitude towards work. As for motivation, employees may not be motivated by the company's success as you are. For them, their motivating factor is money, appreciation or even praise.

2. Human productivity – youth vs. age. Young people can be laid back but probably forget less than older employees. In this respect it is impossible to generalize. If a man in his sixties continuously trains his memory he may have a better memory than a twenty year old employee.

3. Time management – many employees have difficulty setting priorities and adhering to them. They mostly do task by task, regardless of their priority. Or conversely they try to solve all tasks at once which they do not manage on time.

4. Lack of responsibility – the psychology behind employment dictates that the employee is to think that he works for you. Not with you.

How to get rid of these employees? Exchange them for new ones? Do you really think they will be different?

In my subjective opinion, there are several possible ways to minimize forgetfulness, increase efficiency and enhance the credibility of your employees in the eyes of the client.

• Attitude and motivation to work : you may be able to change young employees to become leaders. Give them responsibility (supervise their actions and intervene when necessary). Respect them, treat them as equal to each other. You can change a laid back worker into a team leader with no investment into a completly experienced and valuable senior employee. Your investment will be the time of supervision. The young learn quickly and it will not need a lot of time to develop.Watch performance metrics to measure and reward employees accordingly. Hold a company competition – you will stimulate competitiveness by this which will lead to efficiency and motivation to sharply increase.

• Human productivity : the real truth is that in today's labour market the evaluation is not objective and older people are discriminated against. In Japan people would probably disagree. Older active people may have more trained memory than young people and as a benefit the old ones have much more experience and maturity. Human productivity is necessary to evaluate objectively.

• Time management : I personally think that it is necessary to sort tasks to 3 categories (MUST, NEEDED, WAIT). Another division would be rather confusing. Imagine a bar to which you attach tasks according to their priorities. When the most important tasks are done (those at the top of the bar) you gradually work through to those below, to those that can WAIT. Dividing into more than 3 kinds is ineffecient. Whoever does not agree, please let the comment. I would like to hear their views.

• Lack of responsibility : the employee will never feel the same responsibility as you feel! However they should feel some, so with let juniors employess collaborate on projects for VIP clients.

Do you think there are other reasons for forgetfulness or inconsistency of the employees?

Do you agree with my conclusions?