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How does it not work? You come in, do your job, go home.
If there are any serious impediments to getting the job done (coworkers included) then you bring it to the attention of management and then...let it go. If you find the situation is not meeting your needs, begin to look for another job.
If I had to look for another job every time I ended up working with a slacker, I'd have a pretty rich work history by now. Get educated.
I haven't read every post in this thread so apologies if this has already been covered: one of the likely causes is pity. Ie managers 'cutting some slack' for an employee who's having health/relationship/family troubles etc, especially for someone who may have been a perfectly decent performer in the past. Other employees might not be privy to this.
HOWEVER A manager in this situation has to be careful that they're not being manipulated with skillful fabrications. I have to confess that I'm a manager who's been caught out by this - ie swallowing a slackers litany of sob stories. It's a sickening feeling once you eventually realise that you've been played like a chump.
Other top causes - PLENTY of nepotism and cronyism.
The real question is, what happened in the workplace which lead to this dynamic? If I talk to someone my grandparents' age, they'll say the workplace was for competent people who wanted to work. I did some reading on interviewing techniques and noticed there has been a trend in the last 20 years to use behavioral question techniques to truly assess if a person is competent. What happened in between my grandparent's generation and when the workplace started to change how they assessed competence? We're all looking at the results now and wondering if it really "worked" out.
The reason I believe things got out of wack is managers and HR people start taking BS studies and articles on human behavior and "top 10 things to make the workplace great" as a means to run an office. You see way too many people who make hiring decisions based off some book they read over common sense and figuring out the needs of the office. This trend I think started in 80s when leaders got full of themselves with buzzwords and phrases like synergy, can do attitude, "Is what I'm doing best for the Company", and feeling like they need to emphasize the mission statement and company's mission everyday. The people who spout the company's mission to me seem like they can't even take a crap by themselves without looking up a how to guide.
How are any of those questions relevant to the job??
(facepalm)
Because HR says that behavior questions on like "what do you do for fun" shows that you are the "perfect fit" for the culture, and because you answered correctly with "I drink on weekends' makes you the best candidate for the job. Also if you answer, "I strongly agree that I'm a team player" gets HR people all giddy.
Personally speaking my manager is a little girl. he's terrified of controntation and he's just lazy. My manager has a group of like 5 stores/offices. One of his offices is very poorly staffed, people always calling off, leaving the office to walk around the mall, etc. He's let it go on for years. They are constantly calling me and my office trying to get us to fill in and stuff. I refuse to help. I told my boss straight to his face, I helped out at first, you've let this go on for 2 years, it's your problem not mine, if you won't fire worthless employees than you will be the one to go fill their shifts when they don't show. You may be asking why would I talk to my boss like that, because I can and because I'm right in this siutation.
Just to give you an idea, my office has 3 people, two of us work weekends one doesn't for no other reason than she doesn't want to. I brought this up to my boss, instead of talking to her himself he asked me to do it. She through a tantrum and cried and screamed and said he'd have to fire her. I called him and told him and he said well I guess we just won't make her work saturdays. He made me do his job and tell someone on my samve level what htey had to do, and then didn't back me up when I did. It'ss poor management is the reason.
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