Challenging Employees | Managing Employees

What If You Don’t Like An Employee

When you are managing employees, you quickly recognize that people come with different skills, abilities and personalities. It would be great if you had only high performers, who easily followed everything you set out to do and with a wonderful warm personality. People come to work with their personalities and that is one of the hardest aspects in managing people.

How do you work with an individual, who is performing, and you find annoying? If an employee isn’t performing, then you have a different issue. For this post, we are addressing performers who you just don’t like.

Managing an Employee’s Personal Crisis

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Employees are people and they bring their personal lives with them when they enter the business doors or virtually start work for the day. The reverse happens as well as employees bring home their work issues and it impacts their families. It’s impossible to create a clean line between personal and business and most managers see it on a daily basis.

Some employees never show any sign of personal issues, others are more expressive of the various changes in their lives. Whatever the situation, your role as their manager is to make sure they stay focus on their performance.

Employee Theft

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Employee theft is not a topic that managers want to discuss, though it happens a lot in the workplace. What constitutes employee theft? Anywhere from stealing time, supplies or an outright theft where a trusted employee embezzles thousands of dollars. Small companies are vulnerable because they don’t usually have in place financial control systems that ensure employees are honest.

Studies show that people will rationalize taking something that doesn’t belong to them if the environment is ripe for the taking. That’s why it’s essential that managers/owners help employees stay honest by setting up clear guidelines and systems that protect the assets of the company.

Employee Termination

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Terminating an employee is stressful for managers. It impacts you, the employee and the rest of the team. Though not handling this challenging issue also affects the productivity of the team.

Most states are “at will” which means an employer and employee can terminate the employment relationship at any time without cause. If you have an employment contract, you need to make sure those rights haven’t changed.

There are two different types of employee issues: performance and/or behavior based. Both need to be addressed as soon as you notice the problems.

Stop Supporting Mediocre Performance?

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Managers can be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work and skills required under their umbrella. Sometimes, rather than coach an employee, a manager will elect to hope their performance gets better. Other times, the thought of having to hire a replacement and train them, it seems better to keep the known one and accept mediocre performance. Or maybe just uncomfortable confronting an employee and wait until the performance or behavior becomes a significant problem?

You are faced with a lot of decisions when managing employees, though how you deal with underperforming employees impacts you, your team and the company. When an employee’s performance consistently comes in under a standard, they won’t change unless you intervene and start the coaching or in some cases counseling process.

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