Every business owner encounters difficult employees – commonly referred to as jerks – in the course of running his business. These difficult employees are easy to spot in an organization. They complain about any task you give them, spread around rumors, slack on their jobs and bully their peers and subordinates. In general, they drain lot of energy from everyone, particularly the managers and business owners.
How you deal with them can help you minimize the impact on you and your business. As a business owner, avoiding them is not an option for you, as much as you would like. This will only delay the problem for later and make it even more challenging to address. Rather than avoiding them it is better to nip the problem in the bud and address the situation head on. From our own experience and after talking to fellow business owners we have come up with a 4-step approach that can help you deal with this problem in an appropriate manner.
- Communicate – This is the most important step in dealing with difficult employees. As we mentioned earlier you cannot avoid the situation as a business owner. While your first reaction may be to just get rid of the employee it may not be as easy as you would think. Instead, you should first try to understand the situation by talking to him bringing up specific situations that exhibited the bad behavior. It may be that the bad behavior is a result of some temporary issues he is dealing with and alleviating the issues may change his behavior. Without communicating with him you would never know.
- Coax – While your first reaction may be to confront the employee and get rid of him, in some situations it may be advisable to see if explaining the situation to the employee and asking him to take necessary steps to improve. This is particularly true if the employee has worked at your business for long time. You don’t want to lose the experience he has garnered over years. As you know well, it takes a long time to train a new employee.
- Confront – If the bad behavior continues after giving the employee a chance to improve it may finally be necessary to confront him and give an ultimatum. Give one last warning with clear instructions of what you expect him to do and the consequences if he fails to improve.
- Kick out – Finally, if the bad behavior continues after the ultimatum it may be time to show the door to the employee. Make sure you follow all necessary procedures and policies in letting him go. Also, execute this step in professional manner and expeditiously so that it doesn’t impact the business and other employees who are left behind.
Make sure you document all examples of bad behavior and steps taken to correct the situation. This is very important and necessary because you never know if or when you will need to answer the questions from employee’s lawyer or government officials after you have taken the final action of firing the employee.
What do you think? Do you have any other suggestions or advice for the readers?
I agree with your approach in broad tersm as it should bring about a recognition of the problem and a chance to rectify, before the final act of dismissal comes about.
It is both fair and sensible.
As a lawyer dealing with a more tightly regulated market in the UK I would be introducing some additional safeguards to ensure the discipilnary process was followed properly in each case and that would have to include an appeal procedure.