Within your company, is there one employee who just kind of gets everyone’s guard up? Maybe they’re a bit rude or forceful. Maybe they kick back too often and let others pick up the slack. Or maybe their negative attitude is just a total drain on business operations. The problems they bring to the table aren’t necessarily fireable offenses, but they are incredibly annoying and difficult to deal with.
One difficult employee can have more of an impact on your business than you may have considered. It isn’t just about petty personnel complaints or surface-level office drama. First of all, their attitude may be wearing on others as well, leading to high turnover and disgruntled employees. Secondly, their attitude may be reflecting negatively on your business as a whole, leading to fewer sales of your products and services. Finally, they may be a distraction from your company’s core offering—after all, if you’re always putting out fires they start, it’s how to stay focused.
If you want to keep your employee around because of the value they bring to the table, that’s fine—but you still need to address their difficult nature. Ignoring the problem is like letting a wound fester; sooner or later, it’s going to get infected and be even more of a problem than you started with. Here are four ways to handle a difficult employee—and what to do if none of them are working.
Take Accountability
No matter how difficult the employee is making things, there’s probably a role you’re playing as well. Identifying this should always be the first step. Maybe you haven’t communicated the issue to them, given them enough guidance, or answered their questions quickly enough. They could simply be frustrated that they’ve brought something to HR over and over again only to be ignored. Take a look at your previous interactions with the employee and try to see where you may have dropped the ball. Does this mean all of their negativity is your fault? Of course not. But accountability is an important first step to take. It’s essential to look at ways you’ve enabled the employee as well. If they’re always making excuses, but you’re always accepting them, you’re participating in a bad dance that needs to end. There’s no point in letting things drag on and on when what you really need to do is figure out a solution.
Have a Crucial Conversation
You may need to have what’s called a “crucial conversation” with the employee. In other words, you need to sit them down and be straightforward with them. This doesn’t need to take place within the framework of an official employee evaluation or a performance improvement plan, but it might. Clearly explain—with details and specific scenarios—what the difficult employee is doing wrong. Try to frame things constructively; you want to give guidance on improvement, not just point out all of the areas they’ve failed. If the conversation doesn’t go well, it may lead to the employee quitting, which could actually be a good thing in the long run. If it does go well, you may hold onto a valuable employee with an improved job performance. This is also a time when you can get to the real root of the problem, and make sure you’re not just slapping a band-aid over an important issue. It may take more than one conversation to figure out what’s really bothering someone, but once you do, the problem might be easy to fix. Resist the urge to rush to solutions; instead, take your time to find out why this person is acting difficult and what it is that they’re hoping to see change.
Shift their Role or Impact
Is there a way you can minimize the team member’s impact on the rest of the company? Maybe they’re a terrific marketer, but really get difficult and obnoxious when they have to handle social media. A simple social media intern hire could take a ton off their plate. Or maybe they’re exceptionally rude to one individual coworker because of a personal issue—could you rearrange your structure a tad so that those two aren’t forced to work together? Get creative and find ways to move things around so that their difficult nature isn’t impacting business operations quite as much.
Remember the Bigger Picture…
Is this employee so valuable too your business that you’re willing to put up with a bad attitude? The answer might be yes! If an employee is bringing in a ton of your yearly revenue, but the way they’re always late drives you nuts, you may just need to valuate their pros vs. their cons. Nobody’s perfect, and there are some traits you’re probably willing to put up with in order to have an effective employee in place. After all, a new hire will bring their own set of difficulties. Remember also that you should be focused on behavior, not personality. If you just personally dislike someone, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with their behavior, it may be something you need to get over.
…But Make a Decision
However, with all of that being said, no matter how badly you want to hold onto this employee, it might be the best decision to let them go. No matter how great they were at sales, or marketing, or coding, you can always train a new hire to learn those skills. It’s a lot harder to train someone to be less difficult and more of a team player. Yes, you should focus on behavior over personality, but it’s certainly possible for someone to have such a toxic personality that it affects the entire work environment. There’s very little you’re going to be able to do in order to mitigate that. Don’t get so attached to any individual employee’s job performance that you can’t let them go. If that’s what the situation calls for, do it with respect and confidence that you did everything you could.
Claire Swinarski is a Contributing Editor at HR Daily Advisor.
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