Your company’s employees are its most valuable resource. It’s important to hire the right team members, keep them motivated and happy, and improve their capabilities in order to help your company evolve and prosper.
But what happens when a problem employee appears? Those people who are never happy, or who spread turmoil and conflict and discord throughout your entire team? These toxic employees can drag a company down, and it’s often difficult to manage them – especially when you’ve invested a lot into their training. At Technalink we understand this challenge and have developed a few steps that can help make it easier to manage these problem employees and guide them towards a better, healthier role in your business.
Here are a few things to keep in mind.
- Always begin by approaching with empathy and compassion. Sometimes, a problem employee is dealing with much more than is just visible on the surface. They could have problems at home, or with a loved one far away from them, or with financial issues. Being a compassionate boss is an important step and could help you find positive ways to improve their outlook.
- Try to maintain a positive, healthy dialogue with employees. They shouldn’t feel like they’ll suffer retribution when they talk to you about problems and concerns, and this applies to problem employees as well.
- Creating a solution is better than creating a confrontation. When you approach a problem employee, you should do so after developing some form of a plan as to how to manage and deal with the situation and what is stemming from it. If you have no way of managing the situation, it’s better to develop a plan first.
- Termination is a last resort, but it’s one that you may need to consider. In particular, you need to assess the importance of the employee as well as their relationship to others in the business and what kind of impact they’re having as a whole. In some cases it may come down to termination, but you should try to exhaust other options first. Your other employees will see your efforts as well, and respect you for trying to help the employee first.
- Honesty is always the best policy. Many problem employees create toxic environments by addressing things that aren’t even true, or spreading rumors. An open line of communication with your employees is the key to stopping many problems before they begin.
If you’ll keep these basic things in mind you should be able to better manage a problem employee and avoid the kind of turmoil they can create within a business. A little effort can go a long way towards preventing major issues.
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