How To Handle Difficult Employees
photo credit: mackenzienicole
These difficult people harass you and others, ask too many self-explanatory questions, neglect details, distract you and repeatedly challenge you and others. Even worse, when they interact with customers, vendors and people lower than them on the corporate hierarchy, they can be grouchy, impolite, condescending, uninformed, misleading, inappropriate or simply wrong. Do you know anyone like this?
Entrepreneur.com recently posted an article regarding these difficult employees that we have all encountered at some point in our business life. Many of us don’t know how to handle them, well now there are a few suggestions below to help you out.
- Don’t ignore the problem, this will only tell them that their behavior is acceptable and it will continue rather than stop.
- Take care of the problem. A manager needs to take the difficult employee into a room away from others and calmly address the issue, give the employee a chance to respond and then try to work on ways to correct the behavior.
- Step in to take care of the problem as soon as possible. Letting this behavior go on for any length of time even a few days could cause the solution to backfire. The employee may ask why it wasn’t addressed days ago if it was such a problem.
- When all else fails termination may have to be a course of action. If you have addressed the behavior more than once, you have given numerous warnings verbally and written warnings to go in the employees file, and it is still going on, then termination may be the only resort left.
Shannon on June 4th, 2009 4:03 pm
This sound like a way to deal with naughty children except for the termination step. This is a good guide to use as a reminder to how to deal with employees creating problems.
shannon
RedHotFranchises on June 4th, 2009 7:30 pm
Understanding assertiveness and learning how to effectively communicate in both personal and business relationships is a skill that creates positive impact on others as well as yourself. Assertive communication creates opportunities for open discussion with a variety of opinions, needs and choices to be respectfully heard and considered in order to achieve a win-win solution to problems rather than selfishly (aggressively) demanding to “get my own way”.
Jaclyn on June 5th, 2009 5:35 am
Shannon,
It does almost sound like a plan on dealing with an unruly child, unfortunately sometimes even adults can and do act like a child at times. I think we have all done it at least once in our adult lives, but some do it more than others sadly.
Leave a Reply