You Learn Something Every Day!

Alexandra Besnard, Senior Associate at Collingwood Legal discusses how to tackle difficult employees that affect the rest of the workforce.

We’ve been busy delivering Masterclasses over the last few months and our latest one was on “Extreme and Difficult Behaviour”.

I think we’ve all been there and have worked, managed or heard about that employee who is often grumpy, unhelpful or negative or the colleague who thinks their sexual innuendos are hilarious despite repeated requests to stop or obvious embarrassed looks. There are also the employees who will not accept any change to work processes because “they know better” or their way has “always worked”.

However they may also either be very good at their job or not bad enough to justify a dismissal for poor performance. They are just obstructive and difficult to manage. They also never quite cross the line that you feel would enable you to justify a dismissal for misconduct. So they remain employed for years and the longer it goes on the less you feel able to tackle their behaviour and you start to just excuse the behaviour by saying “oh well, that’s just Alex, ignore her”. But clearly, this is not healthy for any organisation, as these individuals, slowly, but surely, affect the morale of their colleagues as well as the atmosphere in their department, which can have a debilitating impact on team performance.

You may feel powerless in tackling it, either because the person is too obstructive or they have been allowed to behave that way for years. It is however clear that this counter-productive workplace behaviour will undoubtedly affect the productivity of your organisation and even the health of colleagues who work with these “functioning psychopaths” (but we can’t refer to them as that unfortunately!)

So what do you do? Well, as an employment lawyer, I have advised on these issues many times and when tackled reasonably and to the end of the process, the employee can be dismissed fairly. But often, managers don’t have the appetite for what could be a confrontational process or any attempt to tackle their behaviour is thwarted by threats of grievances or sickness absence.

During the masterclass, we invited a guest speaker to discuss the psychology of these difficult employees and that was enlightening. I tend to believe that people can change, with coaching (even though as I get older this belief is in danger of being eroded!), but our guest speaker destroyed that myth fairly quickly. Having studied human psychology for nearly 20 years, he was clear that employees with extreme behaviour will not change. What needs to change is how you handle these individuals. The word underpinning most of employment law principles is “reasonableness” and with most employees, if you act reasonably, they will listen and adapt their behaviour. The difficult employee will not have the same response. If you seem reasonable, they will see this as a weakness and will push you until you agree with them. The advice our guest speaker gave was “Tell, Don’t ask”, i.e. “ask nicely once, a bit more firmly a second time and then just tell them”, because that’s the only language they’ll understand.

When you add the psychological analysis of the “difficult employee” to your legal principles of fairness and reasonableness, you are far more likely to keep their behaviour under control and if not, provided that you have followed the appropriate process and acted reasonably you can then proceed to a dismissal, which should be fair.

I am clearly not saying it will be easy to manage these individuals, because it will not, but you can challenge and manage them, even if they have been allowed to behave like that for years. It is never too late! There may be hurdles along the way, but in the long run, once this is over, you will undoubtedly have a more cohesive and happy workforce that will go the extra mile for you because, that’s what 99% of your workforce is ready and willing to do.