Is There A Difficult Employee In Your Organisation? Fear Not? You Are Not Alone!

Senior Associate Solicitor Jane Sinnamon, from Collingwood Legal, examines the impact difficult employees have on business.

As an employment lawyer, I get first hand exposure to the challenges employers face in employing people. Please don’t misunderstand me – most organisations employee good hard working people who present little problems. However, my job gets interesting when an employer calls me to help them deal with ‘that’ individual who displays persistent and difficult behaviour. The employee who makes it their business to make life for the organisation in which they work and the people they work with incredibly challenging. The reason they do this, who knows! But it nevertheless happens and needs managed.

The individuals I’m referring to are those who are tirelessly relentless in their own agenda, who manipulate those around them (including management), who know (or think they know) their rights, are never wrong, can be argumentative or have a tendency to blame others for their failings, who do things ‘their way’, who believe they are being treated unfairly or that the business is doing something unacceptable. Does this sound familiar? From experience, every organisation has ‘that’ one person (or at least they will at some point).

It is these individuals that employers tend to be reluctant to manage because of the distinct characteristics they possess and contentious nature and way in which they raise issues. Do you wait until the problem disappears (knowing they are disrupting the organisation and the people within it) or try to get the employee to see things from the company’s perspective? If so, evidence has demonstrated that the problem will not disappear, but indeed worsen.

So, how do you deal with this small but very toxic element of your workforce?

From experience, I have found that employers are more confident in dealing with relatively ‘conventional’ employees who present more minor issues compared to those genuinely disruptive employees.

Our advice is that this approach needs to be avoided in order to free up time and resource and allow your organisation to flourish. Provided you take control of the individual and manage the matter closely, consistently and robustly, combining organisational and interpersonal perspectives, you should be able to effectively manage the employee.

I appreciate this can be daunting and take a lot of time, strategy and patience to achieve.

With that in mind, and in light of an increase we have seen in employers having to deal with such behaviours, we are hosting a masterclass event at Kingston Park Stadium on Thursday 5 July in collaboration with Martin Smith PhD (Senior lecturer in Psychotherapy at Nottingham Trent University) who, like us, specialises in extreme difficult behaviour in the workplace. The purpose of the masterclass is to help develop understanding, strategies and practical skills to help manage these individuals and minimise risk to your organisation in doing so.

There are limited places available at this event so if it is of interest we would encourage you to make contact as soon as possible to reserve a place by calling 0191 282 2880 or sending an email to sue. graham@collingwoodlegal.com.