Just like weeds, problem employees can keep your business from growing.
By: Baylee Simon
Shawn Kelly was in a bind. Last January the owner of Mirror Lakes Landscapes, Pools & Waterfalls in Spring, Texas, found out his superintendent of seven years had stolen $2,000 worth of materials at wholesale cost to do an outside job five months earlier. Though Kelly’s immediate instinct was to have the employee arrested, his anger and shock weren’t enough to blind him to one simple fact: He needed this guy on his team.
“We’re a design and building company, and we do very custom work that has to be watched over really closely,” Kelly says. “Here I was with our main guy who was caught stealing, and what do I do about that? If I hold onto him, I lose the respect of my other employees. If I let him go, I’m letting my main guy go.” What’s more, Kelly knew the superintendent well, had brought him up from minimum wage to a $70,000 salary and thought he was a great worker with a good heart.
“When you work with people in this line of work, you spend more time with them than with your family,” Kelly says. “If he would have come to me and asked for the materials, I would have given them to him. That’s why it was so hurtful.”
The buddy-boss balance
When dealing with problem employees, business owners often find themselves in situations that force them to weigh what’s right versus what’s right for their companies.
Though personal relationships formed on the job build morale and create an enjoyable workplace, business relationships are what ultimately sustain profits and balance the checkbook. So how do you decide which ties to keep and which to sever?
As an employer, “you want to be friendly but need to have a sense of distance so people are aware you’re the boss,” says Gini Graham Scott, author of “A Survival Guide to Managing Employees from Hell,” which comes out in November 2006. How an employee behaves at work may be influenced by many outside pressures, so you may want to deal with someone who acts out due to a family crisis or personal problem differently than you would with someone who is merely opportunistic. “There has to be a period where you can be sympathetic,” Scott says, “But if [the problem] continues, realize that you’re not a charity operation.”
Adopting the attitude that everyone screws up now and again, Kelly severely demoted his superintendent, who quit two weeks later, causing a slew of problems for the business owner. “It really handcuffed us; suddenly I had to run out to jobs and check up on everything, and I was already working 70-hour weeks,” says Kelly, who received a call from the employee two months later, begging for his job back. After checking with his crew leaders and senior employees, Kelly brought the superintendent back for half of his salary and with restrictions in place, slowly allowing him to take on more responsibilities and reviewing his wages every four months.
“I’ve been in this business for 25 years and that was the worst two months I’ve ever had,” Kelly says. “What he stole from us monetarily, I lost more than that in one week of him not being here.”
Find the “why” behind the will
When a star employee or loyal veteran strikes out at work, it may be in retaliation to an injustice they feel they incurred while on the job. Though it’s no easy task, it’s the business owner’s job to stop the leak before the whole ship goes overboard. In the case of the superintendent, Kelly realized he had been neglecting the long-time employee when he hired an outgoing landscape architect from New Orleans to become the company’s closer on jobs.
“This new guy was a tremendous help and relieved me of so many things,” says Kelly of the landscape architect, who received benefits and worked fewer days than the superintendent. “It was a jealousy thing. The [superintendent] felt like he had been cut out of the picture; he figured [stealing] would be a way to show people he was boss and still had power,” Kelly says.
From now on, the business owner says he’ll always consult with his current employees before bringing in new ones and, though he hasn’t hired anyone new since the theft incident, he vows to be more conscious of his workers and make sure everyone feels appreciated.
“The biggest lesson is that when you bring somebody in who is a savior for your company, just remember that you have other people working there who have been helping you for a long time,” Kelly says. “Don’t let them get lost in the shuffle.”
Scott also suggests reducing the potential for employees to steal by creating a system of checks and balances or incentives for workers to keep watchful eyes on their colleagues.
“Make each employee responsible for a certain number of items to make sure the materials are there at the end of the day,” Scott says. “Or have one person designated to observe things; that way employees know they’ll be held responsible if productivity goes down.” Offering incentives or bonuses to hardworking employees, dropping in for periodic check-ins and staying in touch with workers may also help bolster productivity and lower the risk of theft.
It’s not personal, it’s business
Though part of being a boss is also being a mentor to your employees, a business owner is neither a babysitter nor a psychologist, and when a worker’s personal life begins to interfere too much with his on-the-job performance, it may be time to let him go.
“I’m sure a lot of company owners wish employees would just leave their personal problems at home,” says Tim Lake, owner of T. Lake Environmental Design in East Dublin, Ga. “We inherit those problems and though you have to try to separate business and personal life, we counsel people and help them manage their lives better,” he says.
Lake would know better than anybody — he’s had several issues with past employees who couldn’t leave their personal lives at the door when they came into work, eventually leading Lake to develop a personnel policy, employee manual and discipline sheets to have written guidelines for acceptable work behavior and documentation of when those rules were breached.
“Earlier in my career, I felt like I should try to save the world, and I still do, but I’ve come to a different place in my life. You’re responsible for your own actions, and if things aren’t going well, it’s because of what you are or are not doing,” says Lake, who put pressure on one very qualified and likeable employee whose personal problems led him to do mediocre work and eventually leave the company. “I instituted sales tracking and found that he was putting out hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in propositions, but his closing ratio was next to nothing,” Lake says. “When we started measuring closing ratio and the profitability of the jobs he was doing, measuring gross profits sold and produced instead of gross dollars, it became evident that he wasn’t doing anything but breathing the air here for free.”
Though not every employee problem can be measured or tracked, often those issues become the most difficult and awkward to handle.
“I had a guy who was a manager of one of our divisions, who was super intelligent and I really liked him, but somehow the chemistry never worked. He became a ‘well-poisoner,'” says Lake. “He didn’t respect the people who worked under him and was negative about everything in the world. When he came in [to work], it was like the black hole of happiness in the halls; everyone would go in their offices.” Lake struggled with how to handle the situation since the employee was very qualified for his job, though his negative energy was damaging the company’s morale. Eventually, the business owner brought him into his office and invited him to find another job where he would be happier.
“I didn’t outright fire him. I gave him sources for help and told him to change his life, come in tomorrow a different person and he’d have his job here,” Lake says. “If [he couldn’t do that], I said go home, wash your face, look in the mirror and think hard about what you need to do. Now he’s in another industry and he’s flourishing.”
“C.Y.A.”
Of course there are tools and practices business owners can use to try to prevent problem employees from poisoning their companies. One motto Joe Pollina, owner of Tommy Pollina Landscape Co. in Park Ridge, Ill, has come to live by is “C.Y.A.— cover your a$%.”
“I’ve learned to use as much technology as possible; I don’t trust an employee until we’ve established a relationship and I know who he is,” says Pollina, who carries a BlackBerry, pocket word processor and two cell phones on him at all times, and has GPS tracking systems installed on each of his company trucks.
“You can never keep too much information and you never know if there’s an issue with unemployment or on a job site,” Pollina says. “I keep notes on employees and clients and I can track my crews; I can tell you where all of my trucks are at any time. Some people call that micromanagement, but I call it supervising.” Others would just call it running a successful business.
The author is a freelance writer based in Chicago. Contact her at 201/248-4686 or b-simon@northwestern.edu.
