Knowing When to Give Up on Difficult Employees

There are people, in every company, that are difficult employees.  They don’t do the job right, so you offer to help them and they do fine while you are there, but as soon as they are left alone, they ‘forget’ everything you’ve told them.  If you continue to give in and continue to work with this person, you might just be supporting the behavior.  Day 4 – Knowing when to give up on difficult employees

Your biggest goal, as a boss, is to build the strongest team you can so that you are as successful as you can be.  If you spend all your time with these difficult employees, then you are losing out on training and building your business with the good employees.  These good employees will soon get tired of picking up the pieces of this bad employee and they will be the ones looking for a new job.

Most of the time, when you have a good employee and you give them the motivation, recognition and positive reinforcement they will continue to grow and be an even better employee.  But what happens a lot of times with a bad employee is that when given these same things, you will find that you still have to correct them and/or do the job for them.  They settle and they have you to fall back on, so why should they change.

Now, I’m not saying NEVER help your employees.  If you have an employee that is struggling, then help them, train them again, and then work with them on a trial bases.  Letting them know that they need to have an “aha” moment by the time the trial is over, because you can’t continue to spend this amount of time with them.  Or find a job, within your company, that might better suit their talents.

Either way, you can only do so much for some people and you have to know when to let go.