How Do I Deal With Difficult Employees in the Workplace?

We have all probably been difficult to work with at some point in our working lives and a few of us have likely had moments where we have been very difficult to deal with. For most of us these lapses are temporary, however, there are some people who seem to derive satisfaction from being difficult. 

These people ignore, belittle, undermine or criticise others. They do not help beyond the bare minimum or may go further and actively sabotage other people’s work and effort.

Being treated unkindly by a colleague, or boss, can be very stressful and cause anxiety and/or depression, and at the minimum, you dread having to work with them. Difficult people de-energise us and they affect other staff and impair their performance. 

Working with horrible colleagues can generate far-reaching stress that follows you home and causes unhappiness for your spouse and family. Keeping workplace stress outside the home can be difficult, especially when it is chronic. 

Resolving tensions in a team is a frequent leadership challenge. At any level of the organisation, conflict and lack of teamwork diminishes a team’s effectiveness.

However, incivility is a solvable problem and not something you have to put up with – you do not have to wait until people get cynical or quit; it is something management, and individual workers, can do something about.   

Resolving incivility and staff tension pays off. In December 2003 the Graduate Program in Business and Technology at UNSW released a paper titled, “Simply the Best Workplaces in Australia”. The study documented several excellent workplaces in Australia and they identified 15 key drivers for excellence, with “quality working relationships” as the central pivot on which excellent workplaces are founded: people relating to each other as friends, colleagues and co-workers, supporting each other and helping to get the job done. This is what we are aiming for – quality working relationships.

How does an organisation achieve “quality working relationships”?

The solution is a three-step process: prevention, self-reflection, and action.

Prevention

Preventing problems from developing in the first place is obviously the best approach. This is achieved by having an effective recruitment, induction, and retention program.

Vision, Values & Behaviours

But, before you do anything, you need to have some sort of code of conduct or some such similar document. We call our statement, “Vision, Values & Behaviours” and it’s on one page and it is easy to read and easy to follow; it’s a living document and is used and referred to as needed, but especially in the selection and induction phase.

Recruitment & Selection

An effective recruitment method begins with the wording of the job advert, is standardised, methodical and structured, albeit with a degree of flexibility. An effective method capitalises on our biases and intuition, uses some form of testing or profiling, and introduces the candidate to the culture and context of your workplace early in the process, including the “Vision, Values & Behaviour” document.

Induction

If you want a good candidate to become a great employee, then the induction process must be a priority; it is the nexus between your staff selection process and staff retention program. 

Induction, or onboarding, is an extension of the recruitment and selection process. Do not just hire someone and hope that it works out. No matter how effective your recruitment process is, there is still a chance that you have made a poor hiring decision, or the new employee is not what you thought they were going to be. Thus, the first few weeks of a new employee’s tenure can be a time to confirm what was learned through the selection process and if any unexpected behaviours emerge, they can be addressed early. 

The induction process is an opportunity to reinforce the organisation’s culture and minimum, non-negotiable, expected standards of behaviour by clarifying your vision, values, and behaviours. 

Retention

Recruitment and induction are just a prelude to how you manage your staff on an ongoing basis. Without a proper retention program all your preceding work will be less effective with time. If you have an effective staff retention program your employees will be more motivated, more engaged, and more enthusiastic about their role. Not only will you improve staff motivation and engagement, by implementing an effective retention program you also take away from those recalcitrant and difficult employees the claim that they are not listened to or heard.

Self-Reflection

You

Perhaps you are the problem, or at least a contributor to the problem. This can be difficult for some people, but you need to think about how you may be a contributor to the problems. For example, in a survey by Comparably of 10000 workers, a micromanager was identified as the worst trait in a manager. Perhaps you are a micromanager, but you are unaware. 

The Gossip Test

Everyone gossips and everyone will have an opinion about you, thus, what do you want them to say about you. This thought experiment will help drive your behaviour.

Take the example of conducting a job interview. You know the candidate will go home that night, walk in the front door and their partner or friend will ask them, “How did the job interview go?” What do you want the candidate to say? Because what you want them to say will drive your actions to create the desired impression. The candidate could say to their partner, “I was really impressed. The manager was on-time – didn’t keep me waiting in reception for a minute which was so respectful. I was able to talk as much as they did. They gave me a chance to put my best self forward. The manager was never distracted or interrupted. I hope I get the job!” If that is what you would like a job candidate to say, then that helps drive your behaviour and actions.

Now take the gossip test one step further and ask what you think your team or colleagues say about you by asking yourself these four questions:

·        What do you think your staff say about you?

·        What would like them to say about you?

·        Does your behaviour and actions reflect what you would like others to say about you?

·        Would you like your family or friends to see you at work?

Action

Finally, there are the numerous behavioural strategies that can be used when dealing with difficult colleagues and the precise armoury of techniques and strategies depends on your own personality and work style. However, for any of these strategies and techniques to be effective, ideally you need to lay the groundwork beforehand, and at the minimum, everyone agrees to the Code of Conduct or the “Vision, Values & Behaviours” of the organisation. 

Summary

Preventing problems from happening in the first place is self-evident and it is not difficult to do: we know how to build high performing teams - the science is clear and easy to implement. However, dealing with entrenched and problematic staff is difficult, but not impossible. You need an open-mind and some self-reflection, and a phone call or email to us as Fermion.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

I am an Organisational Psychologist and owner of Fermion. I enjoy keeping up to date with the latest research in psychology and sharing that information. There are a lot of fads, gimmicks and clichés in the people & culture field, and I believe it is important to be sceptical of hyperbolic claims about human behaviour and to adopt an evidence-based approach to work.

The focus of Fermion is "Psychometric Testing for Recruitment" and “Recruitment to Retention: How to select good staff and keep them”. If you would like to learn how to select good staff and keep them, please feel free to contact us at Fermion.

“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.”

Eleanor Roosevelt.