Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Your workplace can be damaged by difficult employees. You know what I mean – drama queens, gossipers and power grabbers.
It all starts with fear, an acronym for Frantic Effort to Avoid Responsibility. You and your employees have a responsibility. Fear exacerbated by workplace negativity can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fear promoted by just one toxic employee who spreads negativity and gossip can be divisive and a morale-buster. A single worker’s negative behavior can spread and create explosive situations.
Concurrently, it results in backstabbing, gossip, negative team members, rudeness and poor employee morale.
When employees stop contributing good ideas, and sharing information or solve problems, productivity is hampered.
In addition, you can expect loss of your time from supervising a weak performer; employee turnover and loss of talent; rule violations leading to injuries and legal issues; loss of customers; and consequently losing your self-esteem.
So, it’s important to confront negative employees.
Here’s how:
Don’t get sucked into the employee negative-mindset
You can listen to such employees, but stay detached. Don’t let their negativity affect your sunny attitude.
Don’t jump into arguments
Understand how negativity spreads. Maintain your cool. Highlight areas of agreement at every opportunity.
Lay out your expectations of behavior
Without referring to attitude, in fact never mention the word to your employees, outline the repercussions of negative behavior.
While you can’t always change employees’ negative attitude about a company policy, you can change their behavior.
Discipline employees who don’t observe your policies, when they are insubordinate or if they gossip about your policies.
Continue to engage employees
The best approach in engaging employees is to ask questions. In fact, ask open-ended questions vs. closed-ended questions so they tell you why they are compelled to be negative in their behavior.
Espouse the Golden Rule
Do some role-playing about resolving workplace issues.
Ask your workers to walk a mile in your moccasins to see what it’s like to be in your shoes. Invite them to offer solutions instead of just complaining.
Pragmatic employees will start experiencing what it’s like to develop solutions.
Be an intent listener
By listening very carefully, you’ll cut through the quagmire so you can accurately understand employees.
Maintain high expectations of good behavior
Employees with negative mindsets aren’t always bad workers. Work to improve their outlook to improve their performance.
Empower your employees
Give them power. You can stop the victim mentality of workers affected by negativity by empowering them to do the right thing.
Encourage them to take responsibility for positive events. Encourage them to deal with bad events.
Seek employee input
Ask your employees for their ideas and opinions, especially before you implement new policies and procedures.
They most likely will respond in a positive way vis-à-vis spreading negativity.
Employee the best employees
Hire well. In your recruiting and interviewing weed out negative candidates. In this order, focus on the four A’s: Attitude, appearance, ability and angle (the ability to understand others’ points of view).
From the Coach’s Corner, here are related tips:
Toxic Employees Warrant Your Best Coaching Tactics – Frustrations dealing with difficult employees coincide with many management issues – teamwork, morale, organizational dysfunction and weak customer relationships – just to name a handful. And they all lead to loss of profit.
Management: Coach Your Employees to Better Performance – In talent management, coaching, counseling and giving feedback is of utmost importance. But it’s a difficult challenge if you don’t have a coaching culture.
7 Management Tips – Communication with Difficult Employees – Multiple problems including loss of profit result from ineffectively dealing with difficult employees. Here are seven Biz Coach tips.
HR: Avoid Bias in Evaluating Top Employees Who Backslide– Don’t be too lenient with talented employees with a history of strong performance but who decline in their work. Document every event in any downtrend of performance. Inevitably, many terminated employees will file claims accusing you of discrimination.
Human Resources – Bad Hires Are Costly, How to Prevent It – Employee turnover gives employers a major migraine for numerous reasons. Here’s how to hire the right way.
“The best way to be productive is to have a great team. So I spend more time than most CEOs on human resources. That’s 20 percent of my week.”
-Kevin P. Ryan
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