Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. The employees you hire to accomplish your objectives are critical. Bringing on the right staff can pay dividends while bringing on the wrong staff can be costly. The following contributed post is entitled, 3 Types Of Employees That Are Incredibly Bad For Your Business.
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As a business owner, you are unlikely to have the ability (or the desire) to handle every aspect of your business alone. Be you a small or a large business owner then, you have probably hired one or more people to work for your company.
In theory, your employees will carry out the tasks you have set for them. They will help you to promote your business. And they will show commitment to the business you have set up. We are saying ‘in theory’ because that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, you might unwittingly hire a bad egg, a rotten apple, and whatever idiom you care to use when describing an employee who isn’t doing what they are supposed to be doing.
So, what do you do with these employees? It depends. You should have policies in place with the correct warning procedures. If an employee steps out of line, you need only point them to the way they are breaching the contract they signed with you. Hopefully, they will then fall back into line. However, there are times when you might need to fire an employee, especially when their behavior is far removed from what you expect of them. You should, of course, seek legal action beforehand to ensure you aren’t breaking any labor laws – you don’t want a lawsuit on your hands – but in relation to the types of employees we mention below, you might have no other option than to remove them from your company. Check out these tips on how to fire an employee, some of which are connected to the types of employees we mention below.
These are the employees who are bad for your business.
1: The employee who goes against your policy’s ‘standard of conduct’
The ‘standard of conduct’ refers to the type of behavior you expect from your employees. It should fall under the remit of the key policies within the employee handbook that you give to your members of staff after hiring them. Typically, the policies that fall under ‘standard of conduct’ refer to those related to bullying, discrimination, and sexual harassment. If you discover your employee has breached such policies, a simple warning might not suffice, especially if their behavior has threatened the welfare of other staff on your team. An investigation needs to take place with eye witness statements, and if found guilty, you have grounds to fire the employee. Your business depends on it, as you might suffer a walkout from your other employees, as well as legal action if you haven’t taken their complaints about the offending employee seriously.
2: The employee who engages in criminal behavior
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Closely associated with the previous point, but we have included it here as criminal behavior might also include the need for police intervention. For example, consider an employee who steals from you. Now, we are not talking about the occasional paper clip or notepad (although you should still clamp down on minor thefts), but rather those employees who are caught with their hands in the till or who syphon money from your account into their own after accessing your computer systems. On a financial level, your business is obviously going to suffer. And then there’s the employee who engages in violent behavior, perhaps against you, another employee or a customer. They might even take their violent behavior out on your premises, damaging furnishings, doors, walls, and equipment, etc.
Such behavior cannot be tolerated. You will need evidence of criminal behavior of course – you can’t accuse somebody if you are in any way uncertain as to who the culprit is – but you can get this from the surveillance equipment you should have set up, and from eye witness reports from your staff and customers. When the culprit has been found, either by you or the police, you should consider firing them, unless, as in the case of violence to your property, there are mitigating circumstances, such as provocation from another employee or feelings of being treated unjustly from yourself. In such a case, you might be lenient, though you will need to put an action plan in place to reduce the chances of such behavior happening again.
3: The employee who is repeatedly absent
There are times when absences can be allowed. If your employee falls ill or has a family emergency, for example, then you can expect them to be absent from work. Hopefully, they will show you courtesy with a phone call to let you know why they aren’t coming into work. On the other hand, there are some employees who might try to take advantage of you. They might not turn up for work at all without any explanation. Or they might have a string of excuses as to why they can’t come in, some of which may be genuine, but then again, some of which might not be. You need to take action if absences become a regular thing. This involves you sitting down with your employee to discuss the reasons why they haven’t shown up to work.
In some cases, you may be to blame. If you have overworked your employees, or if you haven’t provided a functional working environment, they may have used excuses for their absence because they dread coming into work. The same applies if the employee feels threatened by another member of staff. On the other hand, they might simply be lazy and uncommitted, in which case, you might want to fire them, especially if there is no reasonable excuse. If you don’t, your business will suffer if absences continue, because work won’t get done and you will struggle to make a profit.
Finally
Firing an employee is sometimes the right thing to do, so while you might be reluctant to do so – you might want to avoid hurting their feelings, or you might be afraid of confrontation – you should still take steps to remove the employee if their actions hurt your business and the people who work within it. You might need to start the hiring process again, but despite the time and the expense involved, this is better than having an employee on your team who is incredibly bad for your business!
