When an employee has a 'bad attitude'

Excerpted from the Executive Report: The Supervisors Guide to Managing and Motivating Difficult Employees. 

 

Identifying and correcting behavior often can be more difficult than dealing with performance.

 

Difficult employees are often characterized as having a "bad attitude." Identifying employees that way is a bad starting point for implementing change. What's a "bad attitude"? How is it measured? What standards will you use to determine if it has changed?

 

In short, "attitude" shouldn't be in your supervisor's vocabulary, but "behavior" should. Here's why: You can make behavior a part of performance - with the same types of standards you use for performance.

 

Suppose an employee refuses to cooperate with others or won't follow instructions or argues with customers, or all of the above.

 

That type of employee commonly fends off criticism by saying, "But I do my job."

 

Your answer: "Behavior is a crucial part of your job. So if you can't cooperate, in fact you're not doing your job."

 

To complete the loop, you can make cooperation (with you, other employees, customers, etc) a crucial component of the employee's job description.  Here's a typical statement used in a job description or as a standard laid out during a performance evaluation:

 

Maintain a positive work atmosphere by acting and communicating in a manner so that you get along with customers, co-workers and managers.

 

The greater the importance behavior is to the job, the greater the percentage this standard will apply to the job - whether it's 10%, 25% or 50%. You make the call on it and make sure the employee understands the percentage and the standard.

 

What you'll have done is take the vague "attitude" problem and turn it into something defined and measured. And it gives you a rebuttal to the person who says, "But I do my job."

 

Usually, the person who says that is doing the job at some minimum standard - while driving everyone else crazy. The answer: Raise the standard, to include behavior. Then your response is: "No, you're not doing your job."

 

DIGGING DEEPER

It doesn't require the greatest skills to manage good employees. They have initiative, jump in where needed and don't need someone looking over their shoulder. The people who are a drain on the workplace are the difficult employees. To get help with them, read the Executive Report: The Supervisors Guide to Managing and Motivating Difficult Employees.

Comments

[Cheap Signs Guy Jonny H.]

I purchased a small sign shop in February 2004 with two employees. We have grown to 20ish and learned everything along the way. So I speak from my little window of experience and what I have gleaned from friends and books and anyone who will slow down long enough to let me ask them what they think...

These are my thoughts on what a bad attitude is... You know when somebody has a 'dark cloud' over them all day? When they don't like their job and it's obvious, frequently snap at people, and generally make others uncomfortable to be around. In a retail environment, there are always members of what I like to call the 'order prevention unit' (which I could go on about) but basically means someone who will continually throw up obstacles to prevent orders from moving forward. If they interact with customers (God forbid), they'll continually tell them that we can't do something, or can't accommodate them in some way. I think it usually happens with people who have control issues they can't let go of, and use the power of 'No' to regain control. But now I'm just carrying on!

But when these people are fired, there is a collective sigh of relief by the entire staff. So we don't hesitate anymore when bad attitudes emerge. We write em up twice and the third time - we call/email/text them their pink slip to not to come in tomorrow.