These are four answers to four questions. Here it is…
1. My senior employee is a terrible communicator
My employee, “Jordan”, has been in a senior role for 15 years. Their work involves communicating and coordinating with many different teams and clients; Understanding and being understood is one of the most important competencies. Jordan’s communication skills are lacking. I’ve highlighted this as an area for improvement every year I’ve been his manager (about five years) and in annual goals and performance reviews, as did his previous manager.
Jordan has attended trainings and I have provided task support and feedback, but there has been little improvement. I give feedback in our weekly meetings and only raise one point at a time, even though I typically see 3-5 communication breakdowns. I bring it up and ask for their perspective, then talk about my perspective and what I’d like to see different in the future. I give feedback 1-2 times per month, because any more than that he feels like I’m ignoring him and criticizing him every time we talk.
It seems Jordan disagrees with me. I believe this is the root of their lack of improvement – they don’t feel they need to improve because they don’t believe there is a problem. When I ask what help they need, they can’t give me anything actionable, just “I’ll work on it.” My boss and I think that if Jordan can’t improve on this skill, we may need to replace him.
Jordanians struggle to place themselves in the context of the person they are communicating with and, conversely, when they are interpreting someone else’s communication, they struggle to place themselves in the context of who the person is talking to and what is important to them. Here’s a typical recent example: Jordan needed, say, to change the design of a teapot ordered by a customer five years in the past. The customer asked, “Will the new teapots still go in the dishwasher?” Jordan replied, “You can still wash the teapot.” The customer interpreted that response as “yes”. I knew we hadn’t tested whether the teapot could go in the dishwasher, and Jordan was talking about hand washing. I said, “We’re not sure if the teapot can go in the dishwasher. We’ll get back to you.” “I have confirmed with the dishwashing safety team that the teapots are rated at 90 degrees,” Jodan later emailed the customer. The customer doesn’t know what it means; They don’t know that we consider a teapot rated at 150 degrees to be dishwasher safe, and anything lower than that is not safe. I have to come forward again to clarify that the teapots are not dishwasher safe. Jordan provided the customer with our internal team’s response verbatim, without doing any translation into the customer’s context, or even making sure that the answer actually answered the customer’s question. The customer may have gone in with the assumption that the teapots were dishwasher safe, resulting in an unhappy customer when their teapot could not withstand dishwashing.
I’ve asked my boss, HR, and manager friends how to train Jordan. One person advised that I should document each instance of communication problems and review them weekly with Jordan. I worry that, especially for a senior employee, it will feel as if I’m hovering over their shoulder and watching everything they do and documenting their every little mistake, which would be discouraging. What do you think?
Jordan is not suitable for this job.
You’ve been training him for about five years. Not only have they not improved, they disagree that there is even a problem to solve.
The reality is that not everyone has the skills you are looking for. Some people can get better at it in the same amount of time a manager can reasonably invest in coaching. Some people may be better at this if they get very hands-on help over a long period of time, which is beyond the reasonable range for a manager to invest in. Despite this, some people will never get good at it to the level required in a job where it is a central and essential skill.
You’ve tried with good intentions, and it’s not working. It’s time to move on to the next step to manage the situation, which means telling Jordan very clearly that things are now at the point where if you don’t see XYZ specific changes in XYZ time, you need to let them go. (This time shouldn’t be long, given how long you’ve already been working on it – I’d give a maximum of two months to show significant improvement otherwise you’ll keep dragging things out for no reason.)
Connected:
My employee can’t admit that his performance is bad
2. My co-worker is in trouble but isn’t doing her job
I work for a very small company (literally four employees and a boss), which I was hired for eight months ago. HR is one of the many roles I fulfill, and a role for which I have had zero training. My boss is great, but he’s out of the office most of the time because he’s not a US citizen and he travels a lot, so we employees are very independent with little supervision most of the time.
Enter problematic co-worker, Lisa. Lisa is a wonderful co-worker and good friend…most of the time. Other times, she gets drunk at work and leaves workdays without notice, even though she has already used all of her allowed PTO for the year. In the last few months, he has lost both his parents and was also going through some other serious personal matters; She’s really going through it and I would feel deeply for her even if we weren’t friends.
Recently she was hospitalized, I suspect this may be an attempt to end things, although I don’t know for sure. She has been saying she will work from home until she recovers, but she doesn’t respond to work-related messages or send emails, which is a big part of her job. I don’t want her to be stressed while she recovers, and I definitely don’t want her to lose her job, but like I said, she’s already used up her PTO for the year and she’s not doing her job. I’m worried that the boss will let him go given the problems he’s had in the past, but I also don’t feel right letting him go to work. What are your suggestions?
Oh no. Your company is too small to be covered by FMLA (which would require you to hold her job for three months while she’s on leave), but that doesn’t mean it can’t offer something similar.
How senior is your role? If you’re fairly junior and your HR function is typically things like dealing with benefits paperwork and making sure payroll is processed (as opposed to higher level HR strategy, employee relations, management, etc.), it’s probably not really in your scope to handle this; Your boss will need it. But someone should reach out to Lisa to find out what she needs during this time and give her some options, which ideally would include the option to take extended leave if needed. (If we’re using FMLA as a framework, that leave will generally be unpaid because it’s outside of PTO, though in practice this can make it harder for people to use it.)
3. How honest can I be in the stay interview?
My organization has recently announced that they will be conducting stay interviews. In the past, they have conducted anonymous surveys to get a sense of general workplace perception and environment, and I don’t know if the interviews are in place of or in addition to the surveys. Either way, I have real issues with the organization and its leadership that I have raised on surveys in the past but which are still unresolved (mostly the lack of timely communication between leadership and staff and the attempted standardization of policy that only works for employees in non-public-facing positions, though there are also unresolved issues related to a major security lapse a few years ago) but I’m unsure about whether it’s safe to raise those concerns in an interview.
I feel like it would be one thing to mention these issues in an anonymous survey or even an exit interview, but I’m worried that something I say in a situation where they find out who I am and that I intend to continue working for the organization currently in use could potentially be held against me. Are my concerns justified? Would being completely honest in the stay interview potentially harm me, or do I think it would be more helpful to share the issues the organization is having?
There is no guarantee that your feedback will not be used against you in the stay interview. it should not do Yes – which would be against the whole spirit and purpose of operating them – but does it? Sure. Not all the time and not under good managers, but enough that it’s a legitimate concern.
Usually the way you know whether it’s safe to be honest with better feedback in any form, and especially when it’s non-anonymous, is to see if your company has done work to reassure people that it’s safe. It’s things like creating opportunities for meaningful input that are taken seriously and at least sometimes acted upon, actively welcoming dissent, and not punishing those who offer opinions that make leadership uncomfortable. If you haven’t seen him enough to feel comfortable, assume it’s safer to punch.
Apart from all this, in your case, you have already raised these issues and they have not acted on them. So they already have the information that you are considering presenting with your name this time; You don’t get much benefit from sticking your neck out further.
4. When you’re allergic to nuts and your employer puts nuts in your workplace as retaliation
A question based on a novel I read recently. The main character is a waitress who has a severe nut allergy. The restaurant doesn’t serve nuts, so it’s all good. She annoys the owner and comes back a few days later to find that they have updated the menu to include several items with nuts. When she asks if she is being fired, she is told no, it requires unemployment payments, but she is free to quit if she can no longer perform the job duties.
Besides being extremely evil, it wouldn’t last, right? Can she still apply for and receive unemployment?
She could probably still get unemployment, because this is a fundamental change in job. for him This means that he has to leave it through no fault of his own, and also because it is clearly retaliatory. In fact, depending on what he did to harass the owner, it is possible that legal recourse may also be sought; If the paranoia were in retaliation for her engaging in legally protected behavior (such as making a good-faith report of harassment, discrimination, or security violation or requesting a medical or religious accommodation), it would be illegal. And employment lawyers will tell you that retaliation is often much easier to prove than other crimes on the part of the employer.
