John has worked for you for several months. His work product is acceptable, and he’s had a couple of good ideas that have worked out pretty well. He seems fairly smart and capable (or else you wouldn’t have hired him in the first place, of course), but he is young and unaccustomed to the vagraties of workplace etiquitte. Futhermore, he’s late to work all the time (two or three times a week), usually by more than five or ten minutes. He’s frequently scruffy looking and hungover. He’s had a no-call, no-show incident that he later explained away as sickness. You are also aware that he’s having some personal problems–a death in the family a few months ago and he and his girlfriend have been going through a protracted and painful breakup.
Clearly the situation cannot be allowed to continue, but what is the proper course of action? Do you call him into your office and give him a stern talking-to, or do you fire him outright?
I think he should have had a talking to way before it came to this point. I wouldn’t have let him establish a pattern of tardiness. I would tell him to shape up and if he doesn’t then I would let him go. My experience has been that people like him let you down when you can least afford it.
I’m often late for work (sometimes up to an hour), and habitually scruffy. My workplace is mature enough to realise that these things have no impact on my work, they are pretty irrelevant. If I had to deal with customers directly they would be serious failings.
I’m making three assumptions in answering. One, this person has been given informal feedback that this behavior is not acceptable. Second, that the behavior has been documented. Third, that this is a reasonably big company, not a mom and pop organization. If the first two have not been done, they should be before anything else.
The first thing to do is to visit your HR organization. Most companies have detailed procedures about handling performance problems, and violating them can get the company and the manager in big trouble. Some companies I’ve been to have offenses that lead to automatic termination, but none of the things in the OP seem to fall under that heading.
The kinds of things that happen next is that a get-well plan is written up, for instance that the employee will not be late more than once in a one month period. I’ve been to several classes about how to handle things like that, and HR should have some guidance. The idea is to make the expectations, and the penalties for violating them, very clear.
Many companies have programs for mental health and substance abuse problems available. These are confiidential. Check with HR, but it might be good for this hypothetical person to be aware of them, though a manager cannot demand or even suggest making use of them.
The bottom line of all performance appraisal and improvement is that there should be no surprises. It’s even more important for a new employee with potential.
I think it would be grossly unfair to fire the employee without giving him a chance to correct the behavior. Bad managers consistently expect employees to simply absorb the guidelines for good behavior by osmosis, assuming that the egregious stuff must be as obvious to the perpetrator as it is to everyone else. That just ain’t so. Part of being an effective manager is to guide and instruct employees on appropriate workplace behavior.
I haven’t done any of the things in the OP (aside from arriving late, but that’s by mutual consent). However, one of my big gripes about my current supervisor is that I don’t learn about things I’m doing wrong until my annual review. So I can go up to a full YEAR continuing to do something wrong, blissfully unaware that there’s anything I need to correct. It flat-out isn’t fair. Once I’ve been told that something is wrong, I correct it. It would be extremely galling to be fired over something I’ve done when I don’t even know I shouldn’t be doing it.