So the wrong reaction is to deal with my anxiety/nerves by having a stiff drink tonight, right?
Your performance or theirs?
Motors or you? If the later then yes, but I think you know that already. No time like the present to start addressing the issue and be straightforward in your discussion tomorrow, with them but especially with yourself. Good luck.
Ugh. Not an easy discussion. I had to do this a few years ago with a male employee who was about 10 years older than me. Not pleasant.
Will your employee face up to it and admit, or are they going to deny? You need to be prepared with how to respond both ways, you can’t predict with 100% confidence.
Sorry - should have said more - I have to talk to someone about THEIR issues, not mine.
Why are you anxious about that? What bad scenarios do you envision?
I’m anxious because I anticipate it will be a difficult conversation for both of us. I care about this person and want to make sure they have the opportunity to correct the problems, but I also know that alcohol abuse problems are hard to “fix.”
Basically I am going to be telling someone they’re not hiding their problem as well as they think they are. It will probably be painful for them to hear and will definitely be painful for me to say.
Guess I misinterpreted what you meant by “performance issues,” unless you’re unusually chummy at work…
Well, if he was anything like I was, be prepared for outraged indignation. Hopefully not, but denial is a powerful, powerful thing. Have *specific *details at hand.
I’m so sorry.
Are you going to be able to offer her help? Do you have HR support?
When my sister first went into rehab, it was because of the fantastic company she worked for and its fantastic owner - who paid all the bills and assured her she’d have a job when she got out. That rehab didn’t stick and she lost her job (nor the next one - job and rehab, but the third time was the charm :). She did take a few years to stay healthy and sober before getting another real job.)
And I think wanting a drink is normal - recognizing that is not the healthiest response is healthy.
Agreed. It was my mouthwash/aftershave! It was due to a health condition /prescription medication! This is slander!
Velma? Is that you? The bottle you stashed in the piano really messed up your nephew’s recital, you know…
Has anybody else noticed the alcohol? Will they step forward to support what you say? Does your company have an HR department? Are they on board with what you’re going to do? If any of those questions have a ‘no’ or ‘?’ answer, you may want to tread very carefully.
The first stage of alcoholism is denial.
I would involve HR from the start, and for this reason: I had a colleague who had an employee with a serious drinking problem (showing up drunk at work, missing multiple days because of drinking episodes). He wanted to dismiss her but was warned by others that she might claim her alcoholism was a disability. I don’t know whether that was sound legal advice or not, but it scared him away from doing anything about it for a while, and I think a quiet word with HR would have let him know what his options were–he didn’t need to identify the employee, just let them know the situation. Eventually he was able to fire the employee–not because of alcoholism, but because of frequent absenteeism.
It’s not time for HR yet. I don’t involve HR right away when talking to staff about performance issues - only if it gets to a point where we need things officially documented. It’s just not to the point where anything formal is warranted. Friendly, constructive and supportive conversation comes first. Which stresses me out. 
BTW, thanks to everyone for offering advice. It’s much appreciated.
A troubled employee can effect everyone else. We had a senior computer operator with a major drinking problem. We depended on him to operate the console, mount tapes, print reports, basically all the routine functions in operations.
All the analysts and programmers ended up covering for this guy. Not saying anything when the wrong tape got mounted. Or when requests for a form to be mounted on a printer got delayed. We just put up with it. My supervisor was a Senior analyst on call and waited over an hour for the Check History File tape to get mounted. He finally went up to operations about 1Am and found the guy on the floor trying to untangle the tape. The tape had been dropped, unrolled and was tangled up on the floor all around him. My supervisor had started in operations many years earlier and just took over that night. Put the drunk guy in the corner to sober up while he took care of all the console requests for the Registration run, Payroll and Student AR. Even then he just couldn’t bring himself to turn the guy in. He had been trained by this guy many years earlier. They had worked together for a couple years until he moved into a programming job.
Eventually the operator got a DUI coming in to work for the 11 to 7 late shift. That got him fired. Later they found stashes of booze hidden in the operations room. This guy always had to have a quck swig ready.
Friendships are like that. This guy was our most senior operator. He had been with us for almost 20 years. Nobody wanted to be “the guy” to get him canned. He should have been let go several years earlier.
One of the main reasons this guy had job security was because he knew all our batch systems so well. Heck he even helped me the first few months I was on call. A system would abort. I’d get paged at midnight and didn’t have a clue what to do. These were 10 year old systems written by people long gone. He’d sometimes mention, well in the past we did this and it took care of it. He saved my butt many times when I was learning the ropes. That was true of most of the people in our CS shop. It tore us up when he was finally let go. Such a waste. He was the best operator we had when he was sober. But a few times a month the bottle got the best of him. It got more frequent as the years went by.