Here I am at work with very little to do, and my team leader calls. He asked me if I heard anything today from one of my co-workers (let’s call him Frodo).
Apparently, Frodo showed up for work yesterday . . . and he was drunk. Drunk as in passing out in his chair. :eek: Our team leader wasn’t in yet, so the guys on the team went and got another team leader to come over. He was pretty disgusted, and sent Frodo home.
In the course of my conversation with my team leader, several points came up:
the fact that we were lucky that this happened on a Saturday, when most of the regulars were not here. (I should explain that we are contractors.) If one of the employees here had seen him, our company could have been in real trouble.
the fact that another team leader saw Frodo in this condition. Our team leader is very laid back, and would not have made a big deal. However, since someone else saw this, he will have to tell our project leader. I don’t know what the consequences will be.
Team leader asked me to have a chat with Frodo tomorrow, since I worked with him on a previous project and have worked with him the longest. I have not been in a supervisory position for several years, and I hope I remember my management skills enough to do this correctly.
I was thinking of making two points. The first would be that Frodo put himself and others in danger by driving in that condition. He should have just called and said he was sick, and nothing else would have happened. The second point is that by showing up drunk, he puts our livlihoods in danger. He is single, lives at home, and parties every weekend. From conversations I’ve had with him, he has no idea about responsibility for supporting a family.
Does this sound OK? Is there anything else I should bring up? Any particular way I should say any of these things? Thanks, Gang.
Why isn’t he going to be fired? All of the reasons you mentioned are justifiable grounds for terminating his employment. This isn’t an “I’ll have a talk with him” episode, this is a “you have way crossed a line for the aforementioned reasons” type thing. If you don’t fire him, then you should make clear that he will be if anything like this happens again. You should point out to him that, had it not been a Saturday, and an employee saw him, he certainly would have been fired, if only to save the company from getting turfed as well.
That said, everything can be discussed calmly and reasonably, at least on your part, and keeping the discussion dignified will benefit everyone. It’ll also help you keep your sanity.
And why are you talking to him instead of the team leader? This is 100% the team leader’s job, and he sounds like a coward for ducking it.
Remember that, laying it out calmly as a serious issue now will help him learn the kind of responsibility that most employees manage without difficulty; let him off the hook easy, and he’ll get the impression that it’s not that big a deal.
Because the team leader is very laid back. He wants me to talk to Frodo becuase I’ve been working with him for the last 1 3/4 years. The team leader’s feeling is that becuase I know Frodo better, he’s more apt to listen to me.
This is not the first time I’ve done this type of thing. About 5 years ago (when I worked in the Pentagon) we had a college intern (again, from my company) who thought she was better than everyone else. She liked doing the complicated stuff - rebuilding PC’s - but she would skip the garbage stuff, like replacing monitors. I had a chat with her as well, and pointed out the error of her ways.
If I were drunk guy I wouldn’t be listening to one of my peers trying to be my supervisor. You carry no authority.
Team leader is the one who needs to do this (laid back or not, he is shirking responsibility) and he needs to do it before too much more time passes otherwise Drunk Guy is going to perceive this as either too long in coming and therefore not really worth mentioning or Team Leader is a wus and I can do whatever I damn well please.
Team Leader needs to grow a spine despite your willingness to participate in reducing his spine even further. Shame on you.
What’s indicative of a problem with your team leader, that I think you recognize, is that your drunken coworker wouldn’t be in trouble at all except that another team leader caught him. “Laid back” may make for a great work environment, but the thing that makes it work is clear boundaries, and it sounds like your team leader doesn’t set those.
There’s nothing wrong with peer counseling, per se, if it’s got a chance of being reasonably effective. But you should be on the lookout for yourself being used to avoid any real action on the problem. As you pointed out, there are a lot of bad consequences that were avoided by luck.
Perhaps you can imply that you’ve been given a chance for a “nice” intervention before the serious discipline comes down. Either way, your objective is for drunk guy to leave the talk feeling, not like he dodged a bullet, but that he was caught, and disciplined, and has a reason to avoid doing it again. No screaming, just a calm, reasonable discussion of all the consequences for everyone, and his responsibility not to fuck things up for his coworkers.
Also, someone from your company should probably go to the person who hired you, and tell them what happened, and that your company got him out of there immediately, and disciplined him afterwards. You don’t think any employees saw him, but someone might have (staggering in from the parking lot), and it’ll be a lot better for them to hear it from your company than from their employees. Any good manager knows that problems like this happen from time to time, and knowing that your company dealt with it effectively is, in the long run, a good thing.