Employee Struggling with Performance and Personal Issues: How Should We Respond?

Hi Everyone,

Please help me with a situation where one of our employees is not performing consistently. She has some serious issues at home related to her father's health. It's been 2 years we are supporting her. After so many warnings and counseling, she is still the same. Also, she has attitude problems. What steps can we take in this case? Kindly suggest.

Thanks & Regards, Gazal Kalia HR Manager

You will have to strike a balance. Welfare and work can go together, but welfare should not dominate and allow work to suffer. Call the lady and have a full counseling session with her. Hear her out in full—problems with her father and any others. Give her time to prepare for this counseling session (1 or 2 days). From your side as the company representative, arm yourself with her performance, leave details, details of earlier counseling, and attitudinal issues. Then give her a short period of time to improve her performance. Assign her Head of Department (HOD) as a mentor to monitor her progress. If there is no improvement over the pre-decided period of time, consider giving her an exit path if warranted. How are her peers performing?

What is your objective: Are you looking for an improvement in the employee, or are you looking for a proper way to let her go?

Work-life balance is a personal responsibility and cannot be enforced by the employer. Please focus on your problems and do not try to solve her problems. I know of employees who have left their jobs to attend to parents with critical health issues full-time.

If you have already tried warnings and counseling, then please give her a clear choice between:

1. If she wants to continue in the same position (with continued responsibilities) and is ready to shift the work-life balance to work more.
2. If she wants to leave the job so the company is not affected further by her personal issues.
3. If she is ready to compromise her position, responsibilities, promotions, or increments for a certain period of time (until the recovery of her father and she can devote attention to work again). In that case, you can reduce some of her responsibilities and let her work below her capacity to retain her job and service for your company, in lieu of reduced or unchanged monetary compensation (this concept is similar to extended unpaid leaves).

The third option can provide a win-win solution, but it has to be clearly discussed based on availability and the possibility of getting deviations within your company policies.

If she insists on the first option but fails to meet your standards, then she anyway gets the third option (i.e., no recognition from the job).

If she chooses the second option, then you can hire someone to replace the responsibilities and handle them with more dedication.

Again, everybody has personal problems and different preferences for handling them. Employers or HR should not try to interfere in them. So, none of the above options are wrong or right. You can actually help her by posing clear path choices and letting her choose.

Best Regards,
Amod Bobade.

Hello Gazal Kalia,

While I am with Amod Bobade that Work-life balance is primarily a personal responsibility, with the employer being ONLY in a supportive role, I see there are multiple issues in what you mentioned.

1. The employee's father's health issue
2. The employee's attitude issue
3. The employee's performance issue.

Now, to what extent are each of them inter-related depends on other factors....with the brief inputs you gave, it's tough to take any guess on this aspect. Can you give more details of the situation, like:

1. What is your Company into--which sector?
2. Since when is this lady working with you?
3. Was her performance and/or attitude OK prior to her father's health taking a hit?
4. Any idea of what the health issue is?
5. Does she have any family support? Or rather, what's her family background?
6. What do you mean by 'has attitude problems'?

Sometimes, in such situations 'warnings and counseling' OR even firing may NOT be the most appropriate measures. More detailed the inputs, more the chances of the members giving actionable suggestions.

Regards,
TS

Hi Gazal,

From your post, it is confirmed that you have warned her in writing and had a counseling session with her. However, there has been no improvement nevertheless. You may contact the HR department to initiate the process to separate her. HR will follow their procedures to separate her in a legal manner.

Best Regards