Is thinking about how to deal with a difficult employee making you break out in a cold sweat? Take a deep breath...we're here to help you with this challenge.
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Having difficult employees on the team is not something managers look forward to. And yet, it’s a reality of business life.
Personality clashes, negative behavior, and poor attitudes are unfortunately not rare in the workplace. But ignoring it isn't the best strategy, as situations can escalate if they aren't addressed. Tough, sometimes awkward conversations about attitudes and performance are often necessary, and something that all managers should prepared to handle.
But you don't have to go into those situations unprepared - in fact, we recommend taking the time to reflect on how you want to deal with difficult employees before you bite the bullet. Here are our best suggestions for handling challenging employees.
When it comes to dealing with conflicts of any type, each case is unique. However, there are fundamental rules for how to approach a difficult employee:
By staying patient, you keep a clear head and can see the situation more objectively. Take a deep breath and remind yourself you will not gain anything by losing your cool or pushing too hard. When people have something to share, but you’re impatient, you might miss your chance to hear it.
And sometimes, it’s just worth trying to kill them with kindness.
It might be hard to depersonalize work and distance yourself from emotions in the work context, but it helps. Remember, a negative attitude is not necessarily directed at you – the root of the problem could be hidden anywhere else. It might even have more to do with the employee's personal life than their experience in the workplace.
So before you take offense and get defensive, make sure you look at the problem through clear lenses.
Even if you’re dealing with a disrespectful employee, try to stay professional. By staying calm, you show the person you control the situation and will not let emotions cloud your judgment. Besides, you can encourage the person to act the same way, leading by example.
A problem with a certain employee can be the consequence of problems with team culture. Often, it can be caused by leadership or management – in particular, by inefficient policies and processes, poor communication, lack of clarity and transparency etc. Try to look at the bigger picture and see if your team is healthy overall in the way they communicate and interact.
Dealing with a difficult employee, it’s easy to get caught up in your emotions. To resist this, focus on bare facts and maintain a neutral tone. Being able to separate your emotional responses from things that actually happened is a skill that can and should be learned. It can also help you build a no-blame culture.
Do not rely on your memory – our memories can easily get distorted. Every time you interact with a difficult employee, take notes so that you can refer to these in the future.
There are many types of employees that managers find challenging. You will need to adapt your response, approaching each tough conversation with an idea of what a good resolution looks like for that specific situation.
Here are our tips for how to deal with different kinds of difficult employees:
This is an employee who has lost interest in their job and does not feel excited about it anymore. Such employees lack motivation and need to be pushed to work, as they’re not inspired to put in any extra effort.
To re-engage demotivated employees, a manager would need to talk to them in a psychologically safe environment, to express concern and figure out what exactly caused the change in their behavior. The manager needs to provide support and show the problem can be fixed.
The best thing to improve employee engagement would be providing employees with opportunities that stimulate progress, like new projects that would fit their capabilities. Hosting one on one meetings, or even performing a "listening tour", could also help you get to the bottom of why your employees are feeling disillusioned.
Underperformance is frustrating and demoralizing – not just for the team that is dragged down, but also for underperformers who constantly feel like they are struggling to keep up.
Underperformers are not productive and do not finish their work on time. They may avoid taking responsibility for their mistakes, concerned about their job security. This inevitably affects the rest of the team and even the company's reputation.
An effective way to deal with this type of employee is to conduct a 360-degree review. The person might not be the right fit for the job, lacking the necessary skills – and in this case, you can provide direct feedback, create an improvement plan, organize some additional training, or even move the person to the department where their skills will be more appropriate.
Effective communication is vital for any team as it enables coherent work. However, some people are not the best communicators, and this can result in issues that cascade and impact the whole team.
They do not share information on time, or at all, assuming other team members do not need it. They have issues conveying messages or explaining things, lacking clarity and structure. Also, their listening skills are poor – they may be inattentive and struggle process information.
Besides mentorship or peer guidance, which can be of great use, managers can also provide poor communicators with specific resources and tools that will help them communicate better, setting the rules for their use – for example, create a team agreement, which would require the team to communicate on Zoom once a week to share information on some topic.
These are people who are permanently involved in some kind of conflict. Often, they might be the cause of it.
These employees are hard to please: they might frequently complain about things, but never seem particularly interested in looking for a solution (or even ignore it when someone suggests one). They may gossip a lot, making their fellow team members feel uncomfortable.
As with all of the negative behaviors we're outlining, it exists on a scale. Some people might be prone to complaining, exaggerating, and blowing things out of proportion without really realizing that this is what they are doing. Others seem to thrive in their negativity, provoking others to be just as negative.
When talking to an employee who often creates conflict, it’s important to do two things. Firstly, emphasize the importance of productive conflict – conflict where people constructively discuss their problems and listen to each other, seeking meaningful compromises and solutions.
Productive conflict is actually valuable for a team, as it means that folks are willing to challenge decisions with the aim of creating better outcomes, rather than meekly going along with the status quo.
However, stirring up conflict (particularly interpersonal conflict) for the sake of it is unacceptable. Emphasise to the employee that, if this continues, they will have to face consequences. This negative feedback might be sobering.
Workplace harassment and bullying can look different in different contexts, so as a manager you should be aware of the forms it can take.
Religious, racial, gender, sexual, disability, or age-based harassment can manifest in various ways – through inappropriate jokes, insensitive comments, intolerance to values, or actions taken to make the workplace environment less welcoming and accessible. Bullying can be described as personal harassment, targeted at something about the victim’s personality, appearance, or work.
Harassment and bullying are not always overt; sometimes it can be subtle, but still manages to create a hostile environment for the target of the harassment. You might not even be aware that it's going on until they come to you and make a complaint.
In many cases, though, a harasser or bully will cross the line from simply being a "difficult employee", to someone who needs to be shown the door as soon as possible.
The truth is that it’s best to prevent workplace harassment proactively rather than to deal with after someone has already been made to feel unsafe or humiliated. Create an anti-harassment company policy that outlines specific consequences. Train your staff on the specifics of this policy, and implement a valid complaint system.
If harassment or bullying still takes place, act decisively based on the policies you have outlined. Make it clear that there will be zero tolerance for this kind of hostile behavior in your company.
Before labeling a person as “a difficult employee,” we need to understand there are several factors that can potentially provoke dysfunctional behavior. Here is a list of the most obvious ones:
Difficult behavior and poor attitude can simply be caused by some personality factors. Short temper, arrogance, an inability to compromise and accept someone else’s opinion, or a tendency to see the world in a negative light can be a character trait.
This can be a very challenging case, but remember: it's not your job to try to change someone’s personality. You just need to find a way to work with them, establishing boundaries, and being clear about what behavior is permissible - and what crosses a line.
Besides, a team member might be demonstrating poor behavior because of the problems in their personal life. It might not be related to work at all. This is something a manager can find out at a one-on-one meeting.
When a workplace becomes a battlefield where you need to fight for your spot under the sun, even the kindest people can become grumpy and unpleasant to be around.
This is logical: if you cannot trust anyone, you cannot relax, and all your inner resources are wasted on dealing with conflicts. Unfortunately, a bad attitude is contagious and spreads quickly.
Healthy competition is desirable - but you need to stay on your toes and continually reflect on whether your company's competitive culture is evolving from a lively, motivated environment to a source of toxicity and conflict.
As we've mentioned, problems on the team can be the result of poor management. The inability to properly organize the work process and an ineffective communication style can cause interpersonal conflicts on the team.
Poor management means that people will have to solve problems that could have easily been avoided. Sometimes, they may even feel that they're not being treated with fairness and transparency, which means a manager will lose employee trust.
In particular, the root of many team dysfunctions can be poor resource management, which often leads to over- or under resourcing, and, consequently, burnout, stress, and missed deadlines – at the same time.
That’s why resource planning software is so important for creating a people-first culture. For example, Runn makes it simpler to ensure everyone on the team has a fair workload, highlights how busy everyone is and whether they are at risk of overworking, and provides a high level of visibility that significantly improves communication, helping everyone see how work is done in the organization.
It may sound too good to be true - but creating robust and transparent processes for work management can eliminate a lot of what causes conflict in the first place.
Learn more: How Runn helped Smartmatic create better communication between the Sales and Delivery arms of their business ➡️
People need to see the purpose of their work. If that meaning is absent, they might easily lose motivation. There should be something that would inspire employees, some value they can create while doing the work.
The same, by the way, concerns a lack of growth opportunities – if there are none, it will negatively affect employee performance as people can start feeling stagnation. By encouraging and promoting internal mobility, employees will see more of a reason to strive and go the extra mile in their work.
Dealing with a challenging employee is unpleasant, but necessary. Instead of pretending things are going just fine, it’s better to take the time and analyze what makes the person act unprofessionally.
This way, you will know where to start to improve problematic behavior. Just remember to be patient and empathetic – because sometimes, all it takes for a person to change is to be heard.
