Managing Difficult Employees

Our aim in this topic is to:

• Identify how to recognise a difficult employee or problem.
• Outline a selection of psychological theories for performance management.
• Distinguish worksite causes or triggers.

Too often, conflicts carry a negative association in the minds of people.

They are considered undesirable behaviours associated with anger, sadness, and violence. Conflict resolution strategies adamantly stress the need to reverse one's thinking.

In a team leader role, you should understand conflicts as positive opportunities to make teamwork better. Unfortunately, most people have a negative perception of conflict, usually because of the poor ways in which people choose to respond to it.

It is important to understand that there are a variety of strategies to use when it comes to handling conflict in your team and that your reaction to the conflict situations can greatly influence the quality of outcome you want to receive.

Good conflict management becomes an opportunity for personal growth, inspiring appropriate skills to develop and improve team resolution.

Suppose you think of conflict as something that can happen and strengthen relationships. In that case, you can resolve the situation by being positive.

How do we deal with the misbehaviour or unacceptable work performances of difficult on-site employees or contractors?

All situations and people are different, but that's not an excuse supervisors or site managers should use to hold back on or do nothing about when the need arises. Generally, as a supervisor, it's important to avoid labelling situations or individuals.

Yes, certain team players might be bad-tempered, or they might be known to be moody, or generally have a clash of personalities, but that is your role to facilitate accordingly.

Managers of groups of people shouldn't feel pressured to train or deal with those individual conditions, whatever they might be, other than to communicate their potential concerns.

There are some conflict situations where some short-term poor performance or misbehaviour is understandable or justified and should be considered when managing.

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Applying the Strategy

Difficult circumstances can affect employee behaviour and make them look like difficult employees.

A strategy you can employ is to focus on how their action affects the other team members and how it affects the overall team's goals. Explain why their behaviour or actions are not appropriate or acceptable to meet the business requirements. Explain that their actions don't match the company procedure or policy.

People tend to be more aware of their approach or behaviour once it has been brought to their attention.

Never complain to others in the team about a difficult individual. Instead, gather the information and evidence you need, take the individual aside and discuss the problem. Privately and quietly.

Your job is to make everyone know what is expected of them, so communicate!

Be Alert for Employee Problems

Consider what happens to your team, organisation, yourself, and team members when difficult situations arise.

Suppose you handle situations fairly and resolve them quickly before they have blown up. In that case, these situations usually won't greatly impact your organisation. In many cases, they could even lead to improvements.

But if these problems or difficulties are handled badly, or if they drag on for a long time, they could seriously impact site productivity, work efficiency, quality, and staff motivation.

These resulting issues on the company can pressure others, yourself, or other site members, e.g., a team member is continually late, resulting in the whole team on-site suffering. The project is not meeting the time targets needed.

Before, we covered some common signs of conflict, such as visual or heated exchanges between two people. However, not all forms of conflict can be so obvious.

Some individuals might hide their feelings to cope with the problems at hand and by isolating themselves from the rest of the team.

Often, a series of stages escalates within individuals before conflicts occur. This is when early detection is most beneficial to deflate the potential situation. A description of these stages of discontent as referenced by Otago University are:

Discomfort:	There is a sense that something is not right.
Incident:	Something happens that leaves a worried or irritated feeling but is ignored.
Misunderstanding:	Another incident adds to the initial feeling, and they start thinking negatively about another's intentions.
Tension:	The relationship is affected by negative attitudes and opinions. These actions are interpreted negatively.
Crisis:	As tension builds, there may be a situation when conflict spills out.

Watch Out for These Signs

While on-site, notice the following basic signs:

• Negativity: A team member or team members have a pessimistic attitude to their work.
• Increased absences: Sick leave and lateness increase.
• Gossip: If something goes wrong, your co-workers will probably discover it before you. However, when you find that your co-workers are continually discussing the problems of an individual or the organisation, then you know there is a problem.
• Productivity loss: Productivity often drops when an individual or a team is troubled. For example, when morale is low, team members can easily develop a lazy, can't-be-bothered attitude about work, leading to losses in quality and quantity.
• Challenging authority: If team members feel there is a problem, they will often attribute the cause to their managers. Managers are the ones who have the vision and set the organisational goals, so when things go wrong on a large scale, team members can lose confidence in the organisational leadership. Team members may then challenge a person they think is ineffective as a leader.
• Resignations: Are members jumping ship mid-project? If so, this could be a serious problem. Suppose an employee would rather quit than continue to work towards the organisational goals. In that case, there is an underlying problem that would need addressing.

If you suspect something is not right on-site, try these simple starting points.

1. State the problem as you see it. Remember to stick to the facts – who, what, where, when.
2. Let parties have their say and don't interrupt them.
3. Avoid negative thinking or behaviour.
4. Brainstorm solutions and suggest alternatives.
5. If your discussions aren't working, consider having another person get involved.

Use feedback with your team to assess any issues

A team of workers who give and ask for constructive feedback will have a lot more information to work with than a team that doesn't talk at all. Using the classic feedback cycle is a good way to keep information flowing so that you are aware of potential problems before they can escalate to a much bigger damaging situation.

What does this cycle mean on-site?

This means that you and your team members get into a habit of asking for feedback from your workmates, managers, and sub-contractors and not forgetting yourself (reflect on your performance — ask the question 'How am I doing?').

Some construction businesses use this system for feedback from all contractors. But there doesn't need to be a formal system in place for you to apply these basic principles of feedback in your team on-site.

Be resilient

When you find yourselves in any sort of conflict situation with others as a manager, it can affect your resilience and mental well-being.

The following helpful tips have been created and proven scientifically to help you cope with unexpected circumstances at work or in your personal life.

1. Pay attention to your thoughts and fears.
2. Count on your support network.
3. Keep active and get enough sleep to recharge.
4. Change your perspective.
5. Know what you stand for and what you want to achieve.
6. Face your fears.

So, do good leaders like your Richie McCaw's make good managers?

There are different theoretical approaches to leadership (or thinking about being a manager). Knowing these approaches and their principles will help you determine how you want to interact with your team.

The following website article outlines 10 major leadership or managerial leadership approaches.

Approaching Anger or Dissatisfaction

Characteristics and behaviours can be taught and developed. Anger is often regarded as a negative emotion. However, it is not the feeling that can be destructive at work; it's the ramifications. The key is how you approach and deal with the root of the anger as a manager.

Unlike leadership theories about yourself as a leader, many psychological theories provide a potential insight into how individuals think or behave around these conflict situations.

Managers and supervisors need to have a general understanding of a few of these theories.

Being aware of psychological theories can help you prevent possible conflict from happening in the first place or help manage the situation. We can use our knowledge of these theories to get to the underlying cause of the problem quicker and then control the situation before it gets even worse for all parties involved.

Cultural theory	The influence of culture on a person's understanding, behaviour or reaction to a situation could cause conflict with persons of a different culture or lack of understanding of other cultures.
Equity theory	Based on an individual's feelings of fairness or equity. In cases where an individual feels they are not receiving a fair or equal deal. An individual will look at their work effort on tasks and what reward they get from it, and they will compare this with other individuals doing similar tasks. Dissatisfaction and conflict can arise if they see a difference in how they are rewarded.
Psychodynamic theory	Why do some individuals do or say a particular thing? Everyone has a unique history and concerns, and their past experiences may impact their life now or affect their behaviour differently from how most people would react/behave. In conflict theory, this also relates to unspoken expectations and underlying beliefs that could limit their potential for satisfaction.
Realistic group theory	Conflict results from limited resources. This can lead to prejudice and discrimination between groups who want the same resource and feel they have a greater right or need to use it.
Relative deprivation theory	Similar to equity theory –"I want what he's got – it's not fair – I do all the work too, but nobody notices me, why don't I have a company car?"
Social dominance theory	Society tends to support a hierarchy of groups, ranging from dominant to subordinate – acceptance and adherence to this hierarchy is social dominance theory.
Social identity theory	Being in the in crowd – belonging to a group and looking at other groups differently, strength in numbers
System justification theory	People support and justify the current system or status quo (the way things are being run or managed/rules) even if the current system puts them at a disadvantage by being against their best interests or beliefs. "That's the way they have always done it. I am sure management knows best."
Tuckman's theory	In a nutshell, Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing ideology. Tuckman's model explains that relationships are established as the team develops maturity and ability, and leadership style changes to more collaborative or shared leadership.

Read the following article outlining the psychology of conflict in any workplace and their approaches:

Team Conflict

Simply Psychology put together a conflict theory covering several sociological approaches. Sociologists have used conflict theory to frame and enhance discussions from historical events to individualistic vs. collectivistic cultures and gender discrimination in the workplace.

Most conflict situations may occur when a member of your team is not performing to standard or not behaving appropriately.

This could be a performance management issue in the bigger picture of the organisational procedures. Performance management is about helping your team members do a great job. It's used to set clear organisation goals and expectations while giving positive feedback and taking action when there's a work problem or issue.

As taken from the website Investopedia, "Performance Management Definition" is a performance management tool that helps people to perform to the best of their abilities and produce the highest-quality work most efficiently and effectively.

Performance management systems focus on individual job accountability and transparency during work hours and foster a clear understanding of expectations.

So, if you have an employee problem, this could be defined as a Performance Gap.

A performance gap is the difference between the required performance or behaviour to what the worker's performance is conducted or carried out on-site.

Identifying these staff members' performance gaps when they occur is part of your managerial responsibilities.

This system of doing things monitors and documents the team members' work performance.

You should be able to bring these performance problems and their reasoning to the worker's attention and then agree on required action to bring back the performance standard and close those 'gaps' or issues to meet the job type obligations.

Why is the performance gap happening?

The number one rule when dealing with any situation where a point of potential conflict could happen is to 'think before you act'. Please don't assume that it is a problem with an individual. Maybe the person or team in question never had clear instructions about what is required.

Or an individual may not have the proper tools or resources to fulfil the required performance. As a manager, these are all questions you should ask yourself before talking to a team member about their performance problems.

• Is there a clear standard or measure of performance, and is the collective team aware of it?
• Have all of your team members been fully trained in the job requirements?
• Is there anything in the environment or workplace, such as poor tools, lack of information or time, inadequate materials, or workplace procedures, making good performance difficult to fulfil?

Note: If you need to conduct a performance management discussion with one of your team, be clear about their work performance (be accurate and specific) with the standard of work required. Again, be specific about quantity and quality.

Use this information to clearly state your issue, either in a measurable or quantifiable way or by using specific examples of things they have done (facts).

The performance gap of staffing members is one of the biggest employee issues not just for builders; all types of managers of workers have to wrestle with their own required business demands.

Each build has unique challenges, from remote locations to disconnected staffing issues or council issues. Collaboration and communication between your team are key to overcoming some of these performance conflict triggers.

Remember, conflict isn't always a bad thing. It can be a creative practice for a company or team when handled well. Research has shown that some conflict situations can increase critical thinking and encourage group innovation. When team members try to minimise conflict by suppressing different viewpoints, it can hinder development.

Group Think

The absence of conflict can take the form of Group Think.

"Groupthink is a sociological and psychological phenomenon in which group members will conform to the majority opinion for the sake of harmony." - The Black Sheep

Further Reading on 'Group think versus consensus while in meetings' can be found on this website, Group Think vs. Consensus.

Conflict with employees is an inevitable fact of life.

It manifests out of differences and may arise in any situation on-site where people are required to interact.