Here Is How Bad Employees Ruin Good Employees

Harvard Business Review conducted research and found that an employee’s bad behavior can be so contagious that it can corrupt the whole team.

If you don’t take precautionary steps against non-performing employees, your business might suffer a lot.

In the longer run, you might lose your loyal employees.

So to take steps against bad employees, you should first understand how bad employees ruin good employees.

We can help you understand that. We conducted research on how bad employees ruin good employees.

We met a few great managers, HRs, leaders, and business owners and asked about their experiences with difficult employees.

Here are our findings.

There could be many aspects of how bad employees influence directly or indirectly good employees.

According to another research, a bad employee wastes $50,000 of a company. It could be by wasting paid hours by not doing work, creating conflicts, wasting training costs, and by many other means like ruining other good employees.

Today we will discuss how they ruin good employees and hinder a company’s growth. We will also discuss other details some other day.

Here we go.

They cause a toxic environment:

The first and foremost impact of bad employees is that they make the environment toxic. A toxic environment is never welcoming and easy for good employees.

It makes them feel unsafe. It influences their productivity and efficiency.

Let’s elaborate on it.

If you come to your office and find many daily conflicts, you will waste time resolving conflicts but can’t focus on productive things. You can’t spend time as a manager should do.

The same is true for all employees, especially those doing great jobs at work.

So if there are any bad employees in your organization and you are not doing anything against them, you should get ready to see your downward trends.

They make good employees disloyal:

It’s not only a toxic environment. Many other factors influence good employees.

Let’s say negative employees can brainwash good employees. They tell them stories that never happened.

Here is how it can influence an employee.

If someone keeps you telling that this company is mean and doesn’t care about employees. They try to overburden employees over time so that they can use all their energies.

When you can’t handle that burden, they will let you go. Andy, Kim, and John, who had left, are perfect examples.

How will it influence you?

You might think that if a company is sincere with employees, no one can lie. Truth has its language.

It’s true. But never forget that “anything can be proved from anything.”

Affect new employees:

Bad employees have a significant role in influencing new employees.

The bad employee groups will always try to attract new employees. There could be two reasons: they want to use them for their shady purposes. They want to strengthen their alliance.

In any case, bad employees spread negativity among new employees.

As a result, tough employees easily ruin new employees.

Increase the workload of loyal employees:

In business, the ultimate goal of a manager is to get things done.

So when someone is not doing a job, they ask hard-working employees to assist non-working employees. That’s why a few loyal employees leave due to managers.

In some cases, managers assign complete tasks to hard-working and loyal employees.

This increases the workload of loyal and efficient employees. And it makes them feel uncomfortable.

Good employees feel that management is inefficient:

If a bad employee is not working properly or creating a toxic environment but you, as a manager, are not managing disobedient employees, it makes good employees feel that the management is inefficient.

And you, as a manager, don’t have the guts to control the system.

It will have a bad impact on employees’ loyalty.

As a result, good employees will think of leaving the company to join a well-established system.

They influence others to violate policies:

As discussed earlier, there are many scenarios when wrong employees have a great impact on good employees.

In the previous example, when good employees feel that management is inefficient, there are two options for good employees.

  1. Leave the system
  2. Violate policies as bad employees.

When hardworking, loyal, and efficient employees see that you can’t take any step against a bad employee, they get the courage to violate company policies.

It’s all due to the management’s inefficiency for sure.

Bad employees misuse the resources to ruin good employees:

Sometimes, when bad employees have strong unions and groups, they use their resources to ruin good employees by all means.

There could be many scenarios when some employee tease and torture loyal employees to resign. There are some secret benefits they take in such situations.

Increases turnover:

As a manager, I understand how important it is to manage difficult employees.

If there is even a single bad employee, and you ignore him, you will lose control of all your employees pretty soon.

It will either create a messy work culture or will cause many good employees to lose.

In research, it’s endorsed that many loyal employees leave due to bad employees.

That’s why I prioritize difficult employees and have a well-organized formula to manage disobedient employees.

The formula works pretty fine for all bad employees.

It’s pretty close to the 4D formula of another expert. Where they also Define, Discuss, Document, and then make Decisions. I also use almost the same strategy.

So if you have bad employees, you should also try to handle those disobedient employees. Otherwise, you will suffer a lot.

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