Disobedient employees are a part of every workplace. Because disobedience is a behavior. And behaviors change with time and mood. One good employee today can be difficult some other day.
So if you own a business or manage a team, you will meet disobedient employees one day.
When you meet disobedient employees, you have two options. Either immediately kick them off and pay the price, or you master some techniques for managing disobedient employees.
In fact, if a bad employee isn’t working, kicking him off isn’t the best solution.
The best is to handle any employee unless they have decided to escape for personal reasons. Say they got a job elsewhere or are fed up with a toxic environment.
So your top priority should be to tackle every employee by taking wise steps. If you take wise steps, you can even influence employees to them loyal.
Here is a three steps formula that always works to deal with disobedient employees. Any leading role like a manager or small business owner can use it before you take serious action against disobedient employees.
Sincerely talk to them.
To put more emphasis on sincerity, let’s see why you should be sincere with disobedient employees too.
- Every employee or co-worker in your business or company contributes to business success. This disobedient employee must have done many great jobs. Or at least if you could manage the conflict, this can be an asset to the company. So instead of thinking about self-respect, you should see the bigger picture and forgive little issues.
- Companies and businesses invest a lot of money in employees. It’s never a wise decision to kick someone away. You are wasting your business money. So why not be sincere with a guy and guide him in making good decisions?
- We all are human; we understand the language of love and affection. If you dare to send some love to disobedient employees, they will feel ashamed and might regret being disrespectful or disobedient.
- As a manager, dealing with difficult or disobedient employees is your job.
Due to all such reasons, you should be sincere with all employees.
Once you are sincere with someone, you try to listen to him, understand his issues, and try to resolve or at least convince them.
Once you are clear that you should try to resolve the matter, you should call the disobedient employee privately in your office.
Treat him well like your child, and ask him nicely what’s the matter. Why is he/she not following your orders or doing his/her job appropriately?
Many times, it’s not what you think. You will find many tiny issues behind their disobedience.
Once you listen to them, they will speak their minds and let you know what’s the matter. It’s also possible that they are facing domestic issues, and that’s why they are tired of their lifestyle.
There could be employees who are tired of your workplace and want to leave. They might not take all this seriously. Otherwise, every other employee will take this discussion seriously and think of it with a calm mind later.
Last time, when I was thinking about one of my employee’s bad attitude, I thought I should ask him what was wrong with him.
I realized that it was his conflict with other co-workers. I promised him I would handle and resolve their issue to provide him with a friendly environment.
The truth is that employees think it’s managers’ and business owners’ duty to see what’s happening in the workplace and provide them friendly environment.
But it doesn’t happen most of the time. A manager doesn’t know what’s happening under his nose.
Once you listen to such employees, you will realize they have some opinions that are not appreciated or conflict with your attitude or other co-workers.
But unfortunately, many managers never try to listen to their employees. That’s why they think of kicking difficult employees away instead of taking responsibility for resolving the conflicts.
Schedule follow-ups
Managing disobedient employees becomes hard when you don’t do your duties well.
If you are doing your job well and becoming a true leader, others will soon realize there is no option but to work.
For instance, when you see, there are some non-performing employees. You create an action plan for non-performing employees.
You assign them a project and want them to perform well. Now the next step in the plan is follow-up.
You must cross-check if things are working fine on the projects. There should be a strict follow-up schedule.
If you don’t do it, they will take things easy.
Let’s try to understand it with human psychology.
Procrastination is a part of human life. Everyone procrastinates. So if you offer someone a task, and you are not inquiring about it, or you don’t follow up, employees will take this work less seriously.
And it will be due to human nature, not due to disobedience.
So if you want your team to take every order seriously, here is what you should do.
When you assign some work to disobedient employees, you should set a strict follow-up schedule. Employees will realize that you are serious about work and won’t leave them until they do it.
If you follow up, you won’t require to do anything else. This is my favorite technique to make things happen.
Quite a few times, employees take things for granted.
Here is the last step to make them realize disobeying you is not easy.
Set an inquiry for disobedience.
If you have done everything but the employee didn’t respond well. Then the last step that always works is to set an inquiry for disobedience.
Your inquiry should be 100% accurate, and you should ask employees to provide you with a written explanation of disobedience.
In this way, you are collecting proof of disobedience. And if the employee doesn’t follow your instructions in the future or doesn’t take the job seriously, you can use 3 inquiries as valid proof to take some strict actions (according to the rules).
But with an inquiry, many things get clear. And many other difficult employees will change their minds.
So this was the 3 step formula that I use for managing employees.
I have noticed that giving them respect, listening to their issues, and collecting solid proof against them for their negligence can set every employee.
You won’t require to become rude or take serious actions.
For instance, if you are a manager, you should start sending work anniversary messages to your employees and see how this influences the disobedient employees.
At last, let me ask a question if you are a manager, how do you deal with disobedient employees? Do you follow the formula we discussed here, or is there something else that works fine for you?