How to deal with challenging employees

How do you coach a challenging employee — someone who’s always late, constantly slacking off, resistant to change, consistently grouchy or chronically bullying others on your team — and when and how do you let them go?

Think administrative and motivational

From an administrative perspective, a farm owner wants to ensure their employees know what is required of them, measure performance fairly and accurately, document poor performance, provide continuous feedback and provide an opportunity to improve. However, motivating the challenging employee and all other employees who watch how you handle the situation is just as important.

From a motivational perspective, employers must ensure that the employee has everything needed to do the job at the farm. Ensure the challenging employee has a high level of self-efficacy. Not the same as self-esteem, self-efficacy is job-specific – does the employee believe they can do the job? An employee’s level of self-efficacy can be affected by many things: has the employer told them what is expected? Do they have the skills, tools, resources and time they need? If an employee is not performing well, it is often because they lack self-efficacy.

Perceptions of fairness, specifically procedural fairness, is also extremely important. Procedural fairness refers to how performance in the farm job is measured, how discipline is applied, who gets what, etc. The procedures used to handle this situation will be closely scrutinized by all employees, so ensure they're transparent and fair.

A challenging employee can lead to a toxic work culture. Sometimes, letting an employee go is the only way to deal with the situation, but only after sufficient attention has been spent on a fair and legally defensible discipline process... Read More