1 week Ago
By Karla L. Miller Reader: I’m a site manager for a health care company. One of my direct reports gives gifts no one asks for and dabbles in messy office drama.
She has bought chrysanthemums for the fall, beverage cups filled with candy and socks for Valentine’s Day, and a candle and decorative initial letter for my desk on one random occasion. Whenever a male driver makes a delivery or pickup at our office — which is staffed entirely by women — this employee ensures she’s the only one to interact with him. She has also asked male employees at other businesses in our complex to help her assemble furniture (even though I could easily assemble it myself).
On top of that, her work is spotty. She’s really good at what she does when she wants to do it, but my site constantly fails to meet its target for the one service she has been hired to accomplish. She complains when other company partners contact her about it.
During our morning meetings, she won’t join us at the main conference table but sits in the corner and leaves when she decides the meeting is over. I’m flummoxed by her behavior. I think her gifts are passive-aggressive offerings to help disguise her “mess.
” Should I see if HR can offer any solutions? Other than employee evaluations, I don’t see any other way to officially address her gift-giving and pandering for male attention while getting her to concentrate on her actual job. Karla: Your employee’s gift-giving quirk, whatever her motives, is the least of your worries as her manager. Your primary concern should be her inconsistent performance, to wit: “My site constantly fails to meet its target for the one service she has been hired to accomplish.
” Her performance is tied to a quantifiable, identifiable metric, and she misses it often enough that it’s generating complaints from other departments. This isn’t something you should wait to bring up in her next formal evaluation, but a problem that should have been pointed out ever since it first happened. She needs a chance to explain the shortfall and propose solutions, while you set improvement goals and consequences.
If you’re uncertain how best to broach this topic with her, HR may be able to provide some assistance in driving home the point that she’s being held to a standard, and there will be follow-through if she fails to meet it. To my mind, that’s the most urgent issue. Assuming you’re right about her distributing gifts as bribes to distract from her performance, she might dial it back if she realizes it’s not working.
Otherwise, the gifts are yours to keep or dispose of as you please — no guilt-driven indulgence necessary. Her bailing early on team meetings that everyone else attends without complaint signals disengagement and disrespect. Then again, if she doesn’t seem to be missing out on anything important when she cuts early, it could be a sign that the meetings could be shorter and more focused.
I agree the man-pandering behavior is messy and annoying, but she mostly seems to be embarrassing herself, if anything. However, I can think of two reasons you might need to get HR involved to put a stop to it: One is if the men making deliveries seem uncomfortable with her attentions, or if other employees are uncomfortable witnessing her behavior toward them. That could open your department to potential claims of sexual harassment or a hostile work environment.
The other is her inviting random people from outside your office to perform chores such as furniture assembly, which could present a threat to security or even patient privacy, depending on what kind of sensitive information your department handles. Making a spectacle of oneself isn’t necessarily a firing offense. But failing to meet expectations, deliberately and repeatedly introducing security risks, and engaging in discriminatory behavior are.
Just make sure that however you choose to deal with this hot mess of a worker, you’re motivated by legitimate business-related concerns, backed by evidence rather than by personal dislike..
