Delivering Bad News Tactfully and Effectively

      Providing good customer service is a must for any business to survive. Your employees are crucial to that success. As a good supervisor you owe it to your employees to provide them with constructive feedback on their performance. In that you should be constantly developing your employees so a situation on whether to terminate does not arise. If an employee falls behind, and their behavior effects performance to a point it makes a negative workplace, communicative action must be clear to all involved.  The company’s goals are important, and can be jeopardized if; counseling is not effectively communicated to correct the deficiency.

       In the provided scenario you have an employee that for the last two years is still operating at a substandard level. The first step as the supervisor will be to gather information on the employee. This information would consist of their skill level, and has there been any continuing counseling that he or she has fallen behind. I would first get with the Human Resource Office to make sure there are no other instances that have been documented as in warnings and performance evaluations.  In any counseling session that is of a negative aspect you need documentation to develop a plan or any warnings on firings.

      After gathering the needed records and documents I would also want to know the extent of the customer service complaints. This is important for if the company is having the person work in an area that he or she is not qualified for that could be a cause in the issue. Documented customer feedback will also aid in the meeting with the employee to avoid he said she said disagreements. After gathering enough information I would set up a meeting with the employee.

  

       In the initial meeting there should be an open discussion with the employee. At first you need to be upfront with the employee and let them know that there are some serious concerns that management has, and that performance is affecting the overall goals of the company.  The employee will probably be very defensive or even hostile. As the supervisor you need to be firm and straightforward. This is also a time now to practice the S-TLC system which is an acronym for Stop, Think, Listen, and Communicate.  In that system as the supervisor you will want to listen to the employee views of the current situation. Listening skills are crucial. How I’m viewed in taking concern of the employee’s viewpoint will help them accept the credibility of whatever my final decision is. It will also help de-escalate any tensions in the meeting.

   In the counseling session I will need to separate the person from the problem. No matter my personal feelings or preconceived notions the supervisor must focus on the problem. In the text book Managing Conflict Through Communication, this is described as

“One of the most important actions we can take in a conflict is to keep our perceptions of the other person separated from our perceptions of the problem or issue. It is easy in a conflict to confuse how we feel about the issue with how we feel about the person involved with it. Because this can work in either positive or negative ways, our like or dislike of a person can cloud our decision-making processes.”(Cahn & Abigail, R. 2007)

By adhering to that principle and using effective listening skill to the problems laid out to the employee a training plan can be implemented. If this is a long list of documented problems and there has been numerous warning that have not led to improvement then it would be time to terminate.

    

     If the company was remiss in not helping the employee in identifying weak area, this would be a good time to outline an improvement plan and timeline. Taking the employee concerns in during the listening phase and determines that if there is no improvement than this will lead to termination. In a situation like this one needs to communicate effectively. There is a time to be to the point. When an employee falls behind your communications is important. If they are not effective or ignored the situation will arise over and over.