Toxic Staff

[todger121]

Hi all, hope you are all well.

I work for a council and I have inherited a member of staff who has for 20 years manipulated the system, putting it bluntly she is a devious, manipulating, self-cantered lazy person and gets everything she wants due to poor upper managers who do not have the wollocks to say no to her.

She does everything possible to avoid work and leaves others who want a job compensate for her lack of interest. She will apply for every course going and complains if she cannot attend, complains if she does not get leave or time off at any time of the day she chooses, moans about other people who she alleges are doing nothing. Total pain in the butt. Every time she wins, she struts around the office bragging about another victory, but if she gets caught doing something wrong or if her work is found to be poor she offers appalling lies to get herself out of trouble. I would describe her as TEFLON. She chooses to do work she wants to do and gets out of work she does not want to do after complaining to other managers.

She came to me with a problem case file the size of a telephone book and she manipulates everyone she comes into contact with causing conflict with every team she joins.

If things don’t go her way she complains to the union and the council management fold to avoid conflict and the risk that they might lose their highly paid job. She has a well proven method that she has used for the last 20 years that is hard to beat.

I chose to take her on after every manager avoided her like the plague due to her past history of lodging complaints against managers for petty reasons that grew into a massive issues due to no backing from senior managers and to her 20 years of manipulating the system. She has upset most employees within the council due to her selfish attitude and not a team player and others end up compensating for her poor work performance to avoid conflict.

Ok! I offered to give her a chance after falling for one of her sob stories and decided to give her a clean slate. My line manager at the time offered to give me full backing and let me manage her the way I thought would work. All went well until my line manager went and he was replaced by a new manager.

She is now manipulating him and he is over riding my proven method of how to deal with her. Anyway enough is enough, she lodged a complaint against me with false allegations and causing disruption within the team, I want to get rid of her due to her being high maintenance and I do not have the time due to high volumes of work because of staff shortages.


HOW CAN I GET RID OF HER OR AT LEAST GET HER DISIPLINED OR BETTER STILL SACKED? Bearing in mind we are a council and you have to kill the Popes pet dog to get sacked!

Only thing I can think off is drowning her in a sack, but hey ho its against the law!

 

[JEREMY HAWKE]

I would take her to one side and tell your going to make it your business to have her kicked out and your prepared to lose your job over it ...
Its a great post and it reminds me of why I'm self employed . Oh yes there is nothing more satisfying then chasing after somebody with a piece of timber when you have completely lost it

 

[TurricanII]

Follow your documented disciplinary procedure. Read HER contract/employee handbook so you know what is contractually expected of her. Is she contractually required to maintain a good team spirit?

Start documenting every transgression, having meetings with her about every transgression and the negative impact it has. Invite her to bring a companion to each chat. Give her a clear example of what would have been the correct/acceptable behavior. Identify courses/books that may help her. Record/minute each meeting. Find a way to audit your staff or watch how she works and prove irrefutably that she is lying.

Read through many employment tribunal transcripts to find out how the tribunal views various arguments from the employer/employee - there is much to learn in the writeups.

Warning after x number of problems and dismiss when possible. Read the book then do it by the book and all in writing. Being a council I suppose you have a HR department who may be able to assist.

Now the methods I would not use myself:

Do a proper skills matrix/analysis to see if you can make her redundant. Then convince your manager that you can cut one member of staff to save costs, then do a proper skills matrix/analysis and make her redundant.

When you start a new job you can be fired for no reason in the first two years. I wonder if you can arrange another job for her on better money, brand new contract/title then dismiss when it is not working out after one month... Very ropey.

Last resort, play her at her own game. Arrange two other colleagues to corroborate that she committed an act of gross misconduct. Have proof. Suspend her and investigate. Find proof and invite her to a chat, warn her of gravity, advise her to bring union rep. summarily dismiss.

Record everything or she will lie and cast doubt on your actions.

 

[Billmccallum]

OK, this might sound harsh, but why on earth is a council manager here looking for advice, you must have HR managers and legal departments to do this for you.

Firstly, you made the first mistake by getting taken in by a sob story, at the end of the day a member of staff (and especially a public servant) should be expected to be part of the team and as a manager its up to you to do your job too. That's what you should have done in the first place.

Take the whole case to HR and Legal and tell them to deal with her through the councils procedures.

 

[obscure]

Make sure you have an HR person in every single meeting and working with you to document every transgression, so she can't refute what you say occurred in the meetings.

Also make her prove her excuses. If she claims she couldn't do something because of X don't just accept it, challenge her to provide proof. Make it clear that she is responsible for getting her job/assigned task done and if she has a problem she has to seek help before the job is due, not simply fail to get it done. If she claims she can't do something because she is waiting for something from someone else, immediately go and talk to that person.

Lastly make notes of every single interaction you have with her in case of false allegations. They will be much more convincingly refuted if you can pull out a notepad and say "no actually what we said at the time was......".

 

[beasty]

Hi all, hope you are all well.

I work for a council and I have inherited a member of staff who has for 20 years manipulated the system, putting it bluntly she is a devious, manipulating, self-cantered lazy person and gets everything she wants due to poor upper managers who do not have the wollocks to say no to her.

She does everything possible to avoid work and leaves others who want a job compensate for her lack of interest. She will apply for every course going and complains if she cannot attend, complains if she does not get leave or time off at any time of the day she chooses, moans about other people who she alleges are doing nothing. Total pain in the butt. Every time she wins, she struts around the office bragging about another victory, but if she gets caught doing something wrong or if her work is found to be poor she offers appalling lies to get herself out of trouble. I would describe her as TEFLON. She chooses to do work she wants to do and gets out of work she does not want to do after complaining to other managers.

She came to me with a problem case file the size of a telephone book and she manipulates everyone she comes into contact with causing conflict with every team she joins.

If things don’t go her way she complains to the union and the council management fold to avoid conflict and the risk that they might lose their highly paid job. She has a well proven method that she has used for the last 20 years that is hard to beat.

I chose to take her on after every manager avoided her like the plague due to her past history of lodging complaints against managers for petty reasons that grew into a massive issues due to no backing from senior managers and to her 20 years of manipulating the system. She has upset most employees within the council due to her selfish attitude and not a team player and others end up compensating for her poor work performance to avoid conflict.

Ok! I offered to give her a chance after falling for one of her sob stories and decided to give her a clean slate. My line manager at the time offered to give me full backing and let me manage her the way I thought would work. All went well until my line manager went and he was replaced by a new manager.

She is now manipulating him and he is over riding my proven method of how to deal with her. Anyway enough is enough, she lodged a complaint against me with false allegations and causing disruption within the team, I want to get rid of her due to her being high maintenance and I do not have the time due to high volumes of work because of staff shortages.


HOW CAN I GET RID OF HER OR AT LEAST GET HER DISIPLINED OR BETTER STILL SACKED? Bearing in mind we are a council and you have to kill the Popes pet dog to get sacked!

Only thing I can think off is drowning her in a sack, but hey ho its against the law!

I thought this was the mandatory approach amongst civil servants, she sounds like senior management material the fact that you are on here as part of a council looking for advice just reinforces how pathetic councils are.

 

[MASSEY]

I don't have a great deal of sympathy for councils. My dads partner worked for the council for a number of years and its fair to say the employees get treated badly. In the case of this particular council it seemed that they wanted to offload the older generation and replace them with younger, cheaper employees.

This is why the unions play a very important role. I agree that it creates difficulty for getting rid of genuinely terrible employees, but in the grand scheme of things they are a necessity.

It's also a bit shambolic that a council manager has to post on a forum

 

[Employment Law Clinic]

HOW CAN I GET RID OF HER OR AT LEAST GET HER DISIPLINED OR BETTER STILL SACKED? Bearing in mind we are a council and you have to kill the Popes pet dog to get sacked!

Only thing I can think off is drowning her in a sack, but hey ho its against the law!

By first of all forgetting about your aspirations on what the outcome should be, and focusing on the issues. From there, get someone who knows how to take on & reply to the unions arguments (who are often trained, and certainly have more experience from similar cases, a lot better/more than you/most middle-managers are).

Then find a manager or other person (not necessarily someone from HR) who can write a disciplinary letter justifying any decision - which could be dismissal - so that the union's arguments are closed down.

The fact you or colleagues can't discipline or sack this person (if it is justified) suggests that those behind these policies/the application of these are as incompetent as the employee, as they've provided an entirely blunt tool to manage this employee with.


Karl Limpert

 

[searchengineop]

Talk to the HR manager/director. Failing that, take the documentation route suggested above suggested by Turricanll. Civil servants usually have unions or something similar protecting them, so good luck.

 

[Khalid]

It's all about competence. Competence (or competency) is the ability of an individual to do a job properly. A competency is a set of defined behaviours that provide a structured guide enabling the identification, evaluation and development of the behaviours in individual employees.

Getting the worker to look at their attitudes towards their work, role and contribution in the team within this framework, whilst demanding a mature, objective reflection on their past behaviour and holding a firm boundary, provides an easy path to applying a disciplinary procedure.

But you have to be competent enough to manage such a situation. As others have said you should have the machinery in place if you work for a local authority.

 

[Paul Norman]

One person above has correctly identified the problem. This is a situation in the public sector, where the rules are applied very differently indeed.

In fact, through 20 years of poor management, the council has in fact created this situation, even fanned it. It is not appropriate now to suddenly change the rules of engagement.

The truth is this. In the environment you describe, with the track history you outline, you are going to provoke a claim of bullying if you try to speak to this person. And with no support from your own managers, and theirs, and indeed everyone in the complicated, over expensed, ridiculous system right up to and including council members, you are really wasting your time.

Here would be my advice. You tried to work in public sector. You have discovered it is very frustrating. Look for a real job now.

 

[vvaannmmaann]

My woodchipper is just back from the repair shop.I can rent it out at a very reasonable cost.

 

[Lentinus]

oh and if you do get anywhere near a formal disciplinary hearing that might not go her way, she will likely go off with "stress" for 6 months, no doubt on full pay as it's public sector...
She's had 20 years practice at this remember!