I know it’s late, but if anybody is still on, I’m feeling awful about someone who I will probably have to let go next week and could use someone telling me that I’m not a monster. She’s very close to 90 days, so it’s do-or-die time.
On the one hand, this person has anxiety and ADHD, had an extremely rough time finding this job, tells me she’s traumatized by previous work situations, is currently dealing with a slowly dying cat, and helps support her sister, a single mother. I find her work decent in a field full of pretenders and her situation highly sympathetic.
However, her behavior since she was hired less than 90 days ago has been a stream of red flags that have me convinced her last job was right to fire her and the trauma is largely her refusing to acknowledge her part in anything.
* She calls me multiple times a day in a panic about performing basic parts of the job. For example, she recently told me she was afraid to leave her required comments on our work product in the system because she might disagree with a touchy higher-up and was very upset about being asked to make edits directly to a presentation instead of converting it to a PDF and leaving comments for other people to decide on.
* She seems to be refusing certain work—in fact, I ended up editing that presentation for her because she called me twice telling me it was too hard and confusing and she was going to cry. She also messaged me yesterday to tell me not to take on a type of work because she could see I was discussing it in a separate chat—but this is routine work in our industry, and I told her as much.
* She frequently seems to be focused on graphic design elements at the expense of the actual words, which our department deals with, and requests to please focus on words only have resulted in only slightly modified behavior, with significant backsliding, to the annoyance of our perfectly competent graphic designers. (Unfortunately, telling her the graphic designers are getting annoyed has resulted in her calling me to say she’s afraid to leave any comments for them at all.)
* She is generally good at what we do, but she doesn’t check the manual when she can’t remember something, and there is one concept she clearly hasn’t grasped. I give her a half-hour of study time to get up to speed on our industry each morning, but it seems like she’s not using it to study this mistake she has made repeatedly.
* The microphone on her laptop has stopped working. UPS is unreliable in her neighborhood, so it was a hassle getting her laptop in the first place. I have repeatedly told her to contact IT about this issue. She seemed not to understand that was mandatory instructions from her boss, no matter how I put it, until I started hanging up on all our calls, telling her that I couldn’t hear her but we’d talk when her laptop was fixed. She has since gone to IT once. Today she admitted that they did not fix the issue when her microphone went off in the middle of another meeting. I have since told her to go to IT again four times. She hasn’t. I just sent her a Teams message that she must must must speak with IT again Monday morning.
* She’s been generally insubordinate for about the past week. I asked her to please call someone when she finished an urgent task, but she dropped the urgent task to call that person right away and stopped responding to my messages when I told her to get off that call. A couple days ago, I told her which work was top priority, but she disagreed that it made the most sense to do at the time and started working on other projects. I stopped her and told her to go back to the top priority work instead, and she called me up to explain her thinking. I said no, so she finally, actually did the job I asked her to do, a half-hour later than I asked it, in an office defined by our tight deadlines.
* She regularly tries to make managerial calls, creates unnecessary projects for herself, or “recommends” things to me in a tone that sounds very much like a junior with 2.5 months of experience telling me about my job. Unfortunately, her recommendations are usually absurd.
—She finds our task management interface hard to manage and manuals hard to look at, so she wants to create a separate shared doc listing all our projects and repeating all information in the manuals. We don’t have the time for this.
—She also said that if our freelancers do bad work we should just not pay them. When I explained that that’s illegal she told me she was just venting and I shouldn’t have believed her, but I think she was just trying to save face.
—Within a couple days of being hired, she also sagely informed me that we should try to rely less on freelancers as our department grows, as if this were a novel idea. I actually laughed a little bit at this, which is probably why she never brought it up again.
—She explained, when attempting to turn down a task, that having our department do the work would be “letting Lacy off the hook.” Lacy is another department’s underperforming colleague, largely because nobody has had the time to train her, but what Lacy is on the hook for is a management decision to be made by other departments.
—She’s also recommended new processes to the graphic designers, and she seemed surprised when I explained to her that it is not within her purview or mine to redesign processes of other departments, who have almost certainly already thought of her ideas, given that one was literally to use a spell checker.
* She’s decided that she absolutely won’t put down a cat that is miserably sick but will instead go into intense hospice-like care for the cat all day and night for “as long as it takes,” against her vet’s recommendation, possibly missing a mandatory company-wide meeting as a result. She has not registered that I, someone whose actual human grandmother is dying, may be the wrong audience for discussions of how sad she is about the cat.
* She also is inappropriately personal, if that makes sense? She keeps referring to us as a “dynamic duo” and went so far as to tell me she loved me earlier this week. (Due to some negative life experiences, sudden professions of love from randos fill me with blind rage. I just pretended I didn’t see her write this in our chat.)
This is a woman in her forties. I’ve talked to her about being too emotional at work before, and the behavior subsided for a month or so, but now it’s back in full force. I do understand that she’s getting no sleep because she lies on the couch with her sick cat all night and is mightily stressed out from chasing said cat around the house trying to force it to sit still for multiple IVs all day. I completely believe that the stress of the cat situation is revving up her anxiety to a degree that makes it impossible for her to control her problematic tendencies.
I don’t want to ruin the life of a highly vulnerable person—and, by extension, the sister and niblings she supports—when maybe she could bring her intensity back down to tolerable levels once the poor cat dies. But I’m also TERMINALLY ANNOYED. I don’t have the time to perform huge amounts of emotional labor for anybody. My work load is immense and my department is understaffed.
I feel so awful about the situation. I was really hoping that if I just used radical candor to explain that she should stop certain behaviors she would, but she just seems to find a new way to act out or wait a couple weeks and start up again. On the other hand, my impression is that my employee has nobody to rely on and could be thrown into a truly horrible financial situation if she loses this job. On the other hand, it really seems like her current mental health and (maybe associated?) attitude problems make her a less than ideal fit for any form of paid work.
I’m new to management, I’ve never had to fire anybody before, and I feel like a bad person. /rant
