Have a Negative Employee in Your Office Club? Here’s How to Handle Them the Right Way
Do you run a business? If you’re the owner of a certain business or a manager at a firm, you may have come across certain employees who always see the worst in everything. They sketch the worst-case scenario of a possible business situation and negation is always on the tip of their tongue. Whether you propose an idea or come up with a business plan, such employees will always turn it down.
These individuals are normally classified as negative employees.
Why organizations retain them is a big question mark that organizations are still failing to answer.
Some say its remorse, while others believe that removing them might end their livelihood. Whatever may the reason be, they are still a part of your organization and one way or the other you have to deal with them.
Are you wondering what are the best ways to handle an employee whose spreading negativity within your organization like a plague? Here are a few tips and tricks to help you battle negativity effectively.
A Negative Employee Will Always Come up with Excuses
Many employees develop a negative attitude when they are falling behind their tasks. It is a common observation that some employees are better than others and can produce better results in less amount of time. These are basically the kind of employees who deserve praise. As a result, an employee who is working within the organization for quite some time at a slower pace is more likely to see the new employees take up the charge and do better than them. And when they are inquired about their performance, they usually come up with silly excuses. Instead of doing their tasks, they start their own game of fault-finding in other people and usually end up creating negativity in someone else.
I encourage leaders here to take a different approach. Start taking a genuine interest in employees. Sometimes, employees are behaving in a negative manner because they are under a lot of stress. May it be personal or professional, as a leader you can sit with them and ask what’s causing them stress.
By understanding their troubles, you can make suggestions to help them resolve those problems.
Make a Negative Employee Part of an Important Plan
According to John Maxwell, one of the best selling leadership coaches, a negative employee can be the Critical Kel on your important business plan. A negative employee is commonly observed as a person who will find the odds in your business plan. He will cherry-pick the reasons why your best-laid plans can fail to see the light of the day and can spiral down into endless disasters. In short, he can be the one who can actually turn out to be the person whose criticism can ultimately save you the trouble. However, it is your job to make sure that you control their behavior as negativity often kills motivation.
Leaders can have such negative players on their team but it is their responsibility to make sure these employees are harnessed properly. They might be disliked by the rest of your teammates, but they are a valuable addition to your team when it comes to working on business plans. They are quite valuable.
It’s better if you ask them to share their opinions with you instead of the whole team.
Force Feed Positive Behavior so they Give up Negativity
Speaking of Critical Kel and his negative attitude, if other employees are getting fed up of all his negativity, try asking them to set a goal or an objective. Make sure that this goal and objective comes with a plan and see what positive results he can bring to the table to help your entire project survive. Ask him to share his insights and learning, find out his suggestions on how he plans to make it better. Maybe, you yourself aren’t quite aware of the situation at hand, but he or she is to help see-through.
Negative employees have a tendency to only see the bad in things and giving them an option to produce something worthwhile can eventually force-feed positive behavior into their lives. Not soon enough, but positive behavior can definitely change his or her thought process in time.
So before you know it, your negative employee just might start showing his or her good side.
Develop a Powerful Action Plan to Change His/Her Behavior
Why not start with creating a reasonable action plan to help instigate positive behavior? An actionable plan contains all the necessary goals and objectives which you need to accomplish in order to change negative employee behavior. It will contain milestones and performance indicators to measure their behavior. By knowing which areas are essential to focus, you can put more effort into their behavior and help them push it out of the system once and for all. Give them space so they can accomplish it.
When they will see some progress being made in their performance, they will eventually feel positive. And feeling a little positive can help them grow out of their negative mindset with the right support.
Allow them to have that charge 🙂
You Should Know When to Draw the Line
Tim Chen of the NerdWallet states,
“It’s a big mistake to try and fix someone else’s bad attitude”
Some times, you just have to drink the bitter truth that certain employees are just not the right fit for your digital business. As a leader, even if you try to fix them and you can’t see any possible results come out of it, then the best thing to do here is to let that employee go.
If you don’t sever ties from a negative person, then there is a high chance that this negativity can seep into your other employees. And before you know it, your positive individuals will start becoming negative ones and eventually, your business profit margins will start dropping.
Trust me, that’s the last place you want to see your business to be just because of a negative attitude.
I hope these few helpful tips can help push the negative employees away from you.
