Remediating Toxicity: Moving Toward Recovery

The toxic employee requires expenditures of both time and money. But you can only spend so much before you need to make that difficult leadership decision.

After you’ve had serious talk, used executive coaching, tried job duty reassignment/job enrichment, or placed him/her in a different department, if your employee’s behavior has not conformed to organizational norms, then you must begin termination actions.

Documentation is critical, with crisp, clearly recorded information about the steps, directions and expectations you defined and were agreed to by both you and the employee.  Ancillary records might detail the date of each remediation action: the instruction, what your expectations were, how the employee performed on the task, and outcomes.  Run everything by human resources to ensure that you are conforming to all applicable laws, rules and regulations of your company, the state and the country in which your business is located and has operations or sales.  If you have unionized employees, review the union contract for compliance.

While neither easy nor fun, it’s important.  This is one time where you are “getting paid the big bucks” to make crucial l leadership decisions that affect your entire organization.