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Hi all -
I am facing a tough situation at present (arent we all?). I have a contract worker (1 of 8) that has a very difficult medical situation with his wife. He is having to care for her at night, which is leaving him exhausted during the day. His work is suffering and he has fallen asleep at his desk on several occasions. I am trying to be empathetic as are all the other staff, but I heard this comment the other day:
"Management (me) is sending the message that, although Employee X is having a hard time, substandard work performance will be tolerated...no matter how ridiculous and out of hand it gets (meaning the sleeping at desk)"
I have tried to encourage this employee to take time off, to work adjusted/fewer hours, but he is insistent that due to his wife not being able to work, he cannot afford to even take 1 hour off (he has not had taken a vacation day in 5 years).
I have told him that we would need to look at his performance/situation more often and I have addressed his fatigue (but it continues). I know business is business and all the other cliche's, but I am looking for some real suggestions from my fellow MTers....any empthatic pragmatic ideas out there?
Empathy sending the wrong message?
Your answer is feedback.
You need to talk to the person and tell him that he still needs to perform. The comment is right, that the person is being allowed a LOT of slack and you are sending a message that it's OK for the person's performance to drop.
It's one thing if someone is having a crisis and their performance drops 5% (most people would not notice this little). If the person is so exhausted that he is sleeping at work, he's dropped a lot more than that.
Fatigue is not a behavior, though. Sleeping at work is. Turning in lower quality work, missing deadlines, missing items in meetings are. Focus on the exact performance issues and he might be able to turn them around.
Empathy sending the wrong message?
Is this an ongoing thing or something that has started quite recently?
If it's fairly recent then it could be you and he are just in adjustment phase. Your best bet may be to help him to find and access whatever support services are available (from within your company or from other organisations, e.g. charities, public sector &c). Him working himself into illness or death through having to go out to work all day and then care for her in the night is not doing him, [b]his wife[/b] (who will care for her when he's to ill to?), or you any good.
If it's been going on for a while (you say he hasn't taken vacation in 5 years, that could be problem in an of itself, is that an indication of how long this sort of issue has in evidence) then he really should have sorted out his situation by now. Solution is the same, help him find support services, but there's a greater degree of urgency and possibly some feedback on him not accessing assistance earlier.
If he can't afford to reduce his hours due to expenses then maybe he needs to re-evaluate his expenses? e.g. If house payments are a problem then maybe he could look to trade down (I realise that this isn't a good time to be selling a house).
Stephen