Ah, the joys of management (see icon!)

[graculus]

Well, apparently I have successfully completed my probation period (even though I thought it was 3 months and I have a couple of weeks left) and despite some minor teething troubles, I'm still in a job.

Speaking of troubles, I'm looking for suggestions on how to handle this particular scenario: we have a worker, let's call her K. She works about 12 hours a week on a casual basis and has helped us out when things have been busy; however in recent weeks, K's behaviour with the rest of the team has caused them to start tearing their hair out.

She's not dumb enough to do this kind of thing in front of me, but I understand from others that K's incredibly bossy, to the point of rudeness, particularly to poor J who is half her age. She's also been making passive aggressive comments about staff to other staff when they're not around, again not in front of me. Everyone is working really hard, but apparently nobody works as hard as K does, and everyone needs to know that.

Having already tackled K once about her not letting me know when she wasn't coming in when expected, I know that I am going to be exposed to a massive pity party, but it's getting to the point where the assistance offered by her to our workload is exceeded by the sheer annoyance she causes to everyone. In the interests of full disclosure, I'm also a bit hacked off with her myself, since she went straight to my boss and got her to overrule me when I wouldn't agree with a decision she thought we should make.

So, any ideas? Short of hiring a hitman through an anonymous Cayman Islands account, which is a bit beyond my budget... ;)

Comments

[manna]

Whatever you do, make sure that it's done exactly in compliance with the official HR policy. Get the handbook and find out what the procedure is for telling someone to sort out their behaviour towards other colleagues, and follow it. Especially if you think the place really would be better off if she wasn't there.

[graculus.livejournal.com]

I've already primed up my boss, for starters, but I'll certainly check that out. I fully expect she'll go whining to my boss about how mean I'm being to her (which is what she did last time I had to pull her up about something) and so I'm going to put it off till I'm back rather than deal with it and let things fester while I'm off next week.