Employee with performance issues says I’m bullying them

[Isleepinahedgefund]

I have an underperforming team member, whose actions are having a huge detrimental impact on the team and the work area. They do a very distinct role. Months of supporting them to make improvements with coaching, feedback, training and a structured plan and hasn’t helped, so I’ve now invoked the formal procedure which could lead to dismissal.

The employee has mentioned to several of their colleagues that I am bullying them - no formal complaint as yet but I’m sure it is only a matter of time.

What can I do to shore myself up? I’m being as fair, following the procedure and asking for reasonable and measurable improvements. HR and management are happy with the way I’ve handled things.

I don’t ask people what’s being said about me, but people have told me about it - it seems that a lot of the employee’s grumble is that I am constantly bombarding them with emails. I do send them a lot of emails - mainly because I’m frequently having to chase time sensitive tasks that have fallen into a black hole and I’ve been chased about myself (we also need an audit trail for our work), or because when I ask them for things verbally they are often misinterpreted. They also tend to misremember events/conversations etc and have told me on a number of occasions that I asked them to do the opposite of what I actually did ask, so I feel a bit safer with written instructions to be honest.

Any advice? It’s difficult to act natural with someone you know is saying those things about you.

When youve had meetings with her previously did you take minutes, set smart goals and agree follow up dates?

Is it possible to reduce her workload to give her time to complete fewer tasks?

You have my sympathy OP. I have recently taken on an underperforming member of staff. 'People need to stop bullying her' has been bandied around by her previous manager when they have questioned why she isn't responding to clients or answering her phone etc etc. It seems like stop k response to calling out poor performance.

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Virtually every employee who is performance managed claims they’ve been bullied or raises a grievance.

Make notes of every interaction - just informally in a notebook for now. When you formalise the process, then formal notes of all meetings, with a copy given to the employee.

Emails are a useful record to show that your interactions have been reasonable and fair, but I can’t imagine managing someone solely by email.

But a lot of people who are “performance managed” are being bullied. I went from having an “exceeds expectations” to being performance managed by the new manager. I’m just glad that my grievance was upheld and said manager hasn’t got promoted. If I saw him now I would have to bite my tongue so I wouldn’t say anything I would later regret.

What’s your evidence base for saying that ‘a lot of’ people under performance management are also being bullied?

How many is ‘a lot’?

It doesn’t help the OP, who is trying to do the right thing for the business, to be told about other people’s experience or perception of being bullied. She’s not your former or current manager, so those experiences are not relevant.

I have had experience of performance managing someone who wasn't able to do their job. It's rotten for everyone. If you keep it professional, follow the company's processes and you are compassionate and supportive to the person you manage it is very unlikely that a claim of bullying will succeed in any way.

I disagree that 10 emails on a busy day is too many and can see how keeping a separate audit trail can be needed. Context is everything, the volume of queries will depend on the sort of work you do.

I think that putting in place support for the individual in the form of a buddy as suggested above or anything else that might help should be implemented if possible. Ask them what would help and consider acting on it, e.g. if one of the ways they are falling down is that they are consistently missing deadlines and they believe that they can't cope with current workload, remove some work from them temporarily to see if that actually is the issue.

I have had a few experiences like this although it only got to the formal stage once. I always hope that the person will improve and do their job well - or they come to the realisation that it is not working out for them and move on. I often start by trying to find work that they can do and build from there. The person I formally performance managed, I'm sorry to say that for many years she had issues outside work that would never resolve, she mainly lived in crisis/victim mode, lots of absence, all of the team were sympathetic to this as her circumstances always seemed so difficult, then sympathy started to wear thin as there was always some tragedy that meant she couldn't be relied on plus she couldn't do her job and she wasn't able to focus on training or guidance to enable her to do it. A lot of people suffered stress from her letting them down or carrying her workload out of sympathy. As part of the process I had to let her attempt to do the work and watch the car crash as she could not do it, then jump in and get it turned around super fast at the point of deadline. It was really hard to manage and bullying was raised when it got more serious at the end. I understood from HR that this was par for the course. I had to have a very thick skin and I found that as it played out and afterwards I would get filthy looks in the canteen or the corridor from people who had heard one side of the story.

If you keep going with this OP you will have to accept that there may well be gossip and misinformation about you doing the rounds. You cannot take it personally and you have to rely on at least some people working out that the story doesn't add up. Good luck.

Iamthewombat - sorry, I didn’t realise that I had to run my posts past you first. That’s my experience from being a union rep. The civil service is full of bullies. I’m not saying the OP is a bully, I don’t even know her. I’m trying to point out that the workplace is not black and white. I have seen quite a few poor managers in my time.

I’ve seen more than ten colleagues going from being managed by people who, frankly, couldn’t manage, couldn’t deliver and couldn’t deliver negative feedback to direct reports (hence always gave glowing performance ratings), to being managed by somebody capable who wanted a higher standard of work. No, the somebody was not me. All of those colleagues immediately claimed that they were being bullied. This was in the public sector, though; it’s less likely to be tolerated in the private sector.

I’m not sure if you were trying to make me as the one at fault (going from a good PAR to being performance managed) but I’ve worked in the public and private sector and never been performance managed. I still stand by my comment that there are an awful lot of bullies in the civil service.

The civil service is full of bullies

I posted before I saw this. It is extremely unlikely that the civil service is ‘full of bullies’. The civil service is, in my experience, well supplied with people who aren’t particularly good at their jobs and are liable to claim that they are being bullied when asked to improve the quality of their work. Which undermines the experience of people who have truly been bullied but allows the underperformed to tell themselves that the issues with their work can’t possibly be their own fault.

Okay I’m not going to argue you, we obviously have different opinions.

OP I suspect your work use certain project names/phrases in emails as a sort of filing system, so you can easily find all emails relating to a project all if needed. If you use those in a compiled email then it might work?

1. Have a 'quick chat' and catch them up on today's urgent tasks
2. Say you'll send some minutes across of this chat so we've got a record of everything that needs doing
3. Send an email with a carefully formulated list of everything that you discussed, with the project names in it so they'll come up in searches later as needed.

That way you send one big email per day but it's disguised as a helpful list. It may even actually be helpful, who knows

Good luck, it doesn't sound like much fun!

I’m not sure if you were trying to make me as the one at fault (going from a good PAR to being performance managed)

Since I’ve never met you, let alone worked with you, you must see that it’s extremely unlikely that your personal circumstances would form the basis of anything I post.

Iamthewombat - I inferred that from your post as I wrote that I went from a good PAR to a bad one and then you came back with your comment...

Anyway, I’m going to leave it there as I don’t think it’s particularly useful to debate this and to be honest, I don’t really care. As you said - we don’t know each other and we never will.

@BirdieFriendReturns

The problem with being a union rep (I am one) is members never contact you and say "By the way, Susan is a really great manager". So you do only see the worst sometimes. Also, as a union rep you must have seen employees unfairly accuse a manager of bullying. It's usually not malicious but they look to project their feelings about the situation onto the manager and that's not helpful.

It is not unusual for someone being performance managed to say they are being bullied. It sounds like you have done all you can and given ample time for improvement. You just have to see this through to the end.

Thank you all for your comments - some useful info and it is quite reassuring to hear from other managers who have dealt with similar.