Lazy colleague causing so much bad feeling in team

[Dwayneswain]

We are a group of 7 in a team, all doing admin type tasks, taking incoming calls and answering emails (think a type of call centre)

One of Our KPIs are the number of emails we respond to. Now this is where it’s a bit unfair as some emails can take minutes to respond to and some a few hours depending on how much info we need to pull together.

One long standing member of the team is quite frankly an arse. He will deliberately pick out the quick to reply emails to keep his numbers up, he will switch his phone onto busy so incoming calls miss him and jump to the next person. Our boss cannot drill down into the figures so has no idea this is going on. The phone calls are not monitored and his time on busy is not seen by management or counted.

Weve tried bringing this up to our manager and he remarked that it felt like he was managing a bunch of kids and that he’d speak to him about it. He hasn’t.

Crap colleague is careful not be off the phone when boss is around but boss is only in half the week so there’s lots of skiving time. He also invents issues every couple of weeks in order to wfh where his skiving behaviour gets even worse.

None of us feel we can go to boss again and tell him - especially as it’s clearly being viewed as us being a bunch of kids.

Any ideas on how to deal with this? DH who works in a male factory environment says just call him out in front of everyone but I’m sure that’s not the best way to deal with this.

I'd be calling it out every time.

"George you've taken all the easy emails this morning, definitely your turn to take this big one."

"George your phone is on busy again, do you need a hand switching it over?"

Keep the tone light and breezy and no nonsense, but call him out every single time.

All of you need to do the following: Keep telling your boss. If boss says it’s like managing a bunch of kids, keep telling your boss. If boss doesn’t do anything, keep telling your boss. If boss says they’ve spoken to Arse, keep telling your boss.

This could've been describing a team where I work except there's more people and it involves mostly women.

Don't know how to resolve this since it comes down to monumentally shit management ultimately.

In my case, lots of people have reported the lazy ones but it suits the shit manager to do nothing about it because it almost masks how little the senior people do. It's become more of a problem lately because new people have joined the team and they have developed the bad habits of the lazy ones already. It's also caused two of the best members of staff the team ever had to leave.

@TidyDancer i wouldn’t be surprised if we worked in the same team, right down to the best people leaving.

I recognise the issue is poor management and being afraid to hurt the feelings of the lazy one. I don’t want to have to leave myself as I enjoy the job but the constant bitterness of knowing he’s taking the piss, right under our noses makes me feel constantly full of rage. I don’t want to carry on like this.

Worse thing is that to others he makes himself appear busy and important, he’s got a clever knack of sounding very knowledgeable and will bend over backwards for the right people in the organisation. Makes me boil.

@Dwayneswain it does sound eerily familiar! Although the person you're describing is a women where I work rather than a man. Guess there's a lot of them, but you have described her to a t!

Ah no, definitely a man…😒

I used to work with one of these. Tried calling it out. Tried taking it up with the boss. Tried speaking to more senior people. No one gave a toss so I stopped caring too and left as soon as I got the opportunity.

how do you share out emails?

Pick them randomly? Do a collaborative share out so you can tell him he is taking the piss. As a previous poster said ask him if he needs help preventing his phone repeatedly being set to busy.

Go above shift manager and ask for a way to break down the types of emails/nUmber of calls being taken. Explain as a tea you are looking at how to share workload to make more efficient….

You can bring it up with your manager in a way that doesn't make you sound like a bunch of kids. Keep it professional and talk about the productivity of the team being impacted by his lack of effort. If a few of you say it, in a professional way (i.e. don't whinge and complain, just state the facts and how it impacts productivity), then they will have to take notice.

Ultimately it is a waste of time and energy complaining. There will always be someone lazy or shit at their job. It is not your job to root this out. Just focus on doing your job. I am not sure why you are so annoyed. Take some short emails for yourself.

If you’ve tried talking to the boss and they are unwilling to support you - Get in there frat and do the easy emails to keep your numbers up!

First!

Is it laziness, or does your colleague need more training?

“Our boss cannot drill down into the figures” why? get the I.T Dept on it. I bet he can but doesn’t want to.

Do you have a whistle blower line/ go above your manager anonymously?

There’s always a few in every line of work who take the piss. Often, it’s something just put up with.

Inability and incompetence are an absolute nightmare to deal with and that’s the line you have to go down eventually. Don’t you have a rota? Could you suggest it? So ALL emails received eg between 9-1pm are taken by an individual. A phone rota would be better than the system you describe. Sounds like a benefit processing type job- always a pita.

I sympathise. I do the other type of work and there are hard working people, but there are also people who do the bare minimum expecting the others to pick up the slack. The funniest thing is the more qualified and professional you are, the more you’re being used and abused by the system and recently I have had enough. I openly called them out and said I will not be doing their job anymore. There was some upset and aftermath but the good thing is that several weeks on my workload has reduced due to not doing the work for someone else.

This.

The KPI sounds wrong to me. Rather than just looking at number of queries closed, could this be enhanced to add a level of complexity of the query?

Btw this would drive me up the wall!

And yes, it’s definitely a management issue. Very often they want nothing to do with it because they know, hard working staff will probably just crack on, until they will not. Then they will hire more hard working people and use them until they lose patience.

Sorry if I missed, but have you tried writing a group email to the management and cc the lazy colleague? Very professional tone, describing the issues step by step?

I have the same issue but sadly the lazy person is my manager so there is absolutely nothing I can do about it except leave. But I love my job so I just have to work on managing my anger and frustration at the unfairness!

i honestly think from your perspective it is best just to focus and do your work
Less stressful in the long run

You need someone managing the mailbox. Each of you has a sub-folder - first thing when you start, someone (not lazy colleague) divides the outstanding emails amongst the different folders, and then does this at intervals throughout the day, making sure any lengthy ones are spread out.

I worked with one of those, so we changed the group emails to a rota basis, so lazy Paul had to work on the In Box himself for a day, he didn’t get to leave any of the emails to the next day. If there were any left over he had to drag them out into his own In Box to finish them. Next day Jane or whoever took over a fresh load of emails. Paul moved onto all the calls the next day.

there were only three of us though so it may not work in your team.

we also have an email rota
it seems the only fair way