How do I manage someone taking the piss at work?

[Blinglovin]

First, a little background if you can bring yourself to read it: I have a small team that is part of a much bigger team. One member of the team was previously the strongest but has unfortunately been deteriorating recently - mostly due to some personal issues but also because the overall department management has changed and she seems to be unable to understand or adjust to the changes. I've posted about this woman before - she took 3 and a half weeks holiday and then didn't come back for an extra 3 days because she broke up with her boyfriend. She also lied a bit about why it took her three days to come back.

She is spending an inordinate amount of time on the phone for personal reasons, mostly with long distance calls to Australia. Her routine now is to come in at 8:30 or so, do a few things, then spend at least 20 minutes, often more like 30-40, on the phone to her mum in Australia. Every day. That's on top of multiple calls to friends etc during the day.

What do I do? I assume I do need to take her aside and ask her to make fewer personal calls? We have performance reviews coming up so I could wait until then, but it's a few weeks away still and to be honest, it's really becoming an issue as everyone notices? Any advice please?

One last thing - my boss is not impressed with her. One of the things that will need to be discussed in her performance review is how to improve her relationship with him. But this kind of thing doesn't help as he has hinted he'd like her to leave.

Tell her what you've just said. Tell her that it isn't acceptable for her to be spending time at work on personal calls. Link this loss of productivity to her work performance targets. Tell her that you need to see an improvement or formal action will be taken.

You haven't said anything about what the personal issues are, but see if your organisation can do anything to support her. Can you help her understand and adjust to the changes in management?

Don't wait until the performance review, and don't tell her that the boss isn't impressed with her. Help her look for ways to improve the relationship, and I would also suggest you do the same with him.

Thanks. That's what I thought. I just am conscious that I'm a bit irritated because this is cumulative so I've lost a bit of perspective.

I will ask her for a meeting to discuss. The personal issues are the break up with the boyfriend. Which admittedly, is what it's hard for me as he was a complete tosser, this was coming for months and we're still dealing with the fall out ages later. And it's not like they'd been dating for 10 years and had 2 kids. [yes, I worry that I will come across as unsympathetic].

Who is paying for call to Oz?

Don't wait for the performance review. You need to spell it out for her now so that you can discuss how she is improving things when it comes to her perfromance review. Long personal calls at work are IMO always unacceptable but even more so if they are costly long personal calls.

Does your organisation have a policy on personal calls during work time? It helps if there are written rules which she is breaking. But even without anything written, she is clearly taking the piss phoning Australia every day for 20 mins plus. A call home to sort out practicalities, or to organise something which has to be done in office hours, is usually considered fair game, but even then some companies would make her do them during her lunch break.

You need to have a chat with her now, ahead of the reviews, to "give her the opportunity" to start improving things before the review meeting.

Calling Australia every day is outrageous. I agree with AMuminScotland about chatting now.

Agree with everyone. General rule of thumb with performance reviews is that nothing negative you say should come as a surprise to the person you are reviewing. Always raise issues at the time, for everyone's benefit. For yours as it gets it dealt with sooner, and for the employee's as it gives her the opportunity to improve before her review.

I think you can and should be extremely tough about the phone calls, that's really not on. You can do this while being sympathetic - if you want to agree that once a week she can phone Australia, for example, or she can do it during her lunch break and have the cost of the calls deducted from her salary, or similar, you could do that, but what she's doing now is taking the p%&£ quite frankly. She can and should where at all possible confine personal calls to her lunch break. One or two during the day occasionally, fine, but whatever her personal issues, they can be managed without doing what she is currently doing.

Okay, thanks everyone. I appreciate it.

Flowery - good point. Her review shouldn't be a surprise and I'm afraid that it will be as this massive deterioration is relatively new (although I still have lots of positives to say in her review even with the things that are driving me mad).

Will discuss phone with her. We work for the kind of organisation where the cost of the call is largely irrelevant. But the time spent on personal stuff at the office, so blatantly in front of evreyone (as opposed to my subtle MNing! ) is the problem. People notice and it negatively impacts their perception of her.

I always think the same should go for Parent/teacher interviews and feel slightly annoyed if there's a bolt from the blue.

Can I just ask one last opinion please...

She's not stupid so she's figured out there are some issues. If I get her in a room is it okay to say, "You've probably noticed that things haven't been going as smoothly as they used to so I just wanted to talk about a couple of things ahead of performance review as I think they're relatively easy to deal with but should be done before then"

Is that okay? Or should I be all tough and mean?

Personally I'd start with "polite but firm" and only move up to "tough and mean" if she doesn't admit that yes it is a problem and she'll work on it. I expect she knows well enough that she's in the wrong, and is almost waiting to be pulled up on it. No need to get nasty unless she doesn't see the problem.

I think 'firm' is the key word. However fluffy you want to be around the edges, your aim is that she leaves the room absolutely clear about what the problem is, what you are expecting to be done about it and by when, and also with an idea of what will happen if the improvement doesn't come.

And I'd suggest following up with an email to her summarising your discussion and making it very clear how you expect her to behave.

If she doesn't comply with that and you need to take it further, you then have documentation to support your case.