Giving a Bad Employee Too Many Chances

About 3 years ago, Erik had an employee who worked for him, starting off with very little experience but was very talented at what he did. He worked out very well from a work-product standpoint.

He’s noticed over the years that employees come in as a model employee then sometime between the three-week and three-month mark, they let their guard down and their true personality comes out. This particular person let his guard down and a lot of problematic traits came out. One of them being, he started coming into work late, like an hour or two after the rest of the team.

The final straw was when he just didn’t show up to work at all. Erik had been giving him warnings becoming increasingly more stern over time but this was just unacceptable.

The lesson learned was that Erik saw the warning signs for weeks and months before this occurred and he didn’t take action quickly enough. As a business owner, you may see the warning signs and choose to ignore them because they’re doing good work. The trick here is that you need to take quick action. When you see something you don’t like or agree with, you need to rectify it as soon as possible.