Today, I’d like to give my take on an often confusing and sensitive topic.
As managers, how do we handle a situation when a staff person’s emotional world is impacting their ability to do their job?
A situation where the cause of their emotionality is not related to the co-op, rather, their emotional turmoil is brought to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m not talking about emotional scuffs and scrapes that need a little patching and redirecting. I am talking about bigger things that really impair their functionality to work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps their productivity is too low, they are not paying attention to customers and are spending great amounts of time processing with other co-workers\u2014stuff like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have a lot of considerations to look at when approaching this situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So let me frame my thoughts with this. For me, there is a central guidepost that all managerial actions need to be in relationship to, and that is this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As managers, we are hired to achieve results and be shepherds and guardians of the co-op. We are there to both move things forward and protect the co-op from negative impacts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is what we signed up for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
OK, that said, how do we roll our response out from this guidepost?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let’s break it down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Are we able to meet with the employee privately? Be a good listener, be supportive, then find out what the employee thinks they can do to meet expectations and get through the day reasonably, given their distress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If available, have we provided EAP (Employee Assistance Program) information? Does time away from work need to be explored? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then here’s where managerial finesse and critical thinking come into play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If their life circumstances have reached a point where they are causing negative impacts to the co-op and team, and they are expecting or seeking accommodations or exceptions from you that necessitate lowering standards of service, safety, or quality<\/strong>, pause and think. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Under these circumstances, lowering standards for one is not an act of kindness when a more damaging impact to all is the result downstream, and a chain reaction of lowered standards is instigated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I understand these are not always easy situations, so you may need to partner and get support from Human Resources or your manager.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These situations can be tough on our hearts, after all, we care! Yet, I think what helps is to expand our view and what we hold in our hearts. As managers we now oversee a collective of individuals, each with a very human story. The whole of this collective moving forward reasonably, functionally, and without negative impacts becomes part of our expanded heart and way of seeing the situation. We focus on what is workable given the context of employment. We safeguard against making a decision that places an outsized expectation on the team to carry additional weight by prioritizing individualized needs without consideration of the negative impacts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Negative impacts and heartbreaking situations are not mutually exclusive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Each individual story is a heartstring to us, and yet our co-op is composed of many heartstrings, and our job is to take them and create a music that is helpful and of service to our co-op and our cooperative community.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today, I’d like to give my take on an often confusing and sensitive topic.As managers, how do we handle a situation when a staff person’s emotional world is impacting their ability to do their job?A situation where the cause of their emotionality is not related to the co-op, rather, their emotional turmoil is brought to work. I’m not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2347,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"1080","footnotes":""},"project_category":[3],"project_tag":[],"class_list":["post-2346","project","type-project","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","project_category-m2m"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/merrimanmanagementsupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project\/2346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/merrimanmanagementsupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/merrimanmanagementsupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/project"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/merrimanmanagementsupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/merrimanmanagementsupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2346"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/merrimanmanagementsupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project\/2346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2349,"href":"http:\/\/merrimanmanagementsupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project\/2346\/revisions\/2349"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/merrimanmanagementsupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/merrimanmanagementsupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"project_category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/merrimanmanagementsupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_category?post=2346"},{"taxonomy":"project_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/merrimanmanagementsupport.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/project_tag?post=2346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}