The art of managing toxic employees

Employees gossiping about female colleague. [Courtesy]

Every employer has dealt with a not-so -great employee – if you haven’t, you will soon enough. It is an inevitable part of being a business owner or manager. Even when you take care to hire people who are seemingly qualified for their roles, there’s generally one (or more) employee who underperforms, or has a bad attitude, or is simply difficult to deal with.

As an empathic employer, you might hold onto the bad employee, especially when you consider how expensive the process of hiring and onboarding a new employee can be. But as you will soon learn, ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away. In fact, toxic employees tend to spread their toxic behaviours to their colleagues.