The role of the HR Manager is fundamental to an organisation, as it plays a crucial part in the well-being of employees and enhancing the cohesiveness of the work environment, an important asset to the company. Dealing with employees’ matters every single day requires HR Managers to recognise employees’ behaviours and their typical characteristics at work.

Good employees and bad employees alike, are common in every workplace, and they more or less influence the performance of their peers too. Working with good employees can transfer positive energies, motivation, and engagement in the workplace. The highly-driven spirits make employees excel at work, boosting the productivity while maintaining a good relationship with others. Everybody experiences a cohesive working environment as they are surrounded with people who are supportive, who also think and act positively.

Conversely, working with bad employees will bring negative influences that affect the overall team’s performance and disrupt the company in many ways. Unfortunately, employee’s bad attitudes are rarely spotted at first during the hiring stages. The true colours commonly appear when employees onboard and executing out their roles.

Some bad behaviours can be due to common reasons like having superiors with weak leadership traits or lack of work-life balance, driving them to display such behaviours. However, some employees in nature possess such negative attitude whereby it can be hard to change. They create ‘havoc’ at the workplace, bringing about some detrimental consequences like lower morale and productivity amongst the rest.

See also: Dealing with Arrogant Employees: How to Manage Them?

Some types of employees threatening the company with such behaviour can be detected during their early stages. The following are the list of behaviours:

The Negative Nancy. Negativeness is always surrounding the Negative Nancy employees. These employees barely find any positivity within a workplace and tend to complain about anything everything, including company’s issues, superiors and other colleagues. They frequently badmouth about these to others infusing a distrust and unreliability through the company.

The Lazy Susan. This type of employees always arrive on time and appears to be readily available at their desks. However, even with such supposedly great working attitude, it does not align with their productivity and quality of work produced, as they are prone to perform only to the bare minimal necessary. They usually work alone quietly and often unwilling to take upon additional tasks outside their job descriptions.

The Houdini. The Houdini employees often seek for excuses to push away their work commitments and other obligatory duties. When other employees are in an extended absence from work due to falling ill or family matters, the Houdini seems to deliberately be absent at the same time for ‘fear’ that they need to cover the area of tasks of their colleagues.

Mr./Ms. Shady. From the description, we know that the behaviour is about dishonesty. Employees that possess such characteristics are often manipulative and tend to spin a web of lies. In the worst scenarios, such employees might even steal from the company.

The Rebel. Employees that are bossier tends to be the ‘Firestarter’ in the workplace where they will be the one heading a ‘mini workers’ union’ where they will be the one representing to voice out resentment to the company. Such employees tend to influence others with their personal discontent while revving up the same thoughts in others.

Such display of behaviours often results in a termination or rehabilitation by the management. Therefore, HR managers play a major role where they identify such characteristics and resolve the issue with the best possible solution depending on the situation.  

What are the steps you (HR Manager) will take when such employees appear in your company? Share them with me!

Next read: How to Deal with Egocentric Personalities at Work?