I've managed a 5 person team for 3+ years and inherited a 20+ year employee and hired another 'seasoned' professional 2 years ago. The 20 year employee has bounced around depts and knows just enough about a lot of things to be valuable but is allergic to taking responsibility for any task and needs to be micromanaged to complete assignments and meet deadlines. The 'seasoned' professional is the nicest/sweetest person you'll ever meet but she's not consistent with following up on things, misses details and sometimes even obvious info that would help with the accurate completion of tasks. In both cases, I've actively worked with each team member to address these weak areas but any improvement is short term then they go back to their normal habits. Nothing seems to work. In the meantime, the rest of the team and I (but mostly me) have to fill in the gaps they leave (for e.g. double-check ing emails and data to a point where we're basically redoing the work sometimes). Needless to say, the team and I are burnt out. Problem is we're already an understaffed team and our processes are manual so training a new employee while continuing our daily processes will be a nightmare. However, we have teammates that are not fully pulling their weight which is holding the team back. Should we continue with our current teammates OR let them go and endure the challenges of training new hires? What would you do?
This post may include affiliate links.
