Dr. Jerry Osteryoung Executive Director of the Jim Moran Institute for  Global Entrepreneurship at Florida State University

Employee Faults

People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.  ~Thomas Mann, German Novelist and Essayist, 1875-1955.

Each person and each employee is so unique, and as such, there are no cookie-cutter approaches to their behavior and temperament. Many people think of each employee like a snowflake: beautiful, but different.

{sidebar id=1}Given the uniqueness of your staff, deviations in employee behavior are just going to happen. The problem is deciding when to take action on unwanted behaviors and when to ignore them.

One successful engineering firm had a very good engineer who worked hard, and his clients loved him. However, he was always late with his time sheets for billing customers, and he would frequently come in late because he had worked late the prior evening.

On one hand, the owner wanted to have every employee comply with the policies of the firm; but on the other hand, he wanted to retain this key and valuable employee. The owner feared that if he tolerated this behavior from this employee, then other staff would start turning in their timesheets late and coming in to work late as well. The ultimate question is:  when do we allow employee behavior to deviate from policy?

The owner felt that if he was going to have policies in place, he needed to make sure the staff adhered to them. However, he was very concerned about losing some valuable staff if he enforced the policies too hard.

While I think this is a difficult issue, it does have some elements of clarity. First, if the employee’s unacceptable behavior violates any laws or affects the core values of the business, they should not be tolerated. For example, a restaurant owner had a great chef that he knew was on hard drugs. In this case, the owner could not ignore the behavior because of the legal ramifications.

One firm that we are working with lists integrity among their core values. When they discovered that one employee had knowingly violated this value, they had to take action in order to preserve their core values.

On the other hand, each business owner needs to ask him or herself if the policy that is being violated is a good one. Take for example, a policy that dictates that managers can only approve overtime with their supervisor’s permission. As there are times when the supervisor cannot be located or contacted, the policy is good in theory, but is not always relevant. Therefore, if a manager approves overtime for his staff without getting the supervisor’s okay, the manager’s behavior may be correct.

With the engineering firm employee, turning in time sheets promptly is important, but given that everyone else turns theirs in on time, it is not worth losing an employee over. With regard to showing up late, if you expect all employees to come to work at the same time, the behavior is unacceptable. In that case, tolerating the tardiness sends the wrong message. However, if the policy of showing up on time is an artificial policy and is not really needed given the unique work of your engineers, then it is probably not important to enforce.

Now go out and make sure that your employee policies are relevant but not confining for your staff.

You can do this!

Jerry Osteryoung is the Director of Outreach of the Jim Moran Institute for Global Entrepreneurship in the College of Business at Florida State University, the Jim Moran Professor of Entrepreneurship; and Professor of Finance. He was the founding Executive Director of the Jim Moran Institute and served in that position from 1995 through 2008. He can be reached by e-mail at jerry.osteryoung@gmail.com or by phone at 850-644-3372. All of Dr. Osteryoung's articles can be found in a searchable form at www.cob.fsu.edu/jmi .

This article originally published on September 8, 2008.

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