How to deal with employees who are ready to “let it rot”?

Zhang was a product support engineer. On January 28th, 2019, the company notified Zhang that his employment contract would be terminated due to his incompetence. On January 30th, Zhang filed an appeal to the company’s HR department. On March 4th, the managers of relevant departments discussed on the appeal, after discussed on several specific work issues, they decided that Zhang was not competent for the job. On March 4th and March 7th, the company notified Zhang twice to participate in the performance improvement plan, but Zhang refused. On April 10th, the company notified Zhang that he was still incompetent, since he refused to participate the PIP, it decided to unilaterally terminate the contract. The court of the first instance held that such termination was illegal, but the court of the second instance held that such termination was legal. (See (2020) Liao 01 Min Zhong No.2691)

In practice, similar cases are not rare. It is challenging for HRs to deal with such employee with poor work attitude, poor performance, or poor ability.

The reasons for “let it rot” behaviors are diverse, including personal work attitude, such as laziness, inadequate abilities, being mean to colleagues, suffering a sudden negative family incident and so on. Therefore, such challenges shall be handled case by case.

If an employee is capable, but suffered a sudden negative family incident, which made him could not put all his effort into work, then HRs should provide psychological counseling to him, and discuss with the business department to adjust his work appropriately, by which the employee may overcome such psychological misconceptions sooner.

If an employee has a negative and lazy work attitude, it is difficult to prove such attitude. But we can try to set a quantifiable work indicators or tasks, and supervise his performance. Specifically, we can set some rules: (1) to clarify work process and requirements, based on which, the specific job responsibilities for such employee could be designed; (2) the job responsibilities shall be specific, quantitative indicators/tasks and corresponding evaluation rules should be set as well; (3) to establish a daily or weekly reporting mechanism, by which the employee could develop a good habit of regular reporting, and also the company could keep the evidence to prove such employee’s bad work attitude; and (4) to analyze or review the aforementioned quantitative indicators/tasks regularly, or randomly for those companies which have too many employees. To sum up, all those rules are aimed to prevent employees from becoming a “boiling frog”.

In addition, it is also difficult to manage employees who have long service experience, intentionally or unintentionally to “let it rot”, with the purpose that their employers may fire them, and give them a large amount of economic compensation. Such employees have long service experience, if their KPI were not too bad, it would be very difficult to be considered as incompetent. Therefore, the rules in the above paragraph would be taken into consideration, and employers should pay more attention to supervise the daily work of such employees. If such employee has disciplinary violations, such as being late, leaving early, being absent during working time, online shopping or playing mobile phone games during working time, and so on, the employer shall require him to correct or give punishment timely. Such employee has to correct his work attitude, or he may resign if he feels uncomfortable for such supervision, or he fails to correct his work attitude and has more disciplinary violations, the employer could fire him without any economic compensation.

The employee who is ready to “let it rot” may bring negative affects to the company, because the company has loss for paying salary to such employee’s incompetent work, and it is also unfair to other colleagues. Therefore, HRs should sort out such employees for different categories, design and implement a specific action plan for each category.