The names of employees and company details in this article have been changed to maintain confidentiality.
Renewal Point Counseling (RPC) is a Utah-based therapy center with seven full-time therapists who work in-office as well as remotely. Janice, the owner of the practice, reached out to me for a consultation regarding one of her employees who had been causing issues among coworkers and in the overall business.
The employee, we’ll call him Jim, was hired by RPC during a hiring crunch. The company urgently needed a new therapist to meet client demand. It was willing to speed up its screening process –and lower its standards by so doing — to get someone on quickly so their client satisfaction rates would remain positive. Jim raised a few red flags during the interview process, but they seemed minor at the moment and Jim was after all fully licensed. Hoping to do what the business needed, Janice decided to bring him on board.
It soon became clear that Jim was going to be a problematic employee. Coworkers and clients started reporting that Jim was a bit too forward in the way he expressed his opinions, especially when it came to religion. Bias like this never has a place in the workplace, but in the sensitive practice of therapy and mental health counseling, it can be particularly destructive. This, unfortunately, can be too common of a problem in Utah-based therapy practices, where religion is already so commonplace (as well as a hot topic).
What’s more, it appeared Jim was diagnosing clients’ mental health problems prematurely. There were a few instances of diagnoses being communicated to clients as soon as their initial intake session. When Janice asked about these, Jim refused to change the diagnoses and would get defensive.
And speaking of defensiveness, this was the biggest problem of Jim’s. Whenever Janice or other members of management attempted to coach Jim after a coworker complained of having to “walk on eggshells” around him, or a client complained of Jim being too forceful when it came to spiritual beliefs, Jim only ever responded as a victim. He would grow angry and claim he was being singled out. He would also accuse his supervisors of acting discriminatory towards him, and that they were out to get him.
“What is the best path forward, here?” Janice asked me. She was concerned about taking further disciplinary action, knowing that Jim was already claiming discrimination. Disciplining or firing an employee after they made such claims puts the company at risk of litigation, and Janice didn’t want to misstep. But the other thing she didn’t want to do was sit and wait for Jim to further disrupt the business. RPC was still a small business, and thus any one single team member has a tremendous impact on the business as a whole, whether for better or for worse.
After some time talking through this situation with Janice and her team over the phone, I suggested an air-tight performance management approach full of documentation and objectivity. After proposing a few options, we decided on designing a performance improvement plan, or PIP.
Performance management in the form of a PIP, or written warnings, puts employers in a good spot if employees choose to claim unfair treatment. Firstly, they are detailed forms of documentation. The documentation includes evidence that the disciplinary action is for performance-related issues, and nothing else (like illegal reasons). When employees make false claims about the “true” reasons for their disciplinary action, all a manager needs do is point to the performance-based documentation, and there is nothing else the employee can say.
This leads us to the second benefit of written performance management, objectivity. If a manager only ever coached and managed performance via verbal conversation, it’s all hear/say. “Yes, my manager claimed it was because of my bad performance, but I’ve been performing great! They just don’t like me because of how old I am!” This allegation has no ideal response if there is no documentation. On the other hand, when performance management action is put on paper, the manager need not explain their way around why the employee is doing poorly, they need only point to the documentation. The argument, in that moment, becomes objective, instead of subjective.
Janice applied this advice and later reported how things were going much better with Jim. We had passed the idea back and forth that she might sign for a more robust fractional HR project where I help manage Jim’s performance, but we decided this was not needed! (Instead, I focused on building her an employee handbook for other challenges she was facing.)
My relationship with Janice and RPC continued far beyond this initial consultation. I am very happy with the changes Janice is making for her organization from an HR perspective, building a stronger foundation to better protect her employees while protecting the business at the same time.
