employee problem advice

[NewJeffCT]

This is for my wife, not me. But, she is doing well at her current job and has gotten 3 promotions in a little over 2 years (the one non-millionaire person doing well under the Bush economy!). When she started with her company, she was befriended by an older woman that is near retirement who was in the same basic position as my wife. This woman is close to retirement age, but is still hanging around because neither her nor her husband have made a lot over their lifetimes.

But, my wife has now been promoted to be this woman's boss and she's kind of noticed that this older woman is just not very good at her job - probably why she's been at basically an entry level job for 25 years. My wife's department deals a lot with outside vendors from overseas, and you often need to be very responsive to their emails and/or phone calls because of the time differences involved. This woman is just not responsive, often due to her spending a lot of the day gossiping & complaining. While I'm all for gossip at work, it should not be to the detriment of performing basic work duties.

My wife has even transferred some of this older woman's more difficult tasks to a younger, new employee in order for this older woman to be freed up to concentrate on the more basic tasks.

Unfortunately, because of this woman's lack of responsiveness to multiple vendors, my wife has to do a lot of extra work to make up for this and is getting quite frustrated.

She doesn't want to hurt this woman's feelings and she doesn't want to fire this woman so close to retirement. But, all this lack of responsiveness and extra work for my wife is going to catch up to my wife sooner or later.

Any advice on what to do? They have a meeting scheduled later this afternoon. I just told my wife (who has a temper) not to be too harsh, but to point out to this woman that they all need to make sure they are very responsive to emails from their vendors, especially the overseas vendors. Anything else I can say?

Thanks

[GOPisEvil]

1. She will need to establish a standard for this woman.

For example: overseas inquiries must be responded to within X hours. Document an acceptable level of performance and place the responsibility of meeting that standard on the employee.

The key is having a documented standard to follow. Oh, and tell your wife that she feels this woman CAN do the job. Be positive.

[TrogL]

2. This doesn't sound like a new problem

She should talk to upper management about what was done in the past. Maybe she just needs a "wakeup call".

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. Sounds to me like...

The woman has already retired, in her head. I ran into something like this several times in the music business, when I went to work for bands that had been around a while. They often seemed to have a guy who had been with them "from the beginning". First, these guys seemed to think they had done all the work they had to do, and were defacto members of the band. All too often, they were given a title like "crew chief" or some other meaningless phrase. They often were an impediment to those who came to work for a living. But you could not get them out.

Solution?

We worked around them. If they became too disruptive to the work flow, we would just go over their heads and get someone to tell them to back the fsck down and shut up.

My best solution is for your wife to swallow the temper(not good in her position. Counter-productive.) and just work around the woman. On the other hand, if the gossip is destructive and causing problems in the work place or the work flow, the woman should be told to cut it out.

[NewJeffCT]

4. thanks

My wife has supervised a lot of people in the past - just usually younger employees.