The personal problems of employees can affect the performance of the department and the organization and cause great headaches to the manager.

Just this past week four of my clients spoke to me about personal problems that employees were having and how it impacted them and their business. All are small business owners, but personal problems of employees can affect all size businesses as it disrupts productivity in the department and affects the whole team as others will need to compensate if the person in question is absent.

One of my clients had a call from the wife of his salesman and she asked him why he was having the salesman go out of town every Thursday on a special project. The business owner replied that he wasn’t, and they quickly deduced that the salesman was having an affair.

The salesman was cheating on his wife but also on the business as he was lying about his whereabouts and of course this was also affecting his performance and productivity.

Course of Action

To affectively deal with personal employee problems there are two things you can do. One is prevention and the other is being effective in the way you respond to the situation.

Prevention

Preventing employees from having personal problems that affect their work order may sound impossible because you don’t have control of the decisions that people make. But you can influence them through the way you lead and manage them and as in all my videos on the best leadership style, I suggest a coaching style of leadership.

By meeting with employees one on one regularly and having them set and meet specific goals for self improvement, you are coaching them to be responsible and accountable. This teaches people to be honest and more mature. It also makes them think more clearly about the choices they make at work and in life and how it affects those around them.

Therefore, personal and leadership development for business owners and mangers is crucial as you need to walk the talk and be an example for others to follow.

You can follow my process for setting performance agreements with employees to learn how to drive great responsibility and accountability using a coaching approach. The basis of this is setting win win agreements with each employee.

Dealing with the Problem

In the example of the salesman who is cheating on his wife and lying to his employer the way to deal with the situation is to first decide if you want to keep the employee. If so, you need to confront him and set an agreement in writing to meet certain performance commitments and then meet up regularly to monitor his progress. The agreement should include a penalty should the commitments not be reached.

Further Prevention

If you are monitoring employee performance on a regular basis you should sense if there is a problem that might be impacting their performance. Obviously meeting with them to discuss the issue is needed, but you can also start to attract new employees should you need to replace the individual.

You can post jobs for free or set aside a small budget to keep new applications coming in on a regular basis. I also suggest building your employee rating online by having happy employees rate your company on job posting sites like Indeed and on Google. This way your free posting would attract more candidates on an ongoing basis.