Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Yes, I absolutely got where you were coming from. That’s why I felt the need to elaborate. It sounds like you have more managerial experience than me, but we’re on the same page.

I have a team of 11 including 1 supervisor under me. They’re all mostly ok besides the 3 troublemakers. We’re not in turnaround territory and it definitely could be worse.

I no longer have remote workers. Only by exception (home repair, sick kid, etc.) And not to play semantics, but back when I had most of the problems with remote workers, working from home wasn’t a privilege. It was a health & safety mandate from global hq to allow for proper social distancing. I would take a different approach today if I were put in that situation again.

HR does know about my chronic friday/Monday call off gal. I was able to write her up once, but then she got wise. She’ll pay a co-pay to go to some random immediate care place and get a one sentence doctor’s note saying “she was seen here today.” HR says those absences have to be excused. She’s killed off a few relatives too. It’s a shame because she has the best attitude on the team when she’s there.

For us, PIPs are the last step to getting someone out the door. By then you should have had a couple verbal warnings and a write up or two.

Once I finally get my KPIs finalized, documented and trained, then I can really start auditing and enforcing more aggressively. I’m already getting a lot of pushback, but they were underperforming quite a bit when I joined. We have capacity.

I don’t think they realize how close I was to having to lay off 2 or 3 of them due to falling customer demand. I agreed to take on more business from the region to keep everyone busy. We’re actually growing now, but my RVP won’t have infinite patience if I can’t get results. If he pulls the plug then I’m overstaffed by about 6. I just hired 3 to handle this new business.

Now I’m motivated to write up some SOPs!