Employee challenges

I saw a client yesterday who took over a business 3 months ago and is well on the way to successfully transforming it into a great, profitable business.

Unfortunately, they also inherited the workforce including someone who left soon after the business was taken over, despite promising his commitment. He has proved to be extremely belligerent and appears to be using employment legislation to help award himself a generous severance package!

My clients is, needless to say, distraught with the iniquity of the situation and how the rules seem to be stacked against employers.

Perhaps such an approach is justified with huge employers like big business and the public sector, but small business are a totally different ball game and little or no allowance is now made for them now.

The danger of this is that a disproportionate amont of time is spent dealing with these matters. Disproportionate, that is, with the financial cost. My advice to this client, and to anyone else in this situation, is to swallow their pride and just pay the employee off asap and get on with running and growing the business without distraction. A business owner's ability to do this is a good measure of their skills at prioritising and rational discision making without letting personalities get in the way.