Whenever two or more people work together on a regular basis there will almost always be situations that arise that will be difficult. The more people there are in the workplace, the higher the odds are that there will be some difficult co-workers.

When I owned my kitchen and bath firm, I had several challenging situations with otherwise good employees. There was one woman who was an excellent salesperson, but she simply wasn’t a team player. She only wanted to wait on customers who were doing bigger projects and she didn’t want to “waste her time” on smaller orders.

Another salesperson had excellent selling skills, but her time management skills were terrible. She’d make promises she didn’t keep and her follow through and follow up were atrocious.

Then we had a guy working in our warehouse who had problems at home that he’d bring to work. It affected his attitude and productivity and that, in turn, affected his co-workers.

Finally, there was a woman who just had to keep stirring things up. If there was something she wasn’t happy about, she would get other employees aside, share her concerns and try to rally others against management and company policies.

Now overall, we had terrific employees, and none of these situations were earth shattering. But nonetheless, they were still situations that needed to be dealt with in order to make everyone’s working environment healthy and happy.

A work force is made up of a variety of personalities. The needs of each employee are different. As a manager, your challenge is to be in tune to these needs and be on top of each and every difficult situation and employee. If you don’t identify the problems and do something about them in a timely manner, you can end up with some serious problems.

Keeping People Productive

There are a number of things that you must do to help make your team as productive and happy as possible. Here are some of those things: